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I’m all for steps being taken to improve Paizo’s backlog. I don’t want to suggest changes that would be ineffective or actively detrimental. I honestly believe they are best positioned to decide what steps are effective versus not. Kvetching at them accomplishes nothing but venting our own spleens.
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What division still needs to be done? CS and the warehouse are already separate teams.
Something simple X number answer phones x work on emails. Somethint simplr and puts noone in danger.
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So you’d rather take resources away from clearing the email backlog to answer phone calls from the same people that emailed in? Isn’t that adding more work instead of dividing the current work?
Except that some things require sooner resolution than 5 months. As an example in a private message I was asked to send an email to their team. That was almost 3 months ago.
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I’m all for steps being taken to improve Paizo’s backlog. I don’t want to suggest changes that would be ineffective or actively detrimental. I honestly believe they are best positioned to decide what steps are effective versus not. Kvetching at them accomplishes nothing but venting our own spleens.Contrary to how some come to the immediate defense of Paizo, as if criticism of what is going on is a personal attack on them, either by attempting to bully others into their way of thinking or attacking en masse,which ends up being like the "Leave Brittney Alone" video, people can critique a business. Paizo can tsje it. I am sure that this is not the wo3st criticism the company has or will receive.
I think the issue is that you feel like your comments are aimed at Paizo, but they really only land on your fellow posters here.
So it ends up less, as you see it, shameful oversupport of a company, and more just your peers wishing these threads weren't so full of complaints and passive-aggression. That's the way it looks from my vantage, at least, as admittedly someone with perhaps an overactive sense of patience and forgiveness when it comes to things like this.
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Except CS does read these boards. They have been quick to respond on other threads questioning CS and Moderator behavior.
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I asked about the phone issue in March I think (whenever it was first announced, anyhow). I didn’t get an answer from Paizo directly, other than confirmation from Jeff it would likely be long term.
I did get a really good DM from a guy who does this kind of thing for a living. I had assumed that “divert phone calls home” would be easy, because I’d seen other companies do it. He explained that there are essentially two classes of phone setup - one based largely in the cloud and one more hardwired where incoming calls are “delivered” to Paizo’s office and then distributed internally from there.
Diverting phone lines as I’d envisaged was trivial in the first but almost impossible in the second. Apparently, the needed changes involve booking technicians and making significant investment to one’s IT infrastructure. There has also been an unsurprising surge in requests to make this change.
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Except CS does read these boards. They have been quick to respond on other threads questioning CS and Moderator behavior.
FWIW, I don’t think they can do very much about what you’re interested in changing. Posting here just means CS have to filter through more posts - posts involving things beyond their control.
If you are trying to get executive’s attention, I’ve found the paizo-general-discussion subforum to be best.
If you wanted to query the phone situation, I’d actually suggest the Website-feedback subforum (that’s generally a broader category than it sounds).
This forum is for asking CS to do things. They can’t actually set up external phone access, hire more CS staff or alter Paizo’s lockdown measures. Putting such requests here clouds the waters, somewhat.
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It could help stream line some of the issues.
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Customer Service and the Warehouse team are two separate groups of people doing separate jobs in separate locations.
Back in pre-Covid days, people from the office would go downstairs and help ship product during lunch and after hours during busy months, but that's not possible due to social distancing now, even if they were physically in the same place. None of the Paizo developers and designers seem to have been in the actual building since March, if you listened to any of the GenCon panels where they waxed nostalgic about the office.
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How? What issues of reduced manpower and productivity in the warehouse are streamlined by having people answering phones to field CS requests?
It is my understanding that they hired more people in the WH before the launch of 2E. Managing of people is up to their supervisors.
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How? What issues of reduced manpower and productivity in the warehouse are streamlined by having people answering phones to field CS requests?
But if issues get fixed with orders quicker then that means that shipment can be less impacted for that order.
It is my understanding that they hired more people in the WH before the launch of 2E.
I don’t think they expanded the warehouse team as PF2 was released. CS certainly got bigger.
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There are three companies whose warehouse operations have some visibility to me from my dealing with them as a customer.
