Tricks and tips how to make Evernote support respond - Post all your successful and failed attempts here!

[Lolinda 15]

Hi, as we all know, Evernote support is almost non-existent, even for paying users. In most of the cases, all you get are copy pasted standard answers produced by a bot / AI.

This thread is not to complain, but to find solutions:

- What did produce a meaningful human reaction from Evernote support?

- Your best ideas to try

- What did not work and is therefore a waste of time to try with Bending Spoons?

[Lolinda 15]

Being the OP, I do a first post on this thread myself. it won't be a trick how I made Evernote hotline finally respond, but it is a solution by which Evernote / Bending Spoons could solve their support issue:

First of all, it may sound very surprising, but I actually do support Bending Spoons' idea to reduce investment into a huge costly support machinery consisting of dozens or hundreds of employees ... and instead invest into real and useful debugging and features. For example, I have no more sync issues across my devices, which is pure pleasure brought about by Bending Spoons. 

So how could Bending Spoons reduce expenses for the hotline and improve their debugging process even further and give us the happiness and utility of receiving useful resactions? 

I did experience such a system with another app / website. They used a software called User Voice at that time, years ago. There are meanwhile several cheaper copycats. They all more or less implement the following idea:

If you have a bug to report or a feature request, you do not send it to any hotline at all. You open a website on which you can insert the bug report or feature request directly into their database. This database is displayed to all other users. When you posted your stuff, other users can vote on it. And they can add further information such as screen recordings, screenshots, describe experiences if a bug is reproducible on their device and how to do it, etc. 

Using such a system myself in the past, I have seen that some feature requests and some bugs really take off and get thousands of votes. So the enterprise immediately sees it quantitatively where the real pain of many users is. And very importantly, the enterprise receives aggregated useful information instead of individual bits of chaotic writings dispersed across a flood of incomming emails that often has biblical proportions...

All this comes almost without having to pay a hotline! The database essentially builds itself using votes and contributions by the users. It is not entirely without maintenance, because users often produce duplicates: in the system which I have seen, the same bug report or feature request was sometimes described two or more times using different words. But even that is useful because indeed one may think about the same issue using different words. What needs to be done by a moderator, who is paid by the enterprise, is to occasionally join such issues that are technically the same, keeping the different formulations about it in a single entity from there on.

As a user, I absolutely loved this system, because instead of a useless standard response from the hotline "we have received your request and forwarded it to ..." (or no response at all, from Evernote), I immediately got reactions from hundreds of users: I saw their votes and so I knew if they do have the problem or not, on which devices it happens, or even a workaround how to survive until it is fixed. And then, when an issue gained a lot of votes, the moderators from the enterprise reacted by doing a few clicks, which costed them almost no time. They marked issues as "currently being investigated"  or "successfully reproduced" or "scheduled for implementation" or "started implementation" or "will be available in the next release" or similar. They should be able to attach open questions to any issue raised.

As a user, I saved time because in the vast majority of cases, I didn't need to invest a lot of time to type again and screen record again bug reports and feature requests that others already produced before. Instead, I often just upvoted the feature request or bug report raised by another user. The core of the system was a clever AI, which when I started typing my issue, it showed me a list of similar issues already raised by other users.

 

[Lolinda 15]

My most recent attempt to make Evernote hotline respond: 

Bending spoons sits in Italy. Language may well be an issue. So I wrote them in Italian, using automatic translation by Deepl

(Deepl is a free app and website providing much better quality translations then Google translate. You really can write as if you were a native speaker, almost. Do pay attention to write short and simple sentences in your native language from which you translate. In my experience, the risk of producing utter bullshit by automatic translation is not as big as with Google Translate. However, they do not support that many languages as Google Translate does.)

I am currently awaiting Evernote's reaction, let's see if it works to make the hotline respond. I think it may have a chance and it may help them to respond because I do have experience from other European countries, and in Spain, Hungary and in French-speaking Switzerland, people do not have such a good level of English as they do in Germany or Denmark or the Netherlands. 8n Hungary or French speaking Switzerland or Spain, you may make a living having no other competence then good English! I assume Italy to be the same, and in such countries it isn't easy to create an English-speaking hotline. it is expensive and then you need to select within the few already expensive people who really have a high level of English those even fewer who also do have a technical understanding, whom you can teach Evernote tech issues. Such a hotline is really expensive and difficult to create in such countries.

Me, I speak fluent Spanish and French, and this enables me to have a gues if the Deepl translation to Italian can be any correct. But so far nothing bad came out. And I am using Deepl since ages to help me to produce correct French and Spanish sentences, translating from English or German, and I confirm that the performance is amazing.

