How will I know when Support reponds?

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

I submitted a question to support yesterday, Friday.   

But, now what?  What's next?  What should I expect?

When I contacted support yesterday it was maybe the third time in 10+ years.
Things have changed. I am unfamiliar with what to expect
in the way of a reply and its possible timing.

1. I submitted the ticket late Friday Pacific time. 
   Is there 7x24 support or do I have to wait until Monday?
    
2. I don't think there was a ticket number for my submittal. 
   Should there have been a ticket number?
    
3. I did not receive any confirmation. 
   Should I have gotten an email confirmation of my submittal? 
    
4. Is there a page for ticket submittals, where you could view your item
   for how to see whether support has replied?
   If there's no online reply, then where do I see the reply when it's available, and how am I notified?

It's kind of amazing that there seems to be some assumption that everyone knows these things. I certainly don't.
I realize that it's why I've not asked for help about 2 dozen times in recent years, and have instead just continued having lower and lower expectations that the company can handle basic things needed for a viable product.  Users simply need a modicum of predictability and reliability.

On  which of evernote's sites (evernote for web, evernote contact, or evernote forum) is the link for submitting a ticket? 

 

[mackid1993 1,344]

Okay first off, please just type in one color, one font, one font size. This is just not readable at all.

Whether you get a response depends on the type of ticket. They don't generally respond to bug reports, they log them.

If it's an issue that they clearly must fix for you (that isn't just a bug) then you must respond to the initial AI generated email and then wait. It could take roughly 3-5 days if they aren't too busy, to get a response. If you do not reply to the initial email regardless they will consider your issue solved. 

[IncrediMetaBeta 22]

Thanks, Mackid1993!  Very helpful.  

BTW, when I see something like your reply, which is so clear, concise and valuale,
I think, 
Why isn't there a "programmatic" commitment by the company to systematically 
takeresponses like yours and add them to a FAQ?

I'm struck by the thought that the opportunity isn't noticed, because
the tendency among those in the company, who know the product intimately,
is to discount the need for capturing such comments as yours. 

This is not a criticism of the company as much as it is an observation about human nature.

It's like "I can't see the tree because we already have enough of them in the forest already."
"Oh, we don't need to add this tree to the forest, because it's nice the way it is."

Good advice, thank you: I'll be more careful in how I use the rainbow on my next post.

[Jon/t 1,676]

4 hours ago, IncrediMetaBeta said:

Thanks, Mackid1993!  Very helpful.  

BTW, when I see something like your reply, which is so clear, concise and valuale,
I think, 
Why isn't there a "programmatic" commitment by the company to systematically 
takeresponses like yours and add them to a FAQ?

I'm struck by the thought that the opportunity isn't noticed, because
the tendency among those in the company, who know the product intimately,
is to discount the need for capturing such comments as yours. 

This is not a criticism of the company as much as it is an observation about human nature.

It's like "I can't see the tree because we already have enough of them in the forest already."
"Oh, we don't need to add this tree to the forest, because it's nice the way it is."

Good advice, thank you: I'll be more careful in how I use the rainbow on my next post.

The home page of the support section has an FAQ to the most popular problems together with information on how support and prioritisation works.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us

[tired... 677]

2 hours ago, Jon/t said:

The home page of the support section has an FAQ to the most popular problems together with information on how support and prioritisation works.

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us

It's a bit unclear who is doing the prioritization and how? Are support requests received, acknowledged, and prioritized internally or processed by a third-party AI vendor? 🤔
 

[gazumped 12,101]

4 minutes ago, tired and disappointed said:

It's a bit unclear who is doing the prioritization and how?

Any comments made here are going to be pure speculation - we're (mostly) not employees,  just other users.  If you're not reassured by the Privacy Policy link,  you'd have to (ironically) contact Support...

[Jon/t 1,676]

25 minutes ago, tired and disappointed said:

It's a bit unclear who is doing the prioritization and how? Are support requests received, acknowledged, and prioritized internally or processed by a third-party AI vendor?

As far as I understand it the AI has been trained on the help section and previous support tickets so it deals with the initial ticket by trying to find a solution from existing info, hence the initial email you get to try things. I remember hearing a stat ages ago that something like 80% of tickets are solved by a log out/in again or reinstall.

