The topic of support services for different products and services is rich material for grumbling and being malicious, which I’m going to do once again. I often tell about such things in my podcast but here I wanted to include original quotes, for greater clarity of the absurdity that exists around us.
Before getting to the point, I’ll try with examples to explain what I expect from support service and how it turns out in practice.
Level 0
IntelliJ IDEA is our starting point, this is that unattainable optimum by which we’ll measure everyone. In other words, for me their support is an example close to absolute. And, hand on heart, this isn’t quite “clean” data, since they know me there and the person with whom I mainly communicated is a listener of my podcasts. But even before I reached him (or he reached me, I don’t remember anymore) and was just “a user from the street” — I had no complaints about their support. Precise, to-the-point answers and clarifying questions. They honestly say even what’s usually masked with verbiage, well like when instead of a direct and frank “No, we haven’t implemented this, planning to add it in version NNN” they smear some vague “Yes, this is an important function, and other users also drew attention to this.” Angelic patience and understanding that I’m not mocking them when I ask all kinds of stupid things (I asked plenty of such, especially at first), a clearly expressed desire to help and so on and so forth which I can sing praises to here for another 20 lines.
Level 1
Worthy support, though not ideal. Examples: Apple (especially by phone), DishNetwork. In both cases support works with me by template, but apparently they have a decent template. They don’t ask stupid things, don’t request crazy actions and, most importantly, don’t treat me like an idiot. After a series of standard questions they transfer to a specialist with whom it’s usually possible to resolve the issue. They easily agree to replace problematic equipment (Apple) or to call a specialist to the house (Dish).
Level 2
Average, and less than average. Examples: Comcast Business internet, GoDaddy. In both cases it’s clearly designed for an idiot and you can’t knock them out of the “working with an idiot” template. Everything is very slow, a mass of crazy but universal “recipes” (turn off and turn on your computer) and a completely soul-destroying general subtext — “actually everything works for you, you’re just not capable of understanding it.” To be fair, they can solve simple problems that fit their templates, but there’s a certain limit beyond which the long and painful begins. At Comcast in this case they simply replace equipment, and at GoDaddy, after a dozen conversations with the most different specialists, they simply give up and say “can’t help.”
Level 3
Theoretical support with promises. I.e., they sometimes answer, sometimes even willingly, but nothing visible happens. Either my problems are too trivial for them, or they’re like this with everyone. Just recently I communicated with bjango in this style, and asked whether it’s possible to return the ability to choose network interfaces, which was there before, but disappeared after the paid update. They promised to return it and even make it better than it was, right in the next update. Since then, there have been a couple of updates, and I’m still waiting. Perhaps this level can include the overwhelming majority of support services for various free services. Yes, it’s hard to expect sensible support from them, I understand everything. But when Prismatic in response to my wish/remark asks a series of correct clarifying questions and then says “will do” — it’s a bit offensive when this doesn’t happen as a result or the exact opposite happens.
Level 4
Support that doesn’t actually exist. I.e., doesn’t exist at all. No reaction to letters, no answer to anything and, accordingly, no fixing. At best there’s a modest FAQ, in which of course my problem isn’t there. Immediately Reeder comes to mind as a bright example of my letters “to the village to grandfather.”
Level 5 (added)
As they suggested in comments, there’s also such a level — this is when they send you off. I had one such case when the support service of one company (won’t name because of sympathy for our host from radio-t who works there) from the first letter sent me off in plain text, without any twists and directly informed what it (support not the host :) thinks about my mental abilities in general and where my hands grew from in particular. But I encountered this once in my life.
All this was an introductory part in transition to the phenomenon of Evernote support service. Here my classification helplessly lowers its categories and thinks deeply about the question “where do these ones go?” I’m, of course, talking about support for the paid (premium) product and grumbling about support for the free version my conscience wouldn’t allow. Though there are such phenomena when support for a free product is such that tears of tenderness and joy well up. Here I’ll modestly point to uKeeper and to myself as the only and unique “supporter”. Those couple hundred people who turned to me with problems and reports — they won’t let me lie.
Let’s return, however, to Evernote. The product is decent and quite functional. Even more than decent, in places simply good and I recommend it to everyone. With them I had only three appeals to the support service and 2 of them were sort of on behalf of my (ukeeper) users. These two cases were not simple and requiring certain understanding of the problem and desire to help. One was primitive and easily understandable.
And in all cases I saw exactly the same thing — complete misunderstanding of the problem, their questions clarified anything but what I was asking, advice for “fixing” any problem after the 3rd letter came down to “log in/log out” (in their case reinstall), but most importantly — complete ignoring of the problem history and loss of context in each new letter. In this the experience of communication is close to phone conversations with bank clerks — i.e., each new person doesn’t strain themselves to look and understand the problem history, but asks all questions anew and offers what was already tried 3 calls ago. By the way, this is very similar to GoDaddy. And by results too — to this day none of my 3 problems was solved. The first they promised to fix in the next version (there were wrong-sized icons), but in the next one they didn’t fix anything, and after 3 months released a version in which there are no icons. Probably this can be considered a fix.
