Tag: support

Poor Customer Service

I have to start this with a confession that I screwed up and lost my WePay account.

I lost my WePay account for something that was totally my mistake. I have no complaints about that, I screwed up and missed the clause in their ToS that says you can’t use it for digital goods. This needs to be stressed: this was no one’s fault but my own. You can think it’s a stupid clause as much as you want, but it’s theirs, and I agreed to it and broke it. On accident. But ignorance of the law is no excuse. I know this, I support this. I have no quarrel with this.

My issue is how I found out, and what WePay did about it when I had questions.

How did I find out I was in violation? I got this email:

It seems you’re using WePay for one or more of the activities prohibited by our Terms of Service. Unfortunately, you can’t use WePay to accept additional payments. Any pending payments will be canceled and you won’t be able to withdraw funds at this time.

More specifically:

We are unable to process payments for digital goods including ebooks.

Thank you for understanding and we apologize that we couldn’t offer a better solution.

It’s a nice email, all told, but it doesn’t explain things. Like … if pending payments are canceled, do they get refunded? What about completed payments? Do those get refunded or do I get my money? At first, I had about $70 stuck in some weird degree of transaction hell. Now it’s down to under $20 and I’m still struggling to get a good answer as to where that money goes. Will I get it back? Will my customer get it back?

I logged into WePay and everything looked … normal. I checked my payment pages, as myself, and they were active. Logically I thought they had disabled my payment API and would be refunding money, but I could find no information on that on my pages. Then my friend Kat pinged me to tell me my Donation Page for ebooks was down. THAT is how I found out my account was actually disabled.

I emailed them and right away and was direct that I knew, understood, and accepted, that I was at fault, but I asked if they meant by “Unfortunately, you can’t use WePay to accept additional payments.” Forever? Everything? It was over and done with? I felt that was pretty nice, all told. I understood that it was my bad, but I wasn’t clear on what they meant by the wording and asked for clarification.

They replied with that yes, this account was good and done and gone forever more. I could no longer use it though paradoxically when I was logged in, there was no obvious mention of this. The only way, logged in, to tell I was persona non grata was to try and withdraw my money. Then it said to contact customer service. But my support guy said all was not lost, I could make a new account, and as long as that didn’t break the rules, I would be allowed to stay, “Your current account though, can not be utilized unfortunately.”

It was a strange way to tell me “Your account has been suspended.”

But okay, that’s fine. I accepted this and replied asking if my customers, the couple who were in some various state of pending (I think it was a total of $19.50) would get their money back. And this is where my tale went from ‘Stupid me’ and right into ‘What the hell is wrong with WePay?’

The initial email I got was at 4:12pm. I didn’t see it until nearly 8pm but I replied right away when I figured out what it meant. I did not know, at that time, that they only did support from 6am to 6pm Pacific, but since I got a reply within 30 minutes, I assumed, like you would, that they had 24/7 support. The second email, my question about the refunds, was sent at about 9pm, and there was no reply by 11pm. As anxious as I was, I went to bed.

In the morning, there was still no email, so I sent another asking for an update, and repeating the question, at about 6:30am. After two more hours, I thought something was up. Normally you get a reply telling you there’s a ticket. Instead I got asked to ‘rate’ my ticket; it had been closed. Instead of replying via email, I logged into their system and marked the ticket as unsatisfactory, with a now angry rant that I was trying to get an answer. Then I forcibly reopened the ticket and put in BOTH my emails asking for the same information.

All I wanted to know was if the people who paid me, and whose money WePay put a hold on the payments, get THEIR money back?

I know I screwed up. But that money, if it’s not mine, is theirs and not WePays.

It took six more hours for someone to reply to that question. I poked their Twitter account about it, and was told that my 11pm email was outside support hours. I asked (via Twitter) for someone to look at my ticket please, and got no more replies from them. At this point I put my effort into getting Stripe up and running, making my own donation page, and figuring out how PayPal handles invoices again.

At this point in the game, I was no longer annoyed and understanding, but pissed off and vocal.

I probably sound angry, and I am. I’m angry at myself for not reading the ToS. I’m angry that WePay actually has a ‘no digital goods’ rule for a online payment service in 2014. I’m angry that I didn’t get a warning and a chance to correct myself. I’m angry that their UI made it so I couldn’t see I was actually suspended. I’m angry that their support system which said ‘reply to this email to reopen the ticket’ decided to turf my mails instead, with no notice.

