Hi there,
Thank you for your honest and candid feedback. Taking action on feedback is how we grow and improve.
I agree that a 10+ day wait time on a resolution is unacceptable.
I can also confirm that you are correct in that the purchase of a product from WooThemes includes support for said product. What we are selling is access to support and updates for the product. Thus, the resolution time of tickets is extremely important to us.
Our team are working through all submitted tickets (as you noted, from the notification on our ticket submission form) and are actively hiring in order to improve our handling of tickets, and to decrease the duration between submission and resolution of each ticket.
Further to this, we are implementing improvements to our workflow to ensure we spot bug tickets sooner and can mark these as being urgent for an even quicker resolution time.
While this all sounds great, I realise this comment doesn’t resolve the issue you reported. My aim with this comment is to clarify where we stand today with support, and show a bit of what is going on behind the curtain.
With that in mind I’d like to mention that improvements to our workflow, and hiring more happiness engineers, both take time. While we’re actively pursuing both of these avenues, it’s important to note that improvements here will be gradual, rather than an overnight transformation. We’re running a marathon, rather than a sprint, and want to make sure we improve our processes and team scale in the best manner possible (it takes a few months for a new happiness engineer to be fully up to speed on all WooCommerce extensions we offer).
I’m really sorry for the inconvenience caused here. I hope this post helps to explain a bit of what our support process looks like behind the curtain, and what we’re actively doing to improve upon the unacceptable 10+ day wait time you had.
Thank you very much for your response; I appreciate it. And may I also take the opportunity to thank you for providing the WooCommerce plugin to the WordPress community.
Perhaps this is unusual, but in my experience implementing the ecommerce elements of a website are often the trickiest parts of the job. And because they hit so directly at the financial results of a website, they seem to carry the most pressure. When implementation proves tricky it causes anxiety; when a problem pops up, someone is losing money.
Besides providing the – free! – WooCommerce plugin, WooThemes is a business which caters to the WordPress community. Do you offer, or have you considered offering, a premium service which people could buy, if they get in a jam, that would provide assistance with troubleshooting tricky implementation problems, or professional help with implementation? Perhaps with options for one-time or ongoing assistance? Basically a premium, pay-for-support option, since timely support is so critical for ecommerce implementations?
If that is not practical – I imagine that people might be even more put-off waiting for support if they know that the support personnel are responding first to the pay-for-support services – then perhaps you could provide a more robust and easy to find portion of your website where independent contractors offering special skills in WooCommerce implementations could be listed? Independent developers who one could hire just for these types of WooCommerce troubleshooting and implementation assistance?
I don’t pretend to have all of the answers here. As in my original post, I am just looking for suggestions and hoping for a dialog on the best ways to get help when WooCommerce issues arise, which in my experience is often.
Do you offer, or have you considered offering, a premium service which people could buy, if they get in a jam, that would provide assistance with troubleshooting tricky implementation problems, or professional help with implementation? Perhaps with options for one-time or ongoing assistance? Basically a premium, pay-for-support option, since timely support is so critical for ecommerce implementations?
We’ve discussed offering paid-for support packages in the past. We arrive at the same conclusion regularly, which is that we are focussing on improving overall support times. Offering paid-for pure support packages implies that support times can only be improved if a cost is attached, which isn’t what we’re about. Improving support times enables us to improve the support and experience for all WooCommerce users, over time, whether purchasing from WooThemes or not.
