Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed thus far. Feel free to keep the feedback coming, we’re watching it closely. And as always, you can .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you prefer.
4. Here is a suitably tricky but easy one. Reverse trend of separation, and both invite and encourage, by recognition, all those who pitch in and help. Here’s how it is tricky: customers between their silences and lines pay a lot of mind to whether they are seeming to get ‘official or approved’ attention—particularly when they’re in deep need. Having some titles that are specifically awarded and shown below any rather down-the-nose automatics by length of service (‘grad student??’ - could be fixed also…), would be very useful. People who deserve it get to be spokespersons, given recognition as such.
I think that taking the mark as how well the titles will contribute for the customers helped is a good way to figure out what such titles should be, and who should get a chance to wear them. It could be quite helpful wherever someone is working their way towards having a business, towards gaining a position, etc., and all else you can understand about this goes, as well, for the different individuals.
5. Well, I am actually running out of steam for the moment, and getting interrupted also. Maybe these are enough points to let your own stories well up for the direction of suggestion, and that’s what I would really like to see.
6. I know I am walking around a very large story, in what a productive community really can be; and this is a contemporary story we are all newly working out, as a necessity.
I have long seen Ellis/ExpressionEngine as a pretty remarkable presence as well as opportunity in this regard, and I do study it - part of my more real profession.
I hope you can take that interest as a recognition of value; and find your own feelings for the ways roads of solution can open up, in this case all the way back from ‘support’ to the ability to progress in design and capability—those advances which stand out from within, and are duly important there always; as well as then giving the welcome surprise of fresh venues for add-ons.
I believe that particular roadway is very real; have walked it many times over an interesting and successful earlier career. I wish all here best fortune.
Regards,
Clive
[edited a bit as this was getting rushed]
Speaking as a fairly new EE user (and not a particularly gifted one!), I thought I’d throw in a couple of short comments.
(1) I’m not on the cutting edge at all, so I don’t know if forums are outdated, but I’d have to say that I find them extremely valuable and workable. I’m usually able to find the answers for many of my questions in previous posts. When I don’t find a question already answered, I post and have been fortunate to have been helped by many co-users (thanks! and I hope to get to the point where I can return the favor!). At times, I’ve been a bit frustrated with tech support response times though.
(2) I used to frequently visit the “How-to” forum for answers, but since it was changed to “Codeshare” I didn’t think that was the appropriate place for my questions (which were much more of a “how do I…” nature).
Another thanks to all those who have helped me out in my slow, uphill climb of learning to develop EE sites! I come to this from a design background, so there’s been a lot to learn.
@strudel
i think it is nice to meet people that also search the forums - there are a lot of people who don’t!!!
But the important point is that a blind ticket support system isolated to each individual will mean we lose this resource of answers and agree this would be a problem (for me personally), and potentially increase support requests further, and separate community further - i like knowing other peoples tags, names and viewing their sites. As a result i would not be so envious of the remarkable teen Rumbelow!!!
i think it is nice to meet people that also search the forums - there are a lot of people who don’t!!!
When I was learning the ropes searching the forums answered just about every question I had, but like you say a lot of folks don’t - and that’s probably why the same questions keep popping up.
nevsie - 31 March 2011 11:54 PM
But the important point is that a blind ticket support system isolated to each individual will mean we lose this resource of answers and agree this would be a problem (for me personally), and potentially increase support requests further, and separate community further - i like knowing other peoples tags, names and viewing their sites.
All the more reason to have a well organised repository of solutions to the various problems people encounter.
nevsie - 31 March 2011 11:54 PM
As a result i would not be so envious of the remarkable teen Rumbelow!!!
Greetings you all…I come to this from a design background, so there’s been a lot to learn.
strudel, felt that all of what you have to say was very clearly stated—should help.
Also, I am having imaginations about what a Design area of the forum might be like. Watch out And seriously, it might be very nice to be able to question ‘what would you do’ there, since we have so much freedom of design with EE.
EE / EL - i don’t want to pick out people and names, but this is a prime example of a question which is pretty EE related but straight away bounced. I wouldn’t normally flag this but it illustrates this topic pretty well!!!
A little off-topic to begin with, but I’ve also noticed that Codeshare Corner is basically where posts go to die. A lot of time questions are asked and the support response is that they’re shifting it over there for community help and it never gets answered and that seems to be the end of it.
I’m skimmed through most of the responses but I’ll admit I didn’t read every one in detail, so apologies if I’m repeating something that was said before. So here are the thoughts that occurred to me in no particular order.
1. Part of the cost of the EE license includes support. I read that you agree with that and free support is never going to go away. Great.