In the second case, after a series of ordeals and beating my head against impenetrable walls, I complained about fate on twitter and one of my followers turned out to be a person close to the business of fixing at Evernote. From that moment I felt how good it is to be “connected” :) They talked with me thoughtfully, tried to solve the problem, and though there was no solution in the end, the process was pleasing.
And here’s my fresh round in a not-very-literary translation to the native language:
Good day
It seems that Evernote incorrectly extracts absolutely valid images from email sent to my Evernote account’s email address. Here’s a real example of what I see
A similar picture is observed through your web interface. At the same time, this email sent to any other client (Mail.app, sparrow or gmail) shows images as it should.
Most likely the reason for this is the absence of an extension in the description of image resources. I mean CID which looks like “faobf4494469”. However, this is a fully valid CID and in the HTML body of the letter the img src correctly references it.
I’ll clarify that this is about the case with images “embedded” in the email body.
Let me know if additional information is needed.
Quite an informative problem report, you’ll agree. Apparently, if I had provided an example of letter headers, that would have been some overkill. It seemed to me that I sketched enough stones for their specialists to confidently go along the path leading to a solution. Or at minimum ask the necessary questions. And questions began, though not those I expected.
Please tell us in what format the files were saved? This will help us in investigating the problem.
What was that? Do you understand what they asked? I don’t.
Not sure I understood the question. What does “in what format” mean, what files are we talking about? Actually, I’m not saving anything, but sending email to the Evernote address attached to my account.
And here came the answer. There were many words, but the essence was that I should make a new notebook, share it with them, put the problematic note there and let them know. They honestly warned that an automatic email might come saying the operation failed, but this is normal and should be ignored. Well, I don’t think this is particularly normal, although of course — small stuff. It’s also unclear to me why I should do all this, since the note is already stored in their service. Perhaps it’s heavily encrypted there and they don’t have access to it — don’t know, they didn’t explain this to me. But at the end they added a strange “Evernote respects your privacy, and we have a very limited number of employees with the clearance to access account data. As such, Premium members can expect a reasonable turn around. Free users will be assisted as time permits.” So they can access my data after all? Or only shared ones? No, it’s unclear to me. But especially unclear is this part about “Premium members” versus “Free users”. What are they warning me about? I’m premium, but not sure they know this, no signs of this knowledge are visible in messages, and here they also warn so ambiguously. Of course, I didn’t write about all this so as not to derail the conversation from the productive path where it, as it seemed to me, started moving.
But the stone flower didn’t come out:
Unfortunately we couldn’t access the shared notebook. Please send us a copy in .enex format".
Here probably a normal person would have given up, and I scratched my head in surprise — what kind of .enex is this, first time I’m hearing. Of course, I found how to do export, but it would have been more humane on their part to at least hint where and what to press. Yes, I agree — this is a small thing. But here’s the fresh response to my letter with the attached .enex file:
We apologize for the inconvenience. We receive your note and we were able to look at the attachment.Please follow this step. We believe that reinstalling the latest Mac version may address the issue that you reported.
Well, clear, right? They say they carefully looked at what you sent us and now you need to reinstall Evernote on Mac. Oh. No client participated in creating this note, and no animals were harmed in the process. Well, I wrote this to them 2 times. Yes, and besides, I noticed that my ticket number changed in the process. Maybe they don’t see the beginning of the conversation anymore?
Well, I have patience for three and I informed them that:
This problem is not related to the Mac client at all. As I already said, it’s present in exactly the same form in your web interface. However, I reinstalled according to instructions and as expected — this didn’t solve anything.
A bit harsh, I agree. But I was already tired of doing stupid things and imagine what an idiot I felt like, reinstalling the innocent Mac client.
On that our communication ended for now. Don’t know what will be next, but the process doesn’t please at all. I, of course, tried again to get human support “through connections”, but something didn’t work out there, and they told me like “the ticket is American, we don’t have access to it here” (also strange, if you think about it).
Don’t know how this all is for you, but for me — not very :(
If those “who need to” read this, then tickets 16051-204512 and 16051-203060
Addition Dec 20, 2012
Received another letter from official support. I was happy above that log in/log out for them is limited to reinstallation, but no, they reached the next logical step — reboot the computer. Won’t even translate this crap, everything’s clear there.
No, I won’t do any of this and won’t answer, let them quietly close the ticket in 2 weeks (this is, as I understand, the period of auto-closing if the complainer didn’t answer). Well, there’s just no strength to repeat the same thing, and in response this. Though, there’s hope. Not in these humanoid robots (I’m not even sure people answered me at all) but in the responsive workers of the Russian office of the company, who asked me for all the data today and are going to deal with the problem.
This post was translated from the Russian original with AI assistance and reviewed by a human.