Thread

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!!!

http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/185299/#876145

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.

^ that’s a good example nevsie

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?

Best wishes,

Mark

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…

Ah, I gave too many hints…..
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/03/mf_larrypage/all/1

“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!)

I wanted to throw my two cents in concerning support.

The “unlimited free customer support” problem seems like sort of a red herring. I imagine that there are numbers of older license holders who revisit the forums looking for help, but I would assume most people putting pressure on support are those doing active development; i.e., new license purchasers. I know in my case, if I’m on the forum looking for help it means I’m working on a new website, which means EllisLab is soon going to get another client license. And, like others mentioned, holders of a 1.x license have been paying yearly fees which, according to EllisLab, is supposed to pay for the additional support.

The biggest issues, in my perspective, are:

The high number of support requests dealing with EE 2.x bugs and broken features.

I love the idea of EE 2.x but I’m not alone in thinking it was a rushed, poorly designed release accompanied with questionable changes to EllisLab’s support and community model. I’m just finishing my first “official” EE 2.x build and I’m astonished by how much this $300 purchase looks, feels, and performs like a beta. I can’t be the only one who thinks a better built product might need less support overall.

The higher number of support requests which aren’t answered by the community.

EllisLab doubled the price of ExpressionEngine; continued the trend of addressing missing features by pushing third-party products; forced support of third-party products out of the EE forums; changed the support forums from a typical open-ended thread to a “support ticket” style. It just seems that EllisLab wants the community to be a group of paying customers receiving terse but accurate solutions to small problems, when what it had before was a large group of freely contributing clients and developers. I get some of the reasoning for wanting to focus the support model, but it seems EllisLab threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

My ideas for better support and community:

1. Remove the restrictions on third-party support in the forums. Return the forums to 100% community, including developer support.
2. Pay token amount to moderators, promoted from within the EE community, of the community support forum.
3. Remove the technical support from the forums. Replace with an actual support-ticket system away from the community forums.

EllisLab doubled the price of ExpressionEngine; continued the trend of addressing missing features by pushing third-party products; forced support of third-party products out of the EE forums; changed the support forums from a typical open-ended thread to a “support ticket” style. It just seems that EllisLab wants the community to be a group of paying customers receiving terse but accurate solutions to small problems, when what it had before was a large group of freely contributing clients and developers. I get some of the reasoning for wanting to focus the support model, but it seems EllisLab threw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Ouch.

As someone who was involved in all those decisions, I’m sorry its come off that way. I think adding anything else will sound defensive and really, its besides the point of this thread. I’m not here to defend what we’ve done, only to be involved in a discussion about what’s next & how we can do better.

My thanks for being frank and also taking the time to give us recommendations.

Whoa, I’m glad so many have contributed to this.

Just to give an idea of where I come from. We are a small branding company, we have real clients, real companies, not individuals, so our EE projects tend to be in the higher price range. So you might consider us someone who might want the “biz-class” support for lack of a better word.

How we use EE support

If you look at my post count, and the threads I start, you’ll notice that threads I make in tech support come in batches. Some EE projects that we have I need no help because I’ve been using it for so long and they are easy. Sometimes we get clients that want something very unique, and in that case I might have 10-15 total threads throughout that project.

Here are some stats

This year we have purchased 3 EE licenses (not all on this account) & had to get WYGWAM for all of them (+$35 each) and other extensions for some. We’ve posted a total of 13 posts in the tech support section.  All of these posts were related to the licenses we purchased and not older sites that we’ve done.

This is how we use EE, and I wonder if it is sustainable for EE to answer my 13 questions for what we paid in 3 licenses?

My Questions

So I wanted to actually post what my questions were, the response time by EE, and what the summary was. Here we go:

Pagination no longer working
Posted: 29 March 2011 10:49 AM
EE Staff Reply: 30 March 2011 08:00 AM
Mistake on my part that needed help correcting.

Quick parsing question
Posted: 25 March 2011 02:06 PM
EE Staff Reply: 27 March 2011 01:16 PM
EE parsing documentation no where to be found, member provided link on another website.  Staff helped work through other issue.

Annoying issue with admin nav in firefox 4
Posted: 29 March 2011 12:30 PM
EE Staff Reply: 30 March 2011 04:59 AM
Known bug in EE, member supplied link to bug tracker.

File field type template tag parsing error
Posted: 08 March 2011 02:30 PM
EE Staff Reply: 09 March 2011 02:52 AM
Reply took too long and had to move on, didn’t reply to staff because no time in project.

Disable tracking for visible template
Posted: 08 March 2011 09:41 AM
EE Staff Reply: 08 March 2011 03:42 PM
Found solution on my own and posted it.

assign_to_config in template or alternate method?
Posted: 07 March 2011 10:55 AM
EE Staff Reply: 08 March 2011 01:52 AM
Article provided by EE staff, worked out a solution on my own and posted.

