- For a while now 'sticky' support request tickets on my customer support page have been getting closed without being fixed. More recently some of them are just being deleted. I guess that's one way to fix an issue.
Today I got the following emali from Ning Support:
This e-mail is to inform you that the ticket 1909266 has been moved to "Solved" since you have not replied us within 7 days.
Should you wish to reopen it, please reply to this e-mail.
We're here to help! Reach out to us anytime and we'll happily answer your questions.
Sincerely yours,
Ning Support Team
The moving to solved has been a long-standing problem. You're sent a message with no requirememt to reply - something like 'we're puttig the problem at the very top of our list and it will be fixed as soon as'. Then, becasue you don't reply, the problem report is closed. You used to be able to reopen them by replying, but of late closed means CLOSED. Nonetheless you used to be able to resurrect an issue in a new ticket a refer back to the old one. So, I'm still in the habit of checking what problem report they're clsoing down when I get an email like today's. Today I looked and looked but the probelm report has disappeared.
I tackled Ning about the issue just before Xmas. Here was their penultimate email on the issue:
We fixed the issue for further tickets. Deleted tickets, unfortunately, can't be restored.
We can find them in our system, so if you have something important there, please, let us know.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Ning Team
And their final email:
Hi there,
It was deleted due to some glitch. As we old you, the glitch has been fixed and shouldn't happen again.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Ning Team
So, apparently not - the deleting goes on.
ou may think it doesn't matter, and mayve it doesn't, but, on a practical level, I have found it useful to be abel to refer back to problems that have surfaced in the past. Also it doesn't do much for the fast-dwindling supply of trust for Ning to delete customers' probelm reports.
Things are just getting wosre and worse.
Replies
If you don't think there's a problem, having written the above I replied as follows:
This has just happened again. I just got an email to tell me that ticket 1909266 has been closed. It’s nowhere to be seen in my ticket history. Where is this ticket in my ticket history please?
Their reply to me was:
Hi there,
You are writing in this ticket.
Do not hesitate to contact us if you have any other questions.
Regards,
Ning Team
If I could pick up my site and move, I'd do so now without hesitattion. It's beyond a joke. It's very difficult not to imagine a group of staff lounging round in an office, drinking, smoking spliffs and sharing jokes about their latest customer reply.
Hello Hugh!
Firstly, I want to apologize for the tickets that got deleted recently due to the glitch. But still, I want to point out that we simply have no benefit nor interest in deleting random tickets since it is inevitably leads to more problems and complaints. The recent case was caused by technical issues and we`ve done everything we can to prevent it from happening in the future.
I understand your frustration when tickets are getting closed because there is no reply in the thread when there is nothing to reply to. It basically happens when an agent replies with Pending status instead of the On-hold status in the ticket. Even though we instruct our agents to always use On-hold status in the cases when the bug is not fixed, sometimes they forget, or in a hurry and accidentally reply via Pending status that causes a ticket to get closed automatically in 7 days. I understand that it is not an excuse and I am not trying to justify such mistakes (we always strictly evaluate such cases), my main point is that it is human error and agents do not do it on purpose.
And regarding the last reply you`ve got - I agree, it is not acceptable. We will have a serious talk with Alex and I believe it will not happen again.
Please accept my apologies.
Best regards,
The NING Team
If it were a bit of human error creeping into a supprt system that is otherwise humming along well, I could live with it. But it's not. It seems mreo systemic
What's worse is that things just don't get fixed and it severely affects the usability of the site. To see tickets regularly closed and now deleted just adds insult to injury.
The biggest probelms right now:
1. Pictures can't be added as attachments - when a user seeks to do this as part of adding a new post, the whole post is rejected | first reported Dec 28 (This issems to be part of a bigger probelm with images on the site which seems to date form when you switched your storage server)
2. Forum activity notifications delayed by up to 24 hours | first reported Nov 27 2018
These sorts of issues severely impact on siet usability and users just give up and move on.
3. Message broadcast previews not arriving - first reported April 10 2017 - really you can't fix it after two year!
There are a number other problems which your war of attrition with your customers has left me a bit numbed to. I'd be delighetd if you coudl just fix the bigger isseues for now.
By the way I've stopped getting notofictaions from this site again - and no they're not in my either my local spam folder or my mail provider's one online.
By way of an update, whilst error 1 is fixed, forum notifocations are still being delayed up to 24 hours and, now two years afer it was first reported, message broadcast previews are still not working.
It’s May next week no new updates but they sent me messages all month for a webinar on paid access.Im convinced we aren’t getting any updates anytime soon
Hello,
The issues with the notifications are already in the process of fixing.
You will be informed as soon as we receive more information from the Technical Team.
Best regards,
The Ning Team
Hello,
We do understand your concern regarding the following issues.
But our Technical Team is working on them and they will be fixed. We are sorry for keeping you waiting.
Best regards,
The Ning Team
Thanks Anna, as of yesterday, things do seem better. Sadly, the recent normal course of events for NIng has been for the fixes to be rather temporary. I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope what's working now keeps working! :o)