Practical Conversations

When I switched to Mac, I had to give up my habit of using Outlook for managing my task list (Entourage doesn’t sync Tasks to the server and I typically have 100+ items on my lists).  After some research, I went with Remember The Milk and signed up for a 1-year account (in January 2009) so I could use their MilkSync for BlackBerry.  

Near the end of April I started encountering an error with MilkSync.  The issue was acknowledged on April 25th by email.  Two days later I was asked to provide my logs (and they sent easy to follow instructions on how to get the logs they needed.)   April 28th, I received an email saying:

“I’ve been advised by the team that this issue should be fixed. Please let me know if you have any further issues.”

I thought, great!  Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.  On May 2nd I replied to the email again to let the support rep know the issue still hadn’t been resolved.  I even sent a photo of the error.  No response.  May 28th I sent this message:

“I’m writing to express how extremely disappointed I am that as a customer who purchased I received no further response on this issue (from May 2nd.)  At thetime Krissy emailed me the issue was not fixed.  The errors stopped within a week of sending that email, but I ended up having to reset my sync for the product to work correctly again (it was reporting that sync successfully ran, but was not updating data.)  I’m not sure about you, but I’m VERY hesitant to give any product that touches my contact list another try if I lose important data.  

I’m in the process of looking for something to replace RTM with my BlackBerry now.”

It’s been almost a month since my last email to them and still haven’t received any acknowledgement.  I’m pretty patient, but that is unacceptable.  When I found the MilkSync app was showing my tasks had successfully synchronized, but they hadn’t. In the end I lost some of my task list data.  That was when I cancelled my 1-year non-refundable account, only 5 months into what I had paid for.

I think what I had the most trouble with is that the only means of contact was email, which obviously failed.  The support issue received a tracking number that was in the subject of all communications, so I’m assuming there is a tracking system behind it.  Even if the support rep had taken a sabbatical or left the company, there needs to be a process in place to ensure customer issues don’t fall through the cracks.  

-k

 I’ve been using Evernote for years now.  When I switched to Mac a few months ago I noticed a problem with the Evernote client for Mac.  When I would select a category for my note, it would jump to a seemingly random category regardless of what I selected.  I could work around this by going back into the note and moving it to the right place, but when you’re clipping things for reference later the last thing you want to be doing is spending extra time on it.  

I submitted the issue to Evernote on March 22nd and received an automated response.  As a “premium member” I should get a response within 1 day.  The next day I received my response with a follow-up question from a support rep.  We went back and forth a few times.  The support rep was unable to reproduce the issue, so I created a Jing video to show how easy it was for me to recreate.  Two days after submitting, the issue was given over to QA to be reproduced.  They had acknowledge my issue and were taking a look at it.  

Where I get  excited is less than 2 weeks after reporting my annoying but not show-stopping issue, I received an email saying:

Hi Kevin,

this bug is fixed. New Mac version with bug fix will be released next week.

Thanks,

Evernote Support

True to form, in a week the new release fixed the issue.  

Way to go Evernote.  The entire process was handled via email, but at no point did I feel like I was forgotten or ignored.  The added touch of confirming it will be in the release made me feel that I had someone looking out for me.