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Hello folks!
This thread was about posting in other poster's threads to provide assistance. In some cases members of the community can be very informed, have personal experience with, and be faster at providing assistance. In those cases, we are grateful that folks are willing to help each other out! However, it has its flaws.
Majority of problems are going to take one of us CS representatives to resolve, and we do work from the oldest posts to the newest posts as they appear on the CS forum page. This means that by providing help, you will change the timestamp on the post. If your post doesn't completely resolve the issue, this means that it will indeed take longer for a CS rep to take a look at it.
I think its wonderful when community members help each other out, but to mitigate frustration, here's some things to consider!
1. Its our jobs.
This is just to say that we get paid to have the info and give the help! It is no community member's responsibility other than our own to do this. Please continue to be wonderful community members, but know that we are here to be relied upon.
2. The CS forum is special.
This is structured to be a place where folks can come specifically looking for CS. We don't patrol anywhere else on these forums for CS reasons, and folks should know where they can find us. For the folks with the problems and solutions, know that the community is totally a resource, so you might have a problem that you can post elsewhere for a community solution. If folks want a CS rep, they are in the right place here! Let's make that an expected standard.
3. Recourse for the helpful.
I think we could have a lot more helpful advice on this subject, use of the CS forums overall, and some insight for everyone on really common issues we see. This will take us some time to put together. In the meantime, reading through Steve Geddes's post at this link is a good summation of this specific issue. While we will certainly work hard to provide something more official and concrete based on our CS perspective, this is a great summation of the problem from a community standpoint. Like I said, I love that folks can be so helpful to each other, and with a communal understanding of how best to respect each other there's a lot less frustration to be had!
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I'd say that if a fellow community member is positive they have a solution to a Customer Service thread they should send a private message to the thread's original poster. If this does indeed resolve the problem the OP can state as much in their thread.
Hello folks!
This thread was about posting in other poster's threads to provide assistance. In some cases members of the community can be very informed, have personal experience with, and be faster at providing assistance. In those cases, we are grateful that folks are willing to help each other out! However, it has its flaws.
Majority of problems are going to take one of us CS representatives to resolve, and we do work from the oldest posts to the newest posts as they appear on the CS forum page. This means that by providing help, you will change the timestamp on the post. If your post doesn't completely resolve the issue, this means that it will indeed take longer for a CS rep to take a look at it.
I think its wonderful when community members help each other out, but to mitigate frustration, here's some things to consider!
1. Its our jobs.
This is just to say that we get paid to have the info and give the help! It is no community member's responsibility other than our own to do this. Please continue to be wonderful community members, but know that we are here to be relied upon.2. The CS forum is special.
This is structured to be a place where folks can come specifically looking for CS. We don't patrol anywhere else on these forums for CS reasons, and folks should know where they can find us. For the folks with the problems and solutions, know that the community is totally a resource, so you might have a problem that you can post elsewhere for a community solution. If folks want a CS rep, they are in the right place here! Let's make that an expected standard.3. Recourse for the helpful.
I think we could have a lot more helpful advice on this subject, use of the CS forums overall, and some insight for everyone on really common issues we see. This will take us some time to put together. In the meantime, reading through...
Its funny that I posted a question about an order in this forum and no one from CS ever responded to my query.
It looks like the last post in the last thread CS dealt with before Goblin Holiday was May 30th. The last post in the thread you posted is May 31st. They ought to get to it very early in this work week.
We will see but at this point I wont hold my breath. I mean they had time to start this long post after my initial post, so there 8s that.
It looks like the last post in the last thread CS dealt with before Goblin Holiday was May 30th. The last post in the thread you posted is May 31st. They ought to get to it very early in this work week.
My original post was dated May 28. I responded to a kind response from someone who is a non employee.
As explained in Sam Phelan's post at the top of this thread, they work from the bottom of the thread list to the top. Posting in a thread moves it to the top of the list, so any further posts in a Customer Service thread past the original post move it back in the queue.
we do work from the oldest posts to the newest posts as they appear on the CS forum page. This means that by providing help, you will change the timestamp on the post. If your post doesn't completely resolve the issue, this means that it will indeed take longer for a CS rep to take a look at it.
So your thread is timestamped according to the last post in it, which was May 31st.
As explained in Sam Phelan's post at the top of this thread, they work from the bottom of the thread list to the top. Posting in a thread moves it to the top of the list, so any further posts in a Customer Service thread past the original post move it back in the queue.
we do work from the oldest posts to the newest posts as they appear on the CS forum page. This means that by providing help, you will change the timestamp on the post. If your post doesn't completely resolve the issue, this means that it will indeed take longer for a CS rep to take a look at it.So your thread is timestamped according to the last post in it, which was May 31st.
