So, this is a slightly indelicate subject and I wondered about raising it privately, but I think getting some more of other peoples’ impressions on this would be useful.
Based on a report from a friend I recently recommended Beeminder to, she didn’t have a very good experience with response times from support when she messed up on a goal. I’ve recently had a similar experience as well.
It’s possible we were both unlucky in timing, but it’s important to me to know if this is likely to continue.
If it is it’s not really going to cause me personally any problems, but “If you get in trouble you can just email Beeminder support. They’re really helpful and quick to reply” is my single biggest pro-Beeminder argument when trying to convince people that it’s great and they should use it, and if that stops being the case my recommendations are going to have to start being a lot more qualified. In particular even if the charge is revoked, “Argh I’m going to derail because I messed up, nice support person can you fix this for me?” is much less stressful than “Argh I messed up, can you undo that?”, so when support times cross about a 12 hour boundary it suddenly becomes a much bigger problem.
A lot of this is “Beeminder support used to be amazing and have degraded to merely normal”, and I don’t imagine this is due to any personal failing on peoples’ part but is more likely to be just getting increasingly busy. However it still has an effect, and I wanted to make sure that this was known. Perhaps a meta for support latency would be useful?
I think this was my fault. Namely, we use my Gmail Snooze script for snoozing emails (like if something needs to be followed up on later, or in case the user doesn’t respond to a follow-up question, etc) and sometime about a month ago that failed and we didn’t notice. So every time we were snoozing things for a couple days they went out of sight out of mind. When I did notice we dumped all the snoozed email back in the inbox and are now working our way through the backlog.
So some unlucky people did get worse than “normal support” and I think it may have cascaded to less-than-amazing for a bunch of people. But hopefully this means that we can get back to amazing now that we fixed my stupid snooze script.
But keep letting us know! This might also be a good time to ask you all for recommendations for either hackery for tracking statistics in Gmail (Mark Wilson’s stuff is probably a good place to start) or an actual CRM.
Thanks so much for helping us, starting with the key step of identifying the problem. We’re always super grateful for bug reports and this is no different!
I send an email to support about 24 hours ago to ask for a break for one of my goals (and which is going to derail in about 19 hours unless support inserts the break in time). I haven’t gotten any response yet. In the past I remember only having to wait for a handful of hours (sometimes as little as 2 hours).
Eep, thanks! I’ll get my butt in the support inbox now. @chelsea is taking a break for the month of January and holy cow is it painful without her! Even with us all pitching in. (Which, actually, may be the problem: diffusion of responsibility. The Support Czar position is key.)
You might want to invest into a support ticket system, which would include “quality control” checks on how quick you respond and how much time it takes to resolve an issue. Personally, i’ve been using Jira with good results (and of course you can also beemind this now Close Jira issue => New data point?)
I sent a bug six days ago that is yet to be acknowledged. Should I resend or sit tight?
I’m never quite sure how increased these latencies are, nor whether it is better (more likely to be seen/quicker response) to post bugs in the forum or send them straight to support.
That’s bad. Really glad you spoke up! We’ve actually never gotten 6 days backlogged (I can’t even imagine digging out of that much backlog) so… [investigating…] [sheepish] We apparently accidentally archived it. Have I mentioned how bad things are right now without @chelsea?
Ok, we all discussed and @bee is graciously taking the blame. We have automatic emails we send to ourselves about IFTTT problems and often there’s nothing to be done about it (like a recipe trying to send data to an archived goal) and we’re that dumb that we just let those automatic emails cry wolf and archive them on auto-pilot. [hangs head in shame] So with “IFTTT” in the subject line of your message… Yeah, oy.
So, yeah, that’s what happened. Replying now! Really sorry about that.
Slight correction to the above: We actually send automatic emails with subject “IFTTT error on goal username/goalname” to the user, with support cc’d, when various things go wrong with recipes. So that’s how we accidentally archived it on auto-pilot and it makes sense to send those emails, so it wasn’t us blatantly crying wolf on ourselves (though there are other ways we’re still doing that). And leaving ourselves cc’d probably does count as crying wolf on ourselves, actually. We did that originally because we weren’t sure if such problems might be our fault.
Anyway, enough agonizing postmortem on that! Sorry again for the screwup and do keep hollering when you notice problems!
