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> Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. From what I read this is no

by gist 7y ago

> Technology companies need an "ombudsman" - a contact that customers can go to when the normal tech support processes have failed. From what I read this is nothing to indicate the process failed (so far) just that the user decided to skip to the head of the line by writing a blog post internet style to get something resolved and attention. Failed is not 'I didn't get a reply or find what I needed as quickly as I think it should happen so now let me complain publicly so I get a reply'. > To avoid the Ombudsman being overused, you could give it a price of say $20, which is always refunded when the case is resolved. In theory nice but first it would be a 'deposit' and also opens up a host of new issues as far as the money being paid back and how that would be done and so on.

iudqnolq 7y ago
The core of what you say is correct. I posted about this publicly with two goals in mind: getting help from someone at cloudflare and getting advice on how to avoid this sort of issue from the HN community. From my perspective Cloudflare's process did fail. Assuming I didn't do something insanely dumb and what I think happened did happen, I would consider that a failure on its own even if the support was perfect afterwards. Copying from elsewhere: I address this in TFA. Essentially I felt that this was alright because when I filed a ticket I was informed that I should expect a long wait and that they recommend that their non-business customers post publicly on their support forum for crowdsourced support because that leads to faster replies. I was unable to log into that forum, and I suspect that may be because the way they set up SSO between the forum login and their main login may have failed in Firefox (with all tracking prevention and ad blockers disabled). I felt that if a company invites me to ask for support publicly on their forum to save on customer support costs it's reasonable to talk about the issue in another public place.
- wolco 7y ago
  This is a fair point. If users are directed to post publically for attention for support this user did the right thing.
- basch 7y ago
  Ive run into Cloudflare admin pages that fail with ad blocking before. Test your theory in a private session, it works for me when their site "has issues." (I think in my case it was adding google metrics from the apps page.)

by gist 7y ago

iudqnolq 7y ago

The core of what you say is correct. I posted about this publicly with two goals in mind: getting help from someone at cloudflare and getting advice on how to avoid this sort of issue from the HN community. From my perspective Cloudflare's process did fail. Assuming I didn't do something insanely dumb and what I think happened did happen, I would consider that a failure on its own even if the support was perfect afterwards. Copying from elsewhere: I address this in TFA. Essentially I felt that this was alright because when I filed a ticket I was informed that I should expect a long wait and that they recommend that their non-business customers post publicly on their support forum for crowdsourced support because that leads to faster replies. I was unable to log into that forum, and I suspect that may be because the way they set up SSO between the forum login and their main login may have failed in Firefox (with all tracking prevention and ad blockers disabled). I felt that if a company invites me to ask for support publicly on their forum to save on customer support costs it's reasonable to talk about the issue in another public place.

wolco 7y ago
This is a fair point. If users are directed to post publically for attention for support this user did the right thing.
basch 7y ago
Ive run into Cloudflare admin pages that fail with ad blocking before. Test your theory in a private session, it works for me when their site "has issues." (I think in my case it was adding google metrics from the apps page.)