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Celebrating Deviousness - February 2012
I wanted to thank everyone for the responses on $Thunderstatement’s Blog Pro Tip: Don’t Wait to Report a Problem. There was quite few concerns about the state of our Status forum and we are working to address this because it is most definitely a valid concern and we greatly appreciate those who brought this to our attention!
For quite some time we tried to reserve the Status Forum to the most urgent issues which resulted in parts of the site being completely unusable resulting in high counts of tickets and concerns, to make sure that everyone was made aware of the issue as quickly as possible. By doing this the Status Forum remained quite small due to these types of issues not coming up as frequently and when they do the deviousTechnology department is sometimes so fast the issue gets fixed before we get to press the “Add Article” button!
Due to this our Status Forum appears quite dead despite the many issues that might occur on a weekly basis.Several smaller issues can happen on a weekly basis that aren’t as severe as the ones we normally post up, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important! We understand there is frustration when Bug Reports are submitted and result in getting told it’s a known issue even though there isn’t even on the Status Forum. In light of this we will be working our best to make sure more posts are made concerning the latest bugs that affect multiple deviants. Keep in mind though that there are some issues that we simply cannot(or will not) post such as security issues, minor typo issues, and issues that are only affecting a single person. We want to ensure that we can keep you all informed on all the buggies creeping around the site and encourage everyone to subscribe to the Status forum to keep up to date.
EWM
I don't suppose there's a chance you guys can drop the copy/pasted status posts and replies to people? I think people would like to hear humans posting and replying, not robots.
First off we do not use any form of robots to answer tickets in fact every single ticket is answered by a staff member so there's no such thing as robot responses. What you are seeing are macro responses which are designed to be able to efficiently help people on situations we get questions on most often. With these responses it does pre-fill select fields of a ticket but also provides us with the ability to customize and add on any extra information that is necessary. If we were to provide each and every single ticket with a fully hand typed response down to the very last period we would never be able to respond to every single ticket within a timely manner and I think we'd all develop severe carpal tunnel.
Take this into consideration, say the Bug Report section has 200 tickets and 100 of them are all about the journal editing feature being broken. Would you rather we hand type every single response to the 100 tickets filed about that one bug and let those other 100 tickets wait. Or would you rather that we review all of the journal editing issue tickets, make sure that they are all concerning the same situation, handle any tickets that have additional issues that need to be handled individually, and then handle all the rest of the tickets with a macro response that tells everyone the issue is known and being worked on, leaving us plenty of time to ensure the remaining 100 tickets get looked into in a timely manner and any other issues get sent up to deviousTechnology to be fixed quickly as well?
You have to consider that handling tickets is a balancing act. We need to ensure that we can help everyone in a timely manner with appropriate information to make sure their situation get handled. Not all tickets are handled with preset information but the ones that are we have a very good reason for this. For tickets that do get responded with some pre-filled information we often add extra information and personal touches to make sure everything that has been brought up in the ticket is addressed and when people respond back to us we are likely to respond back as well wishing them a great day and glad to hear that we were able to help them with their situation.
I do understand that sometimes the standard response does not receive all of the personal touches which an individual deviant deserves and that is something we are constantly striving to improve upon each day.
I guess I always see the "It has been brought to our attention that…" stuff, and it just, I don't know, gets a little old. Or something. I haven't even contacted the help desk in a long while, but the pretyped responses were always something that just seemed a little robotic and unfriendly to me.
Anyway, I understand the reasons, and know that it's not a robot on the other end. And I also have no idea what sort of thing is "right" in a help desk of this size. It just feels very robotic and un-human, so I'd like to see a bit more variance on replies. Anyway, just my two cents