I believe I was not the only one who had to struggle to live chat Godaddy. But I have now found 2 simple ways to live chat GoDaddy at any time. Before jumping to chat methods let me tell my personal experience with GoDaddy.
It is extremely difficult to contact GoDaddy customer service. There is a telephone number you could call to but if you are not from USA you might not want to do that. In my case I am very far from the United States and if I called that number it would have costed me a dollar every second minute.
I could not find any easy way to create a ticket in GoDaddy help section.
Live Chat was inactive, it may be for my region. But, if you are doing business you should not be racist by offering live chat to some and not others.
All in all I felt GoDaddy was not focusing on good customer service. What they rather want is sales. And that was where I got hold of your live chat. When there is a sales lead the chat becomes active and available. That is how their system works. So, I adjusted my way of reaching them.
So, if you were trying to chat Godaddy and was not successful try the following methods.
1. Add a domain to your cart and proceed but do not pay. I always tried with some domain that was relevant to me but I did not want to buy it. This was to prevent an accidental purchase. So, search a domain and add it to your shopping cart and proceed without check out. On the way you will reach a stage where the live chat button appears. Click the button, start the live chat and close the main page where you were pretending to buy a domain. This always works. But, there is a problem. The live chat agent might pretend that he or she is only doing sales. Express your feelings and basically yell at them for poor customer service if you have to. Believe it or not, they do have a broader access in their system to attend a lot of issues. In my case I had a problem with a domain that I bought from auction. I sorted this with the agent who at first refused and tried to avoid. If you could not persuade the agent don’t worry, just move on to second method.
2. Go to twitter and ask the question you want with hash tag #GoDaddy and tag the user @GoDaddy. If your issue is a serious problem such as scam or ripoff this is an effective way to reach GoDaddy. They do respond serious matters, if not it would affect their reputation. If they don’t respond make sure you tweet repeatedly for some time and always use the hashtag and tag them.
I found both the ways work fantastic. In my case I actually used the first live chat method to sort out the problem. Since I believed the problem was unethic if not poor service I thought to dump it on twitter as well. Guess what? Few minutes later they asked for my customer number and someone was eager to check on my issue. But, initially the live chat agent was trying to avoid and I had to curse both GoDaddy and the agent for really bad practice. Anyway, it worked.
On a side note, when I opened twitter I saw someone talking about a GoDaddy ripoff. I questioned that man and what happend was that he bought a domain for something around $15 and next year the renewal was around $95 (I don’t remember the exact amount) so he was frustrated. In my experience many of these domain company do the same but such a big margin is something new for me. I faced a difference of few bucks when I renewed following year, not charge of several folds. Anyway, these domain companies are quite tricky. In a situation like this what I try to achieve is to stay with a domain company that do not charge too high as mark up in the following year and offer good customer service. I think GoDaddy fails in both.