@will13am wrote:
@Excommando wrote:
Totally disagree....you must be very lacking basic phone skills if you’re having problems. I’ve had a fantastic experience with PM and have recommended to many friends. If you require lots of technical help maybe this isn’t the place for you.
I have to agree with this statement. This service relies on a self serve model. People who enjoy this service most are those who are very self sufficient. The number of customer service agents here are far less than the so called "full service" brands. It is not so much the brand is bad but rather the brand may be a bad fit for certain customers.
You really seem to be missing the point. Since you are an oracle, clearly you have been here a long time but it appears you have lost touch with the newcomer trying to get on board.
Since this is a self serve model, it would be fine IF there were adequate tools to be "self sufficient". But what people are often complaining about is the difficulty in either getting out of the gate because of long-delayed problems in getting set up OR because they have to rely on moderators to do some functions that are NOT available for self serve. You should know what I mean by looking at the many requests for improvements to the self serve functionality (I won't insult your intelligence by trying to re-interate them here).
And the other major problem is that PM used to promote a response time in hours, then later changed that to responses within 48 hours, which is now being stretched to 72 hours. And they cannot even meet those service level agreements, which they have set up as the expectation... so when customers are getting wait times measure in days, with some as long as 7-12 DAYS, you cannot blame them for being rather miffed. If they would promote the reality of the service where wait times can reach many multiple days, they would not attract nearly as many customers (which makes me wonder what the retention rate is let alone the abandonment rate is for those that never quite make it on board).
Then to top it all off, to then eventually find out that if a customer sends a second PM before their first one is responded to, any previous PMs get bumped to the back of the queue with the last one. Where have you ever seen that? Or that moderators get easily confused if there are multiple requests because as one manager explained it to me, they simply cannot clearly differentiate the requests by the same customer, as apparently they do not see the topics, or some such thing. This tells me that the staff do not have adequate tools to manage the flow of requests.
For a company that chooses to be 100% online with the only form of communication being a forum (which was not always the case), they are woefully poorly equipping both their own staff and the customer. Even the messaging system does not have the ability to link an entire conversation...
I won't bore you with the details but I have struggled with numerous onboarding and technical issues as a relatively new customer. And this after researching PM beforehand and even participating in this forum months before joining...but I never had visibility to the number and types of issues I encountered. So, it is no surprise that many customers are caught off guard.
So for all this, you cannot blame customers that are having a hard time. And the reason many do not leave is because they are attracted by the lower cost, so they try to tough it out hoping to get to that place that you and many other longtimers have gotten, where they no longer need much support, if any. And most do not realize how long it will take to get to end of job when they first get into it, and probably are falling into the old adage of "in for a penny, in for a pound".
So let's be real about the situation here and not brush off what many are experiencing.