2. The same way license holders need to purchase an upgrade after one year to get new versions, support should be handled the same way. Free support for one year after purchase, and then for continued support you need to pay a small fee. I think this would take care of all the 2004 purchasers that are still seeking support. I agree free unlimited support for forever doesnt make any sense.
3. I’m a little concerned about what pricing is going to be like for better support turnaround times. Enterprise support is out of the question for all of the sites that we work on (and we work on about 10-15 per year now and this is increasing) but I understand I’m not the target for ES. I see you mentioned other tiered support services and I guess somewhere there is where someone like me would fit in, so I’m really interested to see how that will work out and I’m a little concerned in the meanwhile.
I think that’s about it. Keep up the good work and the open attitude.
What sort of impression is that giving the customer? When I look at it, it says “this isn’t a tech support question - it’s moved to Codeshare and you’re at the mercy of the community and whether anyone can help”.
There are two issues here:
1. It’s not a technical question per say
- that’s fine but there needs to be a process where a support representative can pick it up and give some help at least in a timely fashion.
2. Customers have paid for support and don’t receive it
- this is the killer. To the customer they have paid a lot of money for their licence, along with the promise of support, yet in this instance they’re not getting it (officially at least). The result is that the customer is left with the impression that they’re not getting the service they’ve paid for, and that’s not good.
Now, while instances like these do frequently get picked up and answered by community members, it’s never guaranteed, so you end up with an ever increasing number of customers with unanswered questions. Over time perceptions will grow ever more negative and reflect on EL.
I agree that you can’t expect response within the hour service with so many users. But when issues languish for days with nary a comment it can get pretty frustrating.
Someone commented that there are a lot of problems posted on the level of “how do I turn on my new TV”
This is a result of the rapid increase in users. And a lot of the new users are folks who are designers not devs. That’s the attraction of EE - you give the ability for people like me to do stuff I never could have done before. But with that of course comes a higher support load.
A lot of the low-level postings might be avoided by offering a much improved documentation. You should bring in someone who specializes in software documentation. The tutorials by Irelan really helped get me started. But the neccessity of using those points to a failure on EL’s part to provide good documentation. Current documentation sort of assumes that you’re a dev and mostly just need a listing of tags and syntax. More is needed.
I’ve had an issue posted for two days and the only support response has been basicly
“hmm, that should work”
I may have to spend a bunch of time completely re-conceptualizing the feature since I can’t get any support.
If you need to start charging for support fine. But you can’t charge for what you’re offering now. If I’m going to pay for support then I would expect faster turnaround - solutions not just replies.
I do not mean to rag on the support staff.
I KNOW they are way overloaded and do the best they can. The problem is at the top of the management chain. They aren’t giving the support department the human resources they need to do the job.
Someone commented that there are a lot of problems posted on the level of “how do I turn on my new TV”
This is a result of the rapid increase in users. And a lot of the new users are folks who are designers not devs. That’s the attraction of EE - you give the ability for people like me to do stuff I never could have done before. But with that of course comes a higher support load.
A lot of the low-level postings might be avoided by offering a much improved documentation. You should bring in someone who specializes in software documentation. The tutorials by Irelan really helped get me started. But the neccessity of using those points to a failure on EL’s part to provide good documentation. Current documentation sort of assumes that you’re a dev and mostly just need a listing of tags and syntax. More is needed.
This is very much where I’m coming from. Fortunately I also have a background in database management—otherwise how would I get this figured out?
But I think the point about documentation is very good. I go to the user guide only for a listing of tags and that kind of thing, and even then, sometimes I’ve spent a day or so trying to figure out an issue that’s not working and then find out it’s due to the documentation not being current. That’s frustrating because I try to be good and exhaust the resources that I have available before I bother tech support about an issue.
I feel it should be a priority to keep the documentation up to date purely from a business point of view, because incorrect documentation creates even more tech support posts that would otherwise be unnecessary—if the docs say “go to xxx under the xxx tab” and that option doesn’t exist, then it’s a lot of time wasted by everybody. This happened to me lately and was not pleasant.
I’m not familiar with Irelan’s stuff; I’ve used some other things: Murphy’s 1.6 book and now Boyink’s latest—both of which have been very helpful—but I feel what’s missing for some of us is a reference so that if I want to know how to do X, I can just look it up under “here’s how to accomplish x”. The problem with the resources I’ve used is that they are tutorials to building a whole site, and so just looking up a procedure is not that easy.
It must be a challenge since the user base includes both programmers and those of us “who don’t even know how to spell PHP”—but I feel that the development of a good reference doc that lists the tags but also explains a bit how to carry out and accomplish certain functions would be very welcome to both the user base I am a member of and your support team, who would have fewer queries to respond to.