When you've tried the initial AI suggestions and they don't work and you reply to the email a human gets hold of it.

From what I know the prioritisation of fixing a bug is done by humans, there's a bunch of project managers and QA folk adding things to JIRA which is development software.

[tired... 677]

23 minutes ago, gazumped said:

Any comments made here are going to be pure speculation - we're (mostly) not employees,  just other users.  If you're not reassured by the Privacy Policy link,  you'd have to (ironically) contact Support...

I'm not concerned about privacy, but whether Evernote (Bending Spoons) takes customers' support requests seriously or not. Your inquiries are, for sure, not "received, acknowledged, and prioritized internally". 

[tired... 677]

27 minutes ago, Jon/t said:

As far as I understand it the AI has been trained on the help section and previous support tickets so it deals with the initial ticket by trying to find a solution from existing info, hence the initial email you get to try things. I remember hearing a stat ages ago that something like 80% of tickets are solved by a log out/in again or reinstall.

When you've tried the initial AI suggestions and they don't work and you reply to the email a human gets hold of it.

From what I know the prioritisation of fixing a bug is done by humans, there's a bunch of project managers and QA folk adding things to JIRA which is development software.

My point and concern is information that can't be fully trusted. As there seems not to be quality control with the Evernote app itself, the same seems to be the case with the information from the company.

Eg bugs tagged "fixed" in the Evernote bugfix tracker, without being fully fixed.

[gazumped 12,101]

Again;  speculation here is pretty pointless - none of us 'knows' anything concrete and if asked Evernote are (of course) going to say that they treat every request seriously. 

I've had a couple of direct contacts this year,  and the individuals I dealt with seem professional and helpful - and my issues got fixed.  Given that Evernote have a LOT of active users,  I'd guess they have tens of thousands of new tickets per day.  I used to work in a contact centre and I think our record for UK based services was around 8,000 calls in one day...  They're automating the process because it's impossible to train thousands of new staff in any reasonable time frame.

As @Jon/t said most of the fixes I ever saw were pretty simple.  Getting user details correct and power off/ back on was often all that was required - but when something goes wrong,  most people (including me a few times) imagine the worst and reach out to support without doing anything to work out what just happened,  and how do I fix it?  Hence the standard letter suggesting the power cycle / signing out and back in / updating / reinstalling.

If you do all that and it's still broken - and you make a point of telling Support that - you'll get some attention.  If that  issue affects everyone and needs some backend work to fix it,  Support - by definition - have done their job.  They won't email back to the 3,000 users who also reported the problem;  they'll mark those tickets closed because there's nothing more for Support to do,  though work is still going on (or may have been scheduled for later) in the background.

All of which can be frustrating for users,  but that's the way the system works.  My philosophy is that if I hit a speed bump in my day,  the priority is to fix it,  find a work-around,  or do things differently.  I don't expect the provider involved to magically solve my issue for me.  If Evernote ever generates too many such speed bumps I'll quite happily switch to another company - but even with all the alarums and excursions of the past couple of years,  we're not (quite) there yet.

[tired... 677]

I'm quite amazed how having lot of customers can be used as an excuse to have a bad support.

[PinkElephant 8,889]

You can scale customer service to an extend, but it takes time to rebuild it from scratch. What I see are clear signs this is currently going on. So I give them a positive outlook, from a low entry point.

A lot of companies relegate the majority of customer support to public communities - like this one.

[tired... 677]

The collapse of Evernotes customer support is self-inflicted, maybe even planned on purpose (calculated deterioration). It shouldn't be a surprise that replacing an experienced support team with new people without knowledge of the product will require a lot of additional resources from the start.

And on the top replacing an experienced development team with new people without knowledge of the product.

And on the top of that, stopping all quality control before releasing new features and updates.

[PinkElephant 8,889]

When you take over a failing business, you sometimes don’t know whom to trust, and don’t have the time to find out.

“Shoot them all, let god sort them out“ …

And sure it takes time to rebuild a support team. As everything else !

[tired... 677]

Replacing an old failure with a new failure doesn't usually solve the problem.

[mackid1993 1,344]

It's actually gotten markedly better.