I’d been with WePay for over four years. I really liked them because they were everything PayPal was not! You can customize a donation page with a pretty URL, or send a custom invoice that looked personable. And back four years ago, I didn’t have to fight to get answers, I got a freakin’ phone call asking me if everything was okay. Yes, I remember that call and said “Well DAMN, this is great!” That was customer service worth lauding, and why for so long I’ve told people to use WePay.

This experience was not WePay. I told them “It’s like finding out your favorite actor is a racist.”

Customer service will make and break you. Customer perception is a huge part of that. WePay went from a service I adored to one that I outright dislike now. And no, I’m not mad at them about shutting my account, I’m mad at them for how they handled it. How they talked to me, how they dealt with my questions, and how I waited almost 6 hours for a reply during business hours, but got them quickly outside them. The money has being refunded to my customers, and I have personally apologized to them for my mistake. I’ll miss you WePay, and I wish you could be less stupid about digital goods. I hope you change your mind one day, but even then I won’t be back. My accounts are deleted, we are no more.

The coda to all this is that on January 16th, WePay announced they were shutting down everything except their API. No more buttons, no more donation pages, no more crowdfunding, no more store. Just an API, like Stripe, only you can’t sell electronic goods, making it officially the least useful of all the online API stores out there. Way to take a great product and kill it.

29 January, 2014
It’s Never A Good Time

One of the biggest things I learned working for a bank was that there is never a good time for an outage.

Take, for example, my ongoing argument about how we had to reboot servers with as little downtime as possible during our deployment process. This is pretty simple, right? If you have to reboot something, it has to be turned off for a little while. Now with a clustered distribution setup like we had, with ten servers in three locations (30 servers), we would deploy to every server in location A, reboot, then B and so on. Now naturally this causes an outage in each location, and we always had different ideas about how to handle it.

One option would be to have the second step of our deployment process be to put up a ‘Sorry’ page, saying the service was offline, and then push to all three locations at once. That minimized downtime to about thirty minutes on average. We’d push the code zipped up to the servers as step one, sorry page was two, gently disconnecting inflight traffic without losing any transactions was three, and unzipping new files was four. If needed, reboots were five, and then six was to remove the sorry page. Pretty fast, right? The downside was that there was an outage, and if we had a problem it would take longer to fix.

The other main option would be to turn off location A, shunt all active users to B and C, upgrade, and repeat. This took longer, usually around 90 minutes, but no service outage, right? Right…? Nope! The problem with shunting users was that we had to wait until the transactions were done before we could redirect them to the new server, which meant servers at locations B and C would be handling a sixth more traffic each, which meant when A came back online and we sent traffic to it, it was more than we had moved off it, so it took longer. Oh, and now A has new code, which B and C does not, so now we have two versions of the service running, and we can’t dynamically flip people around. We have to check service versions before our Round-Robin would work.

Now, in both cases, the longest part of the process was usually the ‘gently disconnect all inflight traffic’ part. But you can see how it gets super messy really fast. The reason this was always a point of contention was that we really didn’t want our customers to have downtime because there was absolutely never a good time for everyone. We picked Thursday nights at ten pm Central for our updates, since we were a Chicago based company, but as time went on, we had to move some to Friday, which you’d think would work for a bank. After all, no one does business on weekends?

I hope you laughed a little at that.

As the Internet makes it more and more possible to work at any hour, we find that services need to be available at any hour. The whole concept behind ‘business hours’ making things standard never really worked for everyone. I mean, if your company was 9-to-5, you would have to do the brunt of your personal business on lunch and breaks. At least today, if I needed to run a personal errand at 2pm, I can just leave and come back to finish my work. Can’t do that at a bank, though! People need to come there to get their work done, so you have to be there.

It’s really annoying, and it comes down to a simple fact: There’s never a good time to turn something off.

This came up recently a friend asked what I was doing at work on December 24th and I replied “The usual. Answering tickets, making the Internet better, closing vulnerable plugins.” He was surprised and asked if I felt mean closing people’s plugins on Christmas Eve. This lead to me teasing the hell out of him for nagging me one weekend with two emails, a slew of tweets, and a text, asking for help with a problem (the last email was, I kid you not, ‘never mind, I read your ebook!’). While I was annoyed then, he apologized and we’re still friends (if the teasing didn’t indicate that already).