I’m also completely open to buying such a book (but please, if I buy the bound book, please include the PDF edition with that purchase!) if it really fulfills this need (even with double monitors I find it handy to have a book open by my side).
I might not be one of your enterprise users using 100’s of licenses a year, but i am purchasing a fair few and i just get the feeling costs are going to drive me out.
***Note i do not know the policies so i might be proven wrong here - but i am sensing the worst.
I just sense the formula of 30days free premium support (and already i am shaking my head and dreading it).
Add to this new premium cost the amount of addons people are all complaining about… I mean people are even selling CSS overrides now to make the control panel actually work and usable…
I just feel this balloon is swelling and it is going to pop (again) soon.
Have to second that emotion. It wouldn’t be so bad to pay for responsive support but it gets wearisome adding all those addons. How often is the solution to a problem of missing functionality in EE the purchase of yet another addon? It costs a couple hundred bucks just to get the essential addons that you can’t live without. Costs ten bucks for even the most piffling addon.
Now there is a place for addons, EE can’t do it all and you want addons. But it’s no fun shelling out money for functionality that should really be in EE to begin with.
For example, WYGWAM… nice addon but this should be built in. Crazy to have to buy that.
It’s one thing to get addons to add new functionality but to spend hundreds just to get EE usable?
Hey I just noticed that there is a character count at the bottom of the input field for this post. Want that in your app? Get the addon. At least I think that one is free. Guess even EL has to rely on addons to get the job done.
Think of it this way. There are people who have purchased a single EE license in 2004 that come here and still receive support. They might be running a personal blog with it or a non-critical project. That person, with a single license, purchased 7 years ago, is taking away support from you & your growing business and is not contributing to the cost of providing on going support. Its not sustainable.
I’m really curious what the $20-$40 per year “download” fee for updates accounts for—because in my ignorance I presumed that fee should have included the cost of ongoing support.
I agree with quite a few of the sentiments in here as shown by my earlier posts but I was just wondering what kind of “how to do x” posts are needed. Perhaps we should all start a list somewhere, perhaps the WIKI and go from there?
Myself I’ve always found the documentation to be very good and luckily for me ExpressionEngine just clicked and I “got it” straight away. I’m not really a programmer but more a designer myself so I guess I’m one of the lucky ones?
Anyway I believe the documentation is good. Yes it can always be better, what can’t, but, perhaps we could get a list (just a few even) of what kinds of how to do x type posts that are needed and then we could all go from there providing those for new users?
Just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has contributed thus far. Feel free to keep the feedback coming, we’re watching it closely. And as always, you can .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) if you prefer.
I think most all of us are learning something from all this - so it’s good to keep a lot of this public.
I’m going to relate a little story from this months Wired magazine which might just relate to the “forums are so 90’s!” and “can you scale up one to one technical support?”.....no cheating now, tell me who said this and what it related to…...???
In the middle of the last decade, a small company was starting to get bigger quickly. The head of customer support went to the boss and asked for more staff.
The Boss told her that the very idea of customer support was ridiculous!
He suggested that rather than trying to tackle the unscalable task of answering users one by one (important words there!) , this new company should enable users to answer each others questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that the head of support said she almost lost her mind.
But the company followed the Bosses suggestion and established some of those “nineties” forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another. It worked.
What company am I referring to and who was the Boss?
BTW, I very much agree with the Boss in this case. Customer support is not scalable. Of course, there is no law which says businesses must accept this…
“But while it’s easy to scoff at Page’s quirks—his odd obsessions, his unrealistic expectations, his impatience for a future dangling out of immediate reach—sometimes his seemingly crazy ideas wind up creating breakthrough innovations, and skeptical Googlers wind up admitting Page was right, after all. That was the reaction in 2003 when Denise Griffin, the person in charge of Google’s small customer-support team, asked Page for a larger staff. Instead, he told her that the whole idea of customer support was ridiculous. Rather than assuming the unscalable task of answering users one by one, Page said, Google should enable users to answer one another’s questions. The idea ran so counter to accepted practice that Griffin felt like she was about to lose her mind. But Google implemented Page’s suggestion, creating a system called Google Forums, which let users share knowledge and answer one another’s customer-support questions. It worked, and thereafter Griffin cited it as evidence of Page’s instinctive brilliance.”
———————end————
Hmm, implemented “90’s” forums in 2003 to solve their customer support problems…....I’m going to send a note to Larry telling him to get with the times and use twitter…...
(sorry, I’m from philly!)
And seriously, it might be very nice to be able to question ‘what would you do’ there, since we have so much freedom of design with EE.