File field type filename names not long enough
Posted: 03 March 2011 12:35 PM
EE Staff Reply: 04 March 2011 03:59 AM
Error in EE, says it will be fixed with the next version

If no_results show other entries
Posted: 21 February 2011 11:45 AM
EE Staff Reply: 21 February 2011 04:30 PM
A question that I have a solution, EE Staff suggested to go with my solution and moved to CSC.

Magpie errors (suppressing them)
Posted: 18 February 2011 10:17 AM
EE Staff Reply: 18 February 2011 10:23 AM
Was told errors only show for super admin, which was fine for me.

Custom fields in admin edit table
Posted: 21 February 2011 11:12 AM
EE Staff Reply: 21 February 2011 02:46 PM
Plugin provided by member, EE Staff later moved to CSC.

Magpie with other plugins
Posted: 07 February 2011 03:19 PM
EE Staff Reply: 08 February 2011 08:19 AM
Didn’t understand plugin parameter properly and was told of parameter to use (by EE staff).

Display channel entries in rows
Posted: 20 January 2011 10:42 AM
EE Staff Reply: 20 January 2011 04:53 PM
Ended up being a plugin I could use to do this (link provided by EE staff).

Site “hacked”
Posted: 06 January 2011 10:33 AM
EE Staff Reply: 07 January 2011 10:17 AM
Needed to upgrade EE due to vulnerability in current version being used (solution provided by EE Staff).

If you take a look at the questions, of the 13 asked (one was excluded which I posted and was a EE vulnerability), 3 of them were EE bugs of which one was due to an older version of EE being used. Most of these posts were answered in one reply where I just needed a plugin or a quick question and the minority were intensive questions that required back and forth with support.

I have no idea what the average number of licenses purchased per year is but we do 7+ on average with some being purchased on accounts other than this one I’m using.

Bottom line is, EE has to figure out what segment of their members are the most important (who make them the most money) and tailor to them. If in my scenario we are causing EL to lose money, then things need to be adjusted, but if we are giving a profit to EL, then we should not be penalized for the growth of EE.

What I mean to say is, without knowing the hours to dollar ratio of support, I feel like I don’t need to purchase a premium support package. I only ask a few questions (in my opinion) and they are usually pretty simple to answer and would seem legitimate for me to ask EE staff to answer as part of me paying for a premium CMS solution.

Now, we may not be the average but it would help EL a lot to know who is and not dictate policy by the “bottom-feeders” (sorry for the term) or the top-tier. I know it is said that people ask support for 7 year old licenses, so fine, tie support to having an active EE licenses on your account or something like that.

In the end I’m really happy you are addressing this and confident you’ll find a solution. My goal is to get my legitimate questions answered quickly the few times I need them (take a look at the response times above, pretty bad imho). If we have to pay a little more for EE licenses, so be it, get rid of our bulk discount or something but don’t make it so I am paying for other people abusing the system that has too many loopholes.

Thanks 😊

Lastly, we bill our clients for EE so I’m not complaining about cost, but I think marketing needs to make sure customers don’t feel like EL is just trying to milk money out of us (you aren’t right now, no feeling like that).  As little as $10 can be given happily or it can be given reluctantly, it is all about how you are asking for it.  It isn’t about the money, it is about the feeling when you give the money.

EE is very unique in good ways, it feels nice here.  That is why people don’t mind buying the licenses over going free with Drupal, Joomla, etc.  So just make sure you don’t pull an ActiVision on us and make everyone hate you with whatever changes you make 😛.

That is all 😊

Too much success is a PITA!

Phire, you are correct…your support requests are very reasonable. But, again, each instance is different. I sometimes liken EE to a pile of 2x4’s you might buy at Home Depot….that is, you can build an infinite number of things with them, and can’t expect to call the lumber producer or HD and expect any and all answers. It’s more likely that your contractor friend (open source!) knows some of the answers.

I wouldn’t want Leslie’s job because this entire thing is a tough nut to crack. Usually, I find answers to difficult situations using “modeling”, that is - finding a company or entity that went through a similar thing to find the right and/or wrong moves. But the net and open sources and quasi-open source…all new and untested in the long run!

It may just be that EL could have a more successful biz by going open source (free) and just doing customizations and support! That was pretty much the Red Hat and MySQL models….and many others! But such changes are a scary proposition to an already successful business! It’s a valid decision to continue along with the original business plan….

In the end, no solution to all of this will satisfy all users. The real question is whether the EE solution compares, all in all, with the other available solutions. For many it will - for some it won’t. But the universe of CMS users continues to expand, so it is unlikely that EE won’t succeed…whatever their choice(s).

I see the bigger problem(s) as being the actual coding and production speed and quality, which as someone else mentioned does affect the need for customer support. If the 2.x deal had went swimmingly and not taken 3+ years and counting, we might not even be talking about this stuff!