But it did bring up something important to him. The time he had to work on his side project was weekends and nights. The time I had to provide random help was weekdays and maybe Sunday. For him, to have his friend and Multisite Resource not available was killing his ability to finish the project. Now, he freely admitted that banking everything on asking someone for free help was a terrible business model, and since then he’s stepped up, read the books, practiced on his own, and he’s now a pretty darn good admin for a network.

Still, on December 24th, he asked if there was a ‘worse’ time to close someone’s plugin. “Sure,” I replied glibly. “The day their mother died. The day their car broke down. The day their tech quit. The day of their product push. The day we upgrade WordPress….” He realized I had a lot of examples and conceded the point. There’s never a good day because we don’t know what’s going on in your life. We can’t know. I’m not actually psychic, after all.

Sometimes people like to complain that we don’t ‘run WordPress’ like a business. If we did, we’d never close a plugin on a Friday night, or on the eve of a major holiday, or without warning, or … You get the idea. And they’re partly right. If WordPress.org was a business, a lot of things would be different. We’d have any easier way to warn people and put shutdowns on a timer, or delete accounts, or help everyone who posts in the forum. But the mistake here is not ‘ours’ for making WordPress what it is, but in you for expecting a free, volunteer, community to act like a company.

Cause we ain’t.

So while it’s never a good time to close a plugin, or reboot a server, or install new software for everyone, we’re going to have to do it at some time. An individual can’t be available 24/7 because we have to sleep, and we have other things to do. So accept that it’s just never a good time, fix it as soon as you can, and carry on.

22 January, 2014
Sometimes The Answer Sucks

I’m good at what I do. I’m really good. I’m an expert, and I’ve rarely run into a WordPress site I couldn’t fix, or at least get back to usable. This doesn’t mean I can code everything, but it means I can take a broken site and get your content back. I can’t, however, perform miracles all the time. You saw how I said ‘rarely’ right?

The real issue here is that sometimes the answer I give people is a horrible, terrible, sucky answer.

While Montgomery Scott always saved the day giving the engines more power, and skipping through the Jefferies Tube like the most bad-ass red shirt in existence, the sad reality of life is that sometimes we can’t save your website. If we can’t figure out why it broke, we may not be able able to fix it.

For example, a site suddenly lost all the plugin settings. They were just gone. Poof. No one had done anything, so the obvious cause is the database having a snafu, right? Well no. The DB was checked, everything seemed in order. We tried a restore, no-go. At that point, the only thing I could tell the person was to re-apply all the changes again, manually. The user was pissed off and it’s totally understandable why! I was pissed off. I couldn’t solve a problem and yes, when I can’t solve things, I get very upset with myself. And I was upset that the answer was so sucky! Redo your hard work? What a crock! But no matter what I did, no matter how I tried to pull the settings back, I was just getting further and further down that rabbit hole, and I knew I absolutely had to cut my losses.

In all likelihood, someone did something without checking it was right and without making a backup first. This happens. We know we shouldn’t mess with ‘production’ but we all do it. So that means sometimes we’re really reckless and we shoot ourselves in the foot without protection. While we can, and do, try really hard not to be stupid anymore, accepting that you (or perhaps your captain) has made a boneheaded mistake is really important. Equally so? Accepting that cleaning up that mistake may not be the answer we wanted to hear.

No one wants to hear ‘Start over.’ That’s pretty much a given. And yet we’ve all done it before. When I studied music, the number of times I had to start over because I’d made a mistake is uncountable. When I was learning to connect pipes in plumbing? Oh I ripped things out a hundred times before getting it right. I even restarted this entire blog post a couple times. And that’s not the only time the answer sucks. You changed user roles and capabilities and now you can’t log in? Congratulations, you get to reset them and start over.

I could go on with example after example of things we do, without realizing how dangerous they are, and how much trouble they get us in, but I suspect the point is made. We do amazing things to ourselves and can’t always fix them. Should you be upset when it happens to you? Of course. And should you be annoyed when you didn’t do anything and they break? You bet! But ….

Your website is like a car that’s always running. Eventually something is going to break, and when it does, the only hope you have of salvation are your backups. Everything really comes back to that, doesn’t it? I deleted the wrong table in a DB and had to restore the whole thing from the day before. Lost a day’s work. Nothing to be done to fix it but that. I had a file, for no reason I could see, go corrupt and refuse to let me edit it. Thankfully the backup was the version I wanted to edit, so I deleted and re-uploaded and moved on.

These things will happen.

The answer will suck.

Decide if you’d rather spend your time complaining about how it’s sucky, or if you want to knuckle down and get to work.

