It's getting pretty bad on people constantly posting on the forums about license issues and software tech support issues and it seems to be getting worse not better. Used to be I could post that maybe you were closed for the weekends (no clue if that's even true or not), but lately a few have been posting during the week that they are not getting responses to their tickets or emails for days when having issues getting their licenses for the software. Not a good thing guys, and truly my fingers are tired of typing the same things over and over and over trying to appease these people that are upset because they paid for your product and didn't get the license for it.
The following would make it better for your users both purchasers and forum users:
Make it clearer on your Ticket system if there's an amount of time it can/will take for answers so people are expecting it to take days (which it often does).
Add a reply message that tells them that they will get a response within X number of hours/days/etc whatever time frame works best for you.
State if it's weekends that you will not be answering tickets until Monday so they know (if that's the case).
Check your tickets, emails and even forums a lot better and more often than you do so these people are getting answers sooner than "days".
State your hours of operation on your site and in the forums too so people know they will not get answers during certain hours/days.
FIX your purchase system, or find a better company to handle it for you so that people aren't having to wait for it like that. There are a lot of systems and companies out there that help to manage the purchasing of downloadable products, maybe it's time to look into replacing yours if it's not working for you.
These are all things that would take someone less than a half hour to do to update the site pages with the needed info, update the forum with the needed info. Might take a bit more to find a good purchasing system for helping you to automate the process better. And then to just check more often so people are able to get answers, and get their license codes they paid for without getting upset at US because we don't have the right answers for them on the forums.
Sorry if this is to the point, but I've been watching these same issues over and over for 2 years and it's never ever gotten better, only worse. At this point I'm usually short and to the point with them and just state "Contact Support" and nothing more because it's just getting old.
If BSS is paying Paddle 5% + $.50 per sale to handle these sort of software fulfillment issues they should expect near zero problems. Maybe the issue is complicated by the whole EU / VAT quagmire. I thought Paddle took that cut since they act as a reseller, not simply as a payment gateway?
One action that can go a long way to helping situations like this is for the people who make the product stay active on their forum. I'm not saying to be on there all day every day, but being a regular and articulating the current state of things will keep people at ease. If development needs to slow a little you're further ahead keeping people informed. You'd be amazed how much people will tolerate as long as you let them know what they're tolerating.
Yeah there are a lot of things that can help with support, but to be honest the main things that I see the most on here is that their emails/tickets are going unanswered about license code issues, and that's where most of the issues seems to lie. Since I don't know if they have that setup as an automated system via Paddle, or if Paddle is just handling the purchases and then BSS people handle sending the codes, I don't know where that issue lies, I just know what is stated on the forums and the 2 things I see the most are:
I didn't get my license code, been waiting for ... (insert time frame here, most of the time it is days).
I've already posted a ticket (insert number of hours/days which is once again mostly days) ago, but haven't gotten any answer yet.
Those are the 2 that are being targeted in this suggestion mostly. To me that sounds like someone isn't staying on top of the licensing system, or Paddle isn't doing their job as they should to get the license codes out, AND BSS people are not monitoring their tickets and emails enough. Forums is fine to monitor, but that is not where it's needed for this, it's in their own ticket system it's needing more support so people don't feel like they "Have" to post here which doesn't get them any help either since we as users can't help them with these issues.
This clearly shows the relationship between Paddle and BSS. Paddle is being paid a premium as a reseller of BSS and as such should handle the fulfillment issues. Perhaps BSS needs to hold Paddles feet to the fire to simply fulfill the terms of their agreement?
Thank you for starting this discussion, Jo! This brings to light some issues that we need to address:
The team is focused on product development and don't actively monitor the forum. This results in us missing important discussions, support issues getting posted as threads and spam.
We handle support issues in a matter of hours during weekdays. We don't during weekends. We need to tell people when we're offline.
We need to improve our self-serve pages. The most common issue is people using incorrect emails when purchasing our app. If they are able to change it securely themselves, nearly all of these messages will disappear.
We will work on these immediately after delivering version 4.2.0 this week. Another thing is that people go straight to google when they face an issue, and land on one of the support-issue-as-forum-discussion threads that we aim to avoid, post there and perpetuate the problem. The only solution that I see for this is to remove these threads and create dedicated pages on our site that offer help.
Glad to hear it Martin, thanks much for that. Definitely check into Paddle though as OSTexo is right, they should probably be doing better for you than they are and that could be half the battle there. Like I said, I don't know if the codes are done automatically through them, or if you send codes after getting information from them about a purchase or how you handle all that so a lot hinges on the system you're using to produce and distribute the purchase codes which is truly the bulk of the support questions on the forums here that us users can't answer. If Paddle should be doing more for you though, you should be sure you get what you're paying for.
Either way though, am glad to hear that it will be addressed. :)