[MvdH 463]

Hi @Lolinda great how you analyze and think along. If there were tricks to make support respond, and we would all do that, then it wouldn't work anymore. They are choosing what to spend the limited time on they have. Having said that, what always helps is: strip ALL emotions. Emotions will trigger their emotions, time/energy/focus that goes to their emotions does not go to solving issues. Only mention facts, facts, facts. Add the logs in advance, ALWAYS. Deliver tight reproduction. Describe exactly the behavior you see after those reproduction steps, and describe the behaviour you would expect. Mention the exact versions and OS and platforms and phone type. Mention exactly if it happens always, only 1 in 3 times, or once a week. Describe the impact of the problem: "It costs me 1 hour per day because of...".  And finally...pay for you use of Evernote. Don't send the same report multiple times. Reopen the ticket by replying to the last e-mail they send. If we would ALL do that, then they would be more effective/efficiënt and they would be able to help more tickets each month than if we do not. My experience is that ALL my bugreports get answers by humans (though sometimes after 2 boilerplate AI/bot answers at first) and ALL of them get taken seriously. Feature requests...less so, and rightfully so. They take notice, and move on. They should.

[ddg 6]

So, the company has 2x the price and effectively, eliminated support. If we are nice to them, they might respond.  Some day.  I may try this with my long term customers.

[kkarney 127]

10 hours ago, ddg said:

So, the company has 2x the price and effectively, eliminated support. If we are nice to them, they might respond.  Some day.  I may try this with my long term customers.

It is indeed a unique business model. And yet, somehow, we put up with it. For me, it's the path of least resistance -- migrating to a new app would just be too much onerous work. Just keeping my fingers crossed that I'll never actually NEED support, as I know I'm unlikely to get it...

[s2sailor 2,351]

1 hour ago, kkarney said:

It is indeed a unique business model.

I think of it more as a current unfortunate situation that hopefully will be fixed soon.

[Boot17 1,497]

1 hour ago, kkarney said:

Just keeping my fingers crossed that I'll never actually NEED support, as I know I'm unlikely to get it...

Yeah - that was me to. I've never even needed support before and so the lack of it hasn't been any different to me except that I worried a bit about what the impact would be to me if I ever was unable to access my notes (outside of the periodic backups/exports that I do).

Bending Spoons must be saving millions of € on the reduced/restructured support staff. I'm just in the peanut gallery, but I'd guess that them reducing the size of their support staff and turning the free plan into more of a trial went hand-in-hand. Think of the (tens of) millions of free users that got account-level support for free. BS don't need to support those people as much because lots of them are leaving. I suspect they are hoping that the drop-off of non-paying customers will help them get on top of support issues for those that are paying.

This is also maybe a hot take here, but for non-account level types of support (log in, billing, etc), I wonder if 90% of that non-account level support needs are taken up by 2% of the user base... and they wouldn't mind if that 2% gets fed up with lack of support and leaves.

[gazumped 11,828]

@Boot17 I think you're missing a point here.  Customer Support wasn't downsized - Bending Spoons had more active user thans Evernote (I think) and a big Head Office staff (including their own support teams) based in Italy.  It made sound business sense to close down Evernote's US operations and merge everything into their main teams...  until they worked out how much expertise they had lost,  and then launched several big changes to the app which caused a huge reaction.

Ending the free plan spree was also sound business - the freemium model attracted a number of users who were simply a continuing drain on resources.  Converting to a limited trial doesn't reduce the number of support calls from new users.

'Spoons are almost certainly spending a lot of money now trying to improve staffing and systems to work their way out from under the backlog - but it's not a problem you can just throw money at.  Staff take time to recruit and train,  and given the complexity of the software and the wide variety of uses we put it through,  they need to be pretty experienced to give 'proper' help.

Meantime all the frustrated users are submitting ticket after ticket demanding answers to their specific issues and generally gumming up support admin with an additional inadvertent DOS attack.

IMHO the easiest,  safest and most positive way to use Evernote at the moment is:

1. Have a backup - you'll never lose access to your notes
2. Use work-arounds when you find the app doesn't quite do what you want
3. Feed back your experiences to Evernote - keep the company informed about what works and what doesn't
4. If you hit a road block,  contact support.  ONCE.  With as much details as you can.
5. Expect a wait.
6. When they reply,  read the email carefully and respond politely and appropriately.
7. Post your issues in the Forums in case someone else has a solution
8. Read the Forums and post suggestions and work-arounds where you can

 

[Jon/t 1,449]

10 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Customer Support wasn't downsized

I think you're right here. I think the old Evernote outsourced a lot of support and spoons have bought it in house closer to the development team. Going to take a while to get all the software and processes sorted but will be better in the long run.

[janndk 616]

1 hour ago, gazumped said:

4. If you hit a road block,  contact support.  ONCE.  With as much details as you can.
5. Expect a wait.

Most (or maybe all?) tickets get stopped and closed by a robot. If you open one ticket, and then just wait and hope for the best, it's very unlikely you get a real response. 

[kkarney 127]

Evernote should really address this publicly. In this forum and/or on social media.

I really want to believe that they are backlogged and things will improve, but there has been absolutely no indication of that, or of any desire on BS's part to address this major issue.

I've seen some really urgent issues (having to do with money and losing one's data, mostly) that get ignored just like the rest of them. It's unacceptable, no matter what the internal situation with BS is. 

I'm willing to extend the benefit of the doubt to a new company just getting on its feet -- but that's not the case here. They are charging a lot for this service, and they should have support, period (rather than depending on folks in these forums to make excuses for them).