Or drink scotch.

13 December, 2013
Presentations Are Not Transcripts

After my review of SEO Slides (they’re pie, not cake), someone remarked to me that my slide decks are useless because I don’t put all the information on the slides. They pointed out, correctly, that my slides are image heavy with, at most, a couple lines of text (with one notable exception: WordCamp Chicago 2012), except my ‘Who am I?’ slide. I told them “Yes, this is true.” and then Tweeted about it.

My belief (and this is shared by a lot of people) is that slides should accent and relate to my talk. If you just need to read the slides to get all the information, why am I there? Coming to a live presentation to just watch someone reading off slides seems counter intuitive to me. Heck. I could go pester my coworker and get the studies showing that when you have a slide with a lot of text, people read the text, then look at you. That means that they aren’t listening until they read, and if, when they’re done, they come to find you’re just reading what they read? They’re probably bored.

When I give a presentation, it’s usually on a topic I’ve written about before. Actually, that’s generally how I decide what I want to talk about! I picked “Don’t use WordPress Multisite” for WordCamp SF 2013 because it is still, to this day, the most popular post on my site. And it’s my most popular presentation. Some may ask “Why would you give a presentation on something I could read?”

People learn in different ways. I, personally, suck at learning from videos. However I learn well from presentations in person, where someone talks to the room, pays attention to our energy, and teaches, using the slides as an emphasis. I also learn well from a written post. Finally, I learn best by doing things. So for me, if I’m blowing up a site, it means I’m learning in a speed unparalleled. There’s a converse to this, and if I hit a blocker were I can’t do something, I get really upset.

What does this have to do with slides and why mine are mostly pretty pictures with a sentence for emphasis? I don’t write my slides to be a transcript because I’m going to write a much longer blog post on the topic, with the same pictures probably, if I haven’t already. So for the person who wants to read the content, I’ll have you covered. And for the person who wants to be inspired by looking at slides? Well I have that. Finally for the person who wants to watch a video, WordCamp does that for me, thankfully.

This is not a perfect system, of course. Like I said, people learn in different ways, so there’s probably someone out there who loves slideshows of text on pictures who is grumpy. They probably also like infographics. Which I don’t. You see a trend here? I don’t like getting my information from pictures. Because of that I suck at writing them, so I just don’t.

11 December, 2013
WCPDX: Lightning Talk

Rolling Your WordPress Support Character (Without Any Code)

12 September, 2013
My Question is “You Suck”

If you’ve ever watched Survivor, they have a Tribal Council at the end of each episode, where they discuss things and decide who to vote off the island. In the grand finale, however, they instead discuss whom to give the million dollars. Every previously voted off tribe member gets a chance to ask the two (or three) finalists a question. Miss Alli, from the classic days of Television Without Pity, used to love/hate when someone would step up and use their time to shout, insult, or otherwise berate the finalists. She called that “My Question is you suck.”

Whenever you do support, you will invariably run into people who act exactly like that. If I had a dollar for every time someone left a support ticket with “This sucks!” I wouldn’t need to work anymore. And those people are really annoying, because you want to reply “Well thanks, and over here in the constructive world…” but you absolutely cannot engage them. As the Survivor yahoos quickly learned, feeding the fuel for someone who’s ranting is about as useful as keeping the rain off with those little paper umbrellas you get with fruity drinks.

My question is … this code is crap

Something to keep in mind, Tech Support is not “Customer Service” per se. When someone needs tech support, while they totally need someone to be ‘nice’ to them, they really need someone to fix their problem. Customer Service is all about building a relationship with the customer, figuring out their needs and wants, and basically selling them something. On the other hand, tech support is being told “This is my problem, fix it.” While that certainly happens to people who work at hotel desks (“There’s no hot water…”) it’s the meat and milk of life for anyone who writes and/or maintains software.

To this end, you’re really not ‘servicing’ the customer, nor are you taking time to build a great rapport with them, you’re trying to fix what’s wrong. Certainly doing this provides a service to the customer, but making sure the person comes back (or stays) is often secondary. After all, if we can fix the problem, you’ll come back, right?

When someone just says ‘You suck’ or ‘Your code sucks’ there’s very little you can do about it, if they’re not willing to give you a concrete example of these things. I have, on occasion, replied “Patches welcome! I’m always happy to improve my work.” That’s pretty much the best I can do. When the reply is that I, personally, suck, then I hand it over to anyone else. There’s nothing I can do here, so it’s time to ask someone else to help me out.(If you’re the solo dev, it’s time to cut your losses, say that you’re sorry you can’t help them, and walk away.)