Netflix still offers DVDs by mail, and they seem to turn around the returned DVDs quite efficiently. Their shipments are transparent enough that it is obvious that the recent delays in shipping are coming from the post office, not from them -- and their high unit volume and many years of experience doing this have made them very efficient. The pandemic on its own never seems to have affected their operations.
Heroforge processes individual orders as they come in and can arbitrarily set the due dates for shipping themselves, so it is no wonder that they always seem to get orders to ship ahead of schedule.
Paizo has the issue that most of their shipments are monthly subscription shipments with a hard deadline of the street date for the products in question, as they inevitably will have disgruntled customers whenever subscribers don't get their PDFs by the street date. This is exacerbated by the still growing delays in Customer Service responses, as they have to balance the need to get shipping started as soon as possible with the need to minimize the shipping errors introduced by unaddressed errors noted by customers from their auth e-mails and order listings.
My best guess is that there are exactly two ways they can catch up:
1) Pandemic restrictions are lifted and they can go back to business as usual, or
2) They find two successive months when subscription bulk is relatively low, cancel shipments for the first month, and move the street dates for the first month to the second month.
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They could hire more CS staff. Part of the problem with shipping delays is being exacerbated by new or usually-disengaged customers not being able to get timely responses to their queries. CS have a supremely high success rate but its currently taking six weeks to get to emails which is unfortunate.
Historically, they've been averse to putting people on short term contracts though. Presumably that's part of the reason we haven't seen a whole bunch of unfamiliar faces come onboard in the last few months.
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Here's a little update from the Ops (CS & Warehouse side of things)...
Sara Marie is hiring for two more CSRs right now to help with the load issues we've been facing so hopefully we can get them in, trained up, and making a difference quickly. We are also looking at various ticketing software packages to replace our current systems which should speed up our processing time and provide a streamlined solution for our customers. This is a several month-long project so it will not likely help in the short term but should in the medium-term and definitely in the long-term.
As far as the phones go, we have no current plans to reinstate them while our folks are WFH. We have committed to keeping our employees safe and at home through the end of 2020 and possibly longer depending on covid so email and MBs will continue to be the only ways to communicate with us. I know that for some of you, the phone was your method of choice and we are sorry to inconvenience you but it's the reality we are living at the moment.
In the warehouse, we finally filled Laura's vacated spot a couple of weeks ago and that basically brings us to capacity as things currently stand with covid precautions. As for the Humble Bundle (HB) fulfillment, we brought in some temps to do the majority of that pack out at our offsite warehouse so our experts could continue to fulfill our regular customer orders. We will likely do that again once the reprint arrives for the final push on the HB orders.
We've also invested in a flo-pack style bubble machine to speed up the HB pack out process and we look forward to phasing it into our normal fulfillment as a partial replacement for peanuts. It won't completely replace them as some orders will still require them to keep their contents safe, but we could see a marked decrease in our use of them this year.
I know it has been a tough and trying time to have issues that need dealing with and we all appreciate your patience. We are doing everything we can to solve the issues and make our lives and yours better so please hang in there.
Thanks very much for the update, Jeff. Really glad to hear the CS team is getting even bigger! (What’s that saying?...Tomorrow, the world!)
I don’t really understand all those technical bits, but anything that cuts down on packing peanuts will make my home life that much less stressful. So thanks for that too! ;)
I didn’t realise Laura had left. She’ll be missed - that team had been together so long. :(
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Thank you for the update.
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We've also invested in a flo-pack style bubble machine to speed up the HB pack out process and we look forward to phasing it into our normal fulfillment as a partial replacement for peanuts. It won't completely replace them as some orders will still require them to keep their contents safe, but we could see a marked decrease in our use of them this year.
No this makes me happier.. Though I would prefer that peanuts just go away fully. You are still the only company I order from that uses them.
TriOmega aged, he did not get old. :)
Nope. I made worse comments about them before I mellowed out.
:)
Been there, done that.
They're just books. They'll show up eventually. My June order still hasn't shipped, for example. I'm sure it will :)