Cultural Research

@Appmakr: More Customer Support Madness [Update: Thanks for Responding Guys!]

Final Update: Just wanted to let folks know they did get back to me.  It was a bit later than they and I hoped but I do understand that they're slammed with work due to a huge uptake by folks wanting their services.  The fact that they, unlike the folks at Diigo, came through with direct communication and responded to my most pressing need tells me that they aren't just fronting, i.e. putting up a false front.

I'll be sure to announce my iPhone App here as well once I sort through all the stuff you really need to learn to do right even with such a great tool as that provided by Appmakr.  Thanks again!

Original Post Follows:

Now I'm having trouble with Appmakr's customer support.  They have trouble tickets and I have an account but everytime I try to login it treats me like I'm trying to register.  Just had to try to get at them through Twitter forcing me to send a Tweet out to thousands of subscribers to one of my other sites.

I guess I'll just have to get on Twitter but because of my pop media projects that kind of thing leads to all sorts of people trying to interact in a place where I don't have time to interact with them.

I'd rather be blogging but I'm spending all my time dealing with broken customer support systems.

Update: I may have to take a break from the web.  It looks like I'm going to have create a Twitter account just to get basic customer support from these companies and I have so much work to do.  It's hard enough just trying to figure out the best design for an iPhone app and then to have customer service be so pathetic.

This is so ridiculous and I bet they think they're so cool.

Update 2: It's been two hours since the comment below from Appmakr was posted as well as a nice show of support on their Twitter account and I still don't have a direct way of communicating with these guys.  I have a confirmation that I left a customer service request but I can't sign in and check my ticket because every time i try to log in it says that I'm already registered even though I'm not even on the registration page.

Will they break down and email me direct?  I'm sympathetic to overworked people cause I'm overworked, in fact, I've canceled all sorts of things tonight on which others depend for their publicity and for their entertainment because I've just hit the wall.  We'll see if they actually step up or just focus on looking good to other people.

Sorry to use this site for such things but I've always found that when people are dropping the ball, one of the few ways to get their attention is to go public.  As someone with little money or power, that's the only equalizer I have.  What a sad state of affairs.

Update 3: I just reread the comment from the Appmakr guy and it's clear he didn't read my original post all the way through cause he's talking about a problem I don't yet have.  Guess that's something more to look forward to.

That's fairly typical for customer service people across the board.  You have to explain everything in the first two sentences or they're just not going to get what you're talking about.  You also must only present one specific problem at a time because they won't read far enough to see that there are more than one, when that's the case.

I'll let you know if they ever respond to my actual concerns but I think I'm going to take tomorrow off, disappoint a bunch of people at some of my other sites and go shovel snow at my parent's house so they don't fall down when they get back from out of town!

Diigo Update: Finally Solved Problem Despite Lack of Customer Service

Hate to give more ammo to those who mistrust web services but I finally figured out my blog posting problem from Diigo's bookmarking service to Typepad despite their deeply unresponsive customer service.

It's incredible that at this point in history Web 2.0 is still not up to the challenge of professional use.  I know there are a lot of challenges online but customer service should not be one of them.

Diigo Web Bookmarking Service Follows Same Downward Path as Delicious & Publish2

I generally don't want to use this blog to vent my frustrations so let's think of this post as a form of constructive criticism directed towards web bookmarking services that aren't following through on providing the services they claim to provide and aren't responding to customer service requests.

This topic is important and relevant to library innovation because, in my limited experience working in libraries, I've encountered a real fixation on desktop-based applications that often keeps librarians from improving their services for patrons by utilizing web-based services. I'll come back to this topic again with some specific examples that, I believe, illustrate the point that the problem isn't with incompetence, the problem is with shifting one's whole mindset to a different way of thinking about providing information services.

And I'm not one to throw around terms like "paradigm shift" in a glib manner. There really is a big difference in these two ways of thinking.

That said, I started using Diigo for both personal and professional bookmarking because of my disappointments with Publish2 which I began using because of my disappointments with Delicious, most of which are the exact same disappointments!

Generally speaking, social bookmarking web services provide a way to store links to sites and online content as an alternative to simply using one's browser to save such links. Using such services frees the user from a specific desktop and/or browser, allowing access from virtually any web connected computer or mobile device with the option of making those links public and interacting with other folks using the service.

Though I keep my bookmarks private and take my social networking activities elsewhere, I love the concept, the options, the possibilities. In addition to bookmarking, each of the above mentioned services also supposedly allows one to publish links to one's blog or other public platform which can streamline the process of sharing such links. Usually one can choose between posting directly to one's blog or setting up an automatic posting schedule that will send the links to one's chosen spot on the web as a published post or ready-to-go draft post.

I first tried this out with Delicious. It made my life a lot easier because I do a variety of projects for which I'm gathering multiple links on a daily basis. That is, until it stopped working and they wouldn't say why and they wouldn't respond to customer service emails. Because they were early movers and innovators back before Yahoo bought them, the breakdown of services and lack of communication was discussed widely on the web. I think they tried to do something at some point but it was a big FAIL.

So I tried Publish2, which is championing what they call "link journalism", an attempt to turn what everybody on the web's been doing into a professional practice and that's all I'll say on that topic. In any case, I started using their post to blog option which eventually stopped working. Some of my links were disappearing as well. My attempts at receiving customer service was a big FAIL so I moved on.

To Diigo, which seemed to do everything perfectly for me both personally and professionally, yadda, yadda.

I was using their send to blog system quite a bit last year to explore different blog topics and also keep some blog sites going to which I wanted to return but didn't have time to spend otherwise maintaining them. I took a break to evaluate my whole operation towards the end of the year and recently decided to begin again with a focus on blogs such as this one where I'm regularly posting content but would love to add some link posts as well to expand my coverage a bit.

Guess what? Diigo's send to blog isn't working. I can't find info online about that problem. Their customer service isn't responding to requests left via their online form.

But guess what else? They're offering customer service via Twitter, which is kind of cool except that it forces one to use Twitter to get help thus serving only a small portion of web users. Plus, you can't really tell what problem they're addressing because the questions don't show up with the answers. You can link through to the account of the person asking the questions but you have to then browse to find the question and if the person asking is active on Twitter, that's kind of tough.

My feeling is, yeah, be cool but make sure you're handling basics well. Diigo is not handling basics well. And the arrogance of this approach to customer service makes Diigo less accessible to the folks that I want to help bring into the age of web-based services. This kind of approach to customer service is exactly the sort of thing that justifies the oppositional attitudes of folks who are a bit dubious about such services.

Diigo, thanks for the FAIL. You're now undermining not only my web publishing projects but my attempts to advocate for the use of web services by librarians. And aren't those the kind of folks you're supposed to be serving?

Looks like Diigo's ubercool approach is pushing them into the FAIL category along with Delicious and Publish2.

And that makes me very sad. As well as angry. But people are more sympathetic to sadness so let's focus on that, shall we?

Update:
Diigo Update: Finally Solved Problem Despite Lack of Customer Service