My question is …. this plugin gets one star because it doesn’t work

Mark Jaquith Reviews Code. Credit Mark Jaquith

Everyone hates the ‘review that should have been a support question.’ Invariably we’ll get it. The plugin doesn’t work, screw you. And when we go back to look at the person’s post history, we see never once did they, in a place you can find, ask you ‘How do I make this work?’ It’s frustrating. Now you should keep in mind, on the WordPress.org forums, someone can change their star rating, so the best thing to do here is try and win them back. Kill ’em with a little kindness, point out ‘I would have seen this faster had you…’

But in general, this one is not to terrible to win back. Much of the time, someone who is this lost that they can only find the review location and not the right support places is someone who has a pretty easy to fix issue. Solve it and you’ve got a returning user. A smaller percentage of the time, alas, the problem is someone who really, truly, didn’t read what the plugin does. “This plugin for vegan resources sucks because there’s no bacon!” Not much you can do there except point out “This is by design.”

My question is …. you don’t reply fast enough for me

Today we expect, and often get, instant feedback. We have livechats, we have Twitter and Facebook. We reach out to the people who represent a company (or a TV Show), and we assume there will be some prompt reaction. This is no longer customer ‘service’ but ‘experience.’ The customer’s personal experience will color their feelings about both the product and the people behind it. It’s a large part of why I don’t think pure customer service exists any more, if it ever did, in software.

The problem comes in when you take a weekend off, or an afternoon, because you want to actually have, you know, some time with your family, or go to a movie. Maybe you were just asleep for eight consecutive hours. Either way, it was the worst time in the world for someone else, and they’ve left multiple requests for help. If you’ve ever worked in a ‘traditional’ office, these people are like the guy who emails you a long question, and then calls you and swings by your desk, after IMing you, to make sure you got the email.

In short, they hit every single ‘annoyance’ nerve in a person’s body, all at once, and they do it over and over and over. I tend to want to reach through the monitor and take away their caffeine for a couple days. But until someone invents that for me, I have a couple tactics.

For anything ‘free’ (like WordPress plugins) I tell them that this is a free product I write in my free time, and that means waiting a reasonable time for a reply means waiting 3-5 days, not 3-5 seconds. And then I answer their question as best I can. For the paid stuff, I point out that I missed their email because I had gone home for the day (or ‘had the weekend off’). Usually just that gentle reminder of “some people do work ‘normal’ hours still” gets them off their horse enough to work with. On the rare occasion it doesn’t(I’ve had people tell me that I’m too important to not be available 24/7, which is sweet, but no.) I’ve just ignored their unreasonable demands and concentrated on fixing the problem at hand.

My question is … you don’t know what you’re talking about

Finally there’s the you suck hidden in a peculiar phrasing of basically “you aren’t good enough.” This is not the same as the outright “You suck.” because it’s actually a value judgement. It’s not a dismissive “You’re a meanie poopy head!” sort of claim, it’s a “Your code sucks!” And this sort of comment hurts a lot. People calling you names rarely have any basis to do so, and they’re rarely right. People calling into question your work, however, that cuts to the bone and tends to make us over react.

In defense of people who submit bug reports, much of the time this is not what they mean! Sometimes they say “I think you’re wrong because of XYZ” and it comes across as “You idiot, how could you not possibly know this!” I say this a lot, but text is a really lousy medium for communication of intent. Now. One thing the people who report the bugs really need to remember to do is say “Thank you” when the bug is fixed, or even “I appreciate you taking the time to explain to me why you won’t do XYZ.” Instead, most of what we get is someone saying “I told you! I was right and you were wrong!” I gotta tell you, that never really makes me want to work with you again.

But the real reason this one galls me is that it’s generally said to me after someone has specifically asked me for help on something of I’m somewhat of an expert (or talented tweaker). I’ve had people tell me I don’t know jack about WordPress (pretty sure that’s wrong), or pretty much anything else under the sun. That frustrates me, since you came over here asking me, admitedly a total stranger, for help, and when I gave it you snipped that I’m ignorant.

To these, I actually do point out “You know, you asked me for my help/opinion and I gave it. We can agree to disagree, but you don’t have to be mean about it, since that’s not a good way to get help from a free, volunteer, community.”

Unless of course you’ve hired me, at which point I refund most of your money and cancel the contract.

22 July, 2013