[PinkElephant 8,388]

2 hours ago, Jon/t said:

I think you're right here. I think the old Evernote outsourced a lot of support and spoons have bought it in house closer to the development team. 

Downsized or not. Relocated or not.

Fact is it’s not working - in this very moment. It is no consolation for a user with an urgent actual problem that in the long term the strategy will lead to an improvement.

There is a time for strategy - and there is a time to take action and „stop the bleeding“.

Nobody expects an engineering miracle in bug hunting. But WTF stops these guys to sort out payment and account downgrade issues 24/7 ???

And THIS can be outsourced for sure !

[s2sailor 2,351]

1 hour ago, kkarney said:

Evernote should really address this publicly. In this forum and/or on social media

I think some public recognition by @Federico Simionato of the problem, and then some steps they are taking to fix it would help generate some needed goodwill and demonstrate they have awareness of the severity of the problem.  Support is abysmal and has been for far too long.

[Paul A. 652]

Yep. Heaven help us if they roll out "RENT" while support is still a fiasco. Imagine all the possible sync bugs that would further overwhelm support and frustrate users? I just hope that's part of the calculus in the delay rolling out RENT.

[Farbauti 48]

17 hours ago, s2sailor said:

I think of it more as a current unfortunate situation that hopefully will be fixed soon.

LOL. They still get the money. From their POV there is absolutely no need to change/fix/improve anything ...unfortunately.

[Farbauti 48]

My guess is, no-one is excited or eager to work in support for a company with such ***** software. Every user (except for some hardcore fans) is angry about pricing, bugs or discontinued functionality.

Maybe they should offer a way to bribe the support guys. Perhaps then our tickets will be worked on?

[PinkElephant 8,388]

Nobody working support does it because it’s the spot to earn praise and glory …

[AlbertR 587]

On 5/2/2024 at 6:49 AM, Lolinda said:

If you have a bug to report or a feature request, you do not send it to any hotline at all. You open a website on which you can insert the bug report or feature request directly into their database. This database is displayed to all other users. When you posted your stuff, other users can vote on it. And they can add further information such as screen recordings, screenshots, describe experiences if a bug is reproducible on their device and how to do it, etc. 
...

That's a dream - but would be the best working support interface I can imagine. Do you really have an example of a SW company (in comparable size to EN) that uses such an open approach? They all fear for competitors lurking the database... 😞

[gazumped 11,828]

2 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

Nobody working support does it because it’s the spot to earn praise and glory …

As I recall,  I got into it because it was a big department with lots of vacancies that paid pretty well.  I didn't realise why there were quite so many vacancies until later...

[Jon/t 1,449]

33 minutes ago, AlbertR said:

Do you really have an example of a SW company (in comparable size to EN) that uses such an open approach?

I don't know of any. Sounds like an open source or community-style software app approach to me. I wouldn't want anyone posting anything into my bug tracker!

[Boot17 1,497]

23 hours ago, Paul A. said:

Yep. Heaven help us if they roll out "RENT" while support is still a fiasco. Imagine all the possible sync bugs that would further overwhelm support and frustrate users? I just hope that's part of the calculus in the delay rolling out RENT.

Yeah - but they will. 😃

I wondered a similar thing with a change that was bound to cause more support issues 9 months ago when I mentioned (opined ?) that they were already "reeling" from support issues.

I don't think wonder if they see the support issue (by issue, I mean the back log issue) as big a problem as some people in the forums think it should be and they aren't going to wait XX years until support issues die down to release new features.

Personally and luckily, I haven't had an issue with support per se -- like no account level or missing notes or anything like that. I've only had issues with lack of QA / regression testing on new releases which I would guess/hope are somewhat separate entities...? -- but that QA stuff still related and perhaps somewhat affected by the reduction of dedicated Evernote resources consolidation.

[ddg 6]

4 hours ago, Boot17 said:

I don't think they see the support issue as big a problem as some people in the forums think it should be and they aren't going to wait XX years until support issues die down to release new features.

Wow... Opinions may differ of course (it makes the world go 'round), but ignoring 15+year customers losing data (I'm not privy to how many) seems to be a big miss.  Selling a product you don't support but focus on adding new features (that may break as well)... I just don't know how that business model works long term. Imagine MS Excel (which has its bugs) not fixing formula error.  Maybe it just me (no sarcasm intended).

[Boot17 1,497]

55 minutes ago, ddg said:

Wow... Opinions may differ of course (it makes the world go 'round), but ignoring 15+year customers losing data (I'm not privy to how many) seems to be a big miss.  Selling a product you don't support but focus on adding new features (that may break as well)... I just don't know how that business model works long term. Imagine MS Excel (which has its bugs) not fixing formula error.  Maybe it just me (no sarcasm intended).

I clarified my statement above for you. By "support issue" I meant the issue being the back log itself.

[ddg 6]

15 hours ago, Boot17 said:

I clarified my statement above for you. By "support issue" I meant the issue being the back log itself.

I'm living with the current state as after 15+ years and 25k notes (I know I should purge!),  I just don't have to time to explore/learn something new right now.  Hopefully, it's better in a year (but I told myself that last year!)... Just being more careful, using @gazumped suggestions, etc. Fingers crossed!