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I think Yev put it well, but I just want to add that customer support has two distinct jobs (Tedivm's issue fell under #2): 1) Answering basic general question
by brianwski 13y ago
I think Yev put it well, but I just want to add that customer support has two distinct jobs (Tedivm's issue fell under #2):
1) Answering basic general questions like "how much does it cost"?
2) Debugging live customer issues. For example, if crappy anti-virus quarantines one of the Backblaze executables, what the heck is happening and why? Of if a customer's client cannot contact Backblaze's datacenter, which firewall is blocking it (maybe it is the software firewall on the computer, or maybe it is the router not allowing HTTPS through)? Etc....
In the process of debugging problems, the customer service reps are dealing with a truly insane array of possible issues and symptoms and they go back and forth with the customer asking for log files, ask if specific symptoms are happening, and in general COLLABORATE with the customer to get to the true bottom of the issue. Nobody lied. These are good, honest people that are really looking out for our customers and take their responsibilities seriously.
- tedivm 13y agoNo no, I want to be clear, people lied. I never claimed the CSR lied, I just claimed he sent useless form letters and didn't understand the problem. There was no dishonesty there, just a frustrating customer experience. However, the Twitter team made numerous false statements trying to downplay the issue to other people and blame the issue on a policy misunderstanding, rather than a bug. This is what prompted me to post pictures of the dashboard online so they would have no choice but to acknowledge the issue publicly. This is the kind of thing that happens when dealing with Backblaze. It's constant misrepresentation on the public side of things. Their twitter account people twist things around and misrepresent things and their employees come into discussions like this and defend the company by claiming I said things I didn't say.
- atYevP 13y agoYea, we addressed our twitter folks about this as well. They aren't in support so typically have no context for tweets they are seeing. They just respond in the best way they are able to. In this case I believe that the social team saw that you were having issues with a restore and with data not being there, so they assumed that it had something to do with our 30 day retention window, which is most commonly the case when users are experiencing issues with the dashboard not showing what they think is accurate (typically this is with an unplugged hard drive or something similar). Once we realized what was going on we told the social folks to try and defer to the support folks. It's hard to have a long conversation on twitter as well, it's not a great medium for full-on support, but it's great for sending links to FAQs and stuff like that. I do honestly think that the conversations you had with our team on multiple fronts were misinterpreted on both sides which led to a lot of confusion. We've also gotten better at making sure that the social team asks our support folks for guidance if they see a tweet or post that they are not familiar with.