Like I said, I am not holding my breath for my question to be answered anytime soon.
It is a bit tedious.
My otherwise-unadulterated posting from the 29th (invoiced product missing from a shipment) hasn't been responded to yet, so I think there's a little wiggle-room in "answered bottom-up," too. Either that... or I'm about to have to get back in line for another 2 weeks :`(
It's definitely a loose guideline rather than a straitjacket.
It won't help anyone with an unanswered thread, but it's worth putting some clarification in the title of the thread too, in my experience:
"problem with subscription shipment" isn't as good a title as "item missing from May subscription shipment" in my opinion. (I invented that at random, it's not a comment about any specific person's issue).
There are also times when there's some "batch problem" and CS will scoot through the forums looking for everyone with that issue. If your thread just says "Order #XYZ" then you may be missed in one of those out-of-usual-order sweeps.
My post from Saturday May 30th was just responded to a few days ago. Thankfully it didn't need CS intervention as the shipping system worked itself out and did not send me my 6 items in 4 different packages :D
That being said they are making their way through. I am now putting a tag line at the end of each of my threads asking people not to respond to them unless they are CS :D
How many CS RepS do they have?
I'm still waiting for a response on a matter from May 27th, myself.
From my interaction on these boards there are some obvious favorites from the Mods. I wonder if this is the same for CR?
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Hello,
There are now 5 of us. We currently have close to 1,000 emails and despite our efforts that number is growing rather than shrinking. You can see updates to where we are in this thread (currently May 11). We haven't forgotten the boards, we just need to catch the inbox up to the boards.
We do not have favorites, we answer posts and emails in order from oldest to newest. I can't speak for my coworkers but I would appreciate not making insinuations that I am dishonest in doing my job.
Hello,
There are now 5 of us. We currently have close to 1,000 emails and despite our efforts that number is growing rather than shrinking. You can see updates to where we are in this thread (currently May 11). We haven't forgotten the boards, we just need to catch the inbox up to the boards.
We do not have favorites, we answer posts and emails in order from oldest to newest. I can't speak for my coworkers but I would appreciate not making insinuations that I am dishonest in doing my job.
Asking a question does not insinuate anything. It is a question being asked. No more and no less. If CS Department is different than the Board Moderators, then that could be explained, and the comment taken as that, a comment/query.
Either way my experience with the Mods is what it is. However, if they are the same then that is an issue. I know that I have been deceived by PFS personnel, who from my understanding is and was a Paizo employee, in the past.We are told to ask CS questions on the boards before emailing CS. To date neither method has illicited a response from CS, but thus question did.
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FWIW, most of the CS team like me and there have been several instances where I’ve had to wait over a month for resolution, from time to time. I’ve also had queries drop off the forum without getting addressed.
They have a massive backlog of customer issues to address. They’re increasing their staffing levels which is good, but COVID, IT-subscription problems and PF2 launching and bringing a bevy of new subscribers all happened at once. No doubt they expected the third and hired appropriately but the first two were problems hard to anticipate and the only way out is to now hunker down and dig through the backlog.
PF2 came out last year.
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PF2 came out last year.
Yeah, and with it there’s been a whole lot of new subscribers with all the usual “newcomer” questions. Concurrent with its release they expanded the CS team (by two, I think but at least by one) which is great to see and maybe if that was the only shock to the system it would have been sufficient to handle the extra queries.
However, there have also been major IT glitches relating to the subs that have cropped up in the last few months - they could not really have seen that coming and staffed up in readiness.
COVID also resulted in mandatory work-from-home which shut things down AND precluded phone resolutions (the most efficient, in my experience).
We’ve been through patches of such backlogs before and they are terribly frustrating for both customers and I daresay staff. In this case, it’s not hard to see the reasons behind it. It could be bias....or it could just be a team of 5 CS people (including some relatively recent hires) suddenly having to deal with far, far more CS queries than they’d anticipated in less than ideal circumstances.
Like I said, I am not holding my brearh for any answer being given soon, especially when a question is penalized for someone trying to be helpful.
Like I said, I am not holding my brearh for any answer being given soon, especially when a question is penalized for someone trying to be helpful.
I think that’s a sensible mindset. At the moment, I expect it will take a month to get an answer if I post a CS question. That seems about right currently (maybe a little shorter, but I prefer to be pleasantly surprised than the opposite).
I think they need to stop sending mixed messages though. Contact us herr for a 1 nonth response time or contact us here for a 2 month response time. I understabd that this is a different time but it looks like only 4 or 5 CS responses were given on this forum yesterday and one was a reaponse to my post about favortism. It feels like Frederick's 21st birthday on Pirates of Penzance and I know that if I waited that long to rewpond ro questions at my jon, especially if they are from CS oe to make the company money, I would be talked to. I mean its not like they couldnt have 1 person dedicated to answering the forums.
I don’t have huge insight into it (not being CS!) but I know things are not always as straightforward as it can seem from our side of the screen.
Historically, they have done as you suggest - one Staffmember on messageboards, one on emails, one on the phones. I think this genuinely is unprecedented and stretching them to the limit - as I understand it, despite their best efforts, there have been times in the last few months when they have finished a day ploughing through emails to discover their queue has grown.
They also have a queue system of some sort that lets them see how many CS issues are waiting on the forum, so it may be that things here are not as bad. If I were faced with the situation that CS were literally receiving more emails than they could answer for a period and that forum issues were not growing as rapidly, I could perhaps see an appropriate response being “all hands on deck, everyone’s on emails today with only a minimal forum presence.
In terms of chipping in to other threads, I think you should be wary of forming a view on what they should have been doing instead. Often, Paizo staff will check the forums when they’re at home (not working) or on a break. They may well see an issue they can shed light on and jump in to offer insight but it’s entirely on their time and outside their official duties - it’s not in place of answering a CS query, it’s in place of playing Galaga (I assume that’s what the cool kids still play, these days?)
Amount of communication is a difficult issue in this context - it would be lovely for us to be easily able to know what’s going on, how far our issue has progressed, who’s doing what, what the priorities are, likely timeframes....and so on. But every such interaction also slows things down.
FWIW, Paizo CS communication has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years - they’ve clearly dedicated a lot of brainpower to that side of things and it’s way, way better than it used to be for us - from the monthly “here’s what’s happening with subscriptions” threads to the COVID-necessitated “here’s how many emails we’ve got left to answer” thread. (I expect we have Sara Marie to thank for that. Thanks, Sara!)
Ultimately...this genuinely is a perfect storm for them. COVID, IT, PF2-influx....I’m probably missing some things I don’t know about. (Recently, I heard Sam was tasked with “some other CS projects” - there’s a lot going on that will ultimately benefit us, even if we don’t see what’s happening). It is enormously frustrating and I’m genuinely not chipping in here to dismiss or deny the issue - I have just seen similar times previously and I know that there are many things happening that aren’t always visible to us. A hopefully useful perspective.
Except I looked at this message board history and saw how many responses were given yesterday. If the issues that people are asking about, more than a month impact them financially, tjen waiting so long is unacceltable. I was under the impression that CS was and has been working from home, hence not being able to get a live person.
Unacceptable is something we each have to judge for ourselves, of course. I accept them, you may not. I’m certainly not commenting on that.
My only point was that if the forum queue is shortening and the email queue is lengthening, it makes sense to shift CS resources from the former to the latter. We don’t have all the information to decide what the best course of action is. Paizo CS team may well currently be facing the choice: “Do we do go for this very bad outcome or this terrible one?”
Which may lead to people having enough of poor customer service and not buying from them any more.
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More power to them.
Yeah, I wouldn’t try and talk someone out of those judgments. If Paizo CS is “poor” in one’s judgment then it will no doubt have an impact on buying from them in the future.
My personal experience is that the Paizo CS team are fantastic. They’ve gone above and beyond so many times over the years. Ive had many, many problems to be resolved (often self-inflicted but often a result of Paizo IT issues). The last six months have been very slow - uncharacteristically so. I don’t see the CS people changing, I suspect they’re frantically solving a whole host of problems I have no idea about.
Paizo CS team may well currently be facing the choice: “Do we do go for this very bad outcome or this terrible one?”Which may lead to people having enough of poor customer service and not buying from them any more.
If that’s the result of making the very bad choice, it would probably be worse if they opted for the terrible option.
My issue is tryinhg to help them make money. For the most part they are very good, it is some of the other people I have major issues with the Mods and their favoritism on these boards, and the PFS team, one of who out right lied to me. Of course, bringing this up to higher ups has done nothing.
I don’t know anything about PFS, but the email for raising board moderation issues (in case you haven’t tried that avenue yet) is:
I don’t know anything about PFS, but the email for raising board moderation issues (in case you haven’t tried that avenue yet) is:
I did that about a month or so again when a group of people werr attacking another person on the boards and the posts are still there.
I did that about a month or so again when a group of people werr attacking another person on the boards and the posts are still there.I don’t know anything about PFS, but the email for raising board moderation issues (in case you haven’t tried that avenue yet) is:
I often find that with the flagging system. Clearly my view of what constitutes “Personal insult” doesn’t always line up with the moderation team’s opinion. I always feel heard if I make contact via the community email though, even if they end up not sharing my perspective.