Your support is really poor these days

[FZ]

I am writing this out of frustration and disappointment with IPS support. 

You have created a wonderful range of community products but your customer support is dropping the ball big time and it's unacceptable. 

Here's what has happened to me since I renewed my license for support in December: 

1. I had an issue with version 3.4.8 where users could not log out. Support bluntly informed me that I had to upgrade to 3.4.9 before they would look at the problem. I had just upgraded to 3.4.8 at their suggestion the week before. I have other issues to attend to in my life and upgrading a site as big as mine on a moment's notice isn't something I can do "just like that". 

2. So I finally found the time this morning to do the upgrade. I go into the Client Area and download the new versions of all my licenses (note at this point that there was never any suggestion from IPS that I only had to do the upgrade to IPBoard). I upload everything as per the instructions, taking special care to rename the admin folder and initdata.php file to the name of my admin directory. I go into the upgrade script and what happens? I get a blank page. Refreshing does nothing. Now the whole site is borked. Not even the "down for maintenance" page is displaying. 

3. So I open another ticket only to be told that I had sent the ticket to the wrong department and that I had possibly made a mistake by uploading IonCube Nexus which is not compatible with my server. I didn't upload that. I uploaded the Zend 5.3 version. I tell them that all my login details are on file with them. They have all the information they need to deal with my issue. 

4. 90 minutes go by and I don't receive any reply from support or updates on whether or not they are doing anything about the issue. My site is down and I don't know what is going on. I don't know if I should restore a backup or just sit tight and wait indefinitely for somebody to help me.

This is not support. This is an outrage. 

If your company cannot provide proper support for paying customers, why on earth should we pay for it? 

All I am asking for is that your support people treat your customers as people and provide timeous responses to questions on open tickets. It's not that much to ask. If you have too many open tickets to deal with then you need to be employing more people to deal with them. It's not good enough, IPS. Not good enough at all. 

[Josh H.]

Hi FZ,

Thank you for providing us with your feedback. I'd like to address a few of your concerns directly.

2 hours ago, FZ said:

1. I had an issue with version 3.4.8 where users could not log out. Support bluntly informed me that I had to upgrade to 3.4.9 before they would look at the problem. I had just upgraded to 3.4.8 at their suggestion the week before. I have other issues to attend to in my life and upgrading a site as big as mine on a moment's notice isn't something I can do "just like that". 

There have been a lot of significant improvements in regards to upgrading in 4.x. Notably, you no longer even have to manually download or upload anything to your server in order to perform the upgrades, the upgrader can automatically do all of this for you. So upgrading in 4.x essentially takes only a few minutes. So whenever you do make the upgrade to 4.x, this is something you can look forward to.

I understand life being busy and not having a lot of time to dedicate to managing these things, however, that is why we provide our own Community in the Cloud hosting service. It's built for people who do not have the time or means to manage everything themselves. We can perform all upgrades for you automatically, so you don't really have to do anything. When you opt for self-hosting, you'll have to dedicate some of your time to maintaining your site and performing these upgrades, there's really not any way around it.

When you're hosting with us, we can also do a lot more to provide you with immediate assistance, and issues like this seldom ever happen on Community in the Cloud anyways (as a large number of these tickets are actually server/hosting related issues and are not specific to the software).

You're told to upgrade because these upgrades tend to resolve a wide array of issues, and we don't really have the resources to investigate individual issues on installations that are running out of date releases (just to end up discovering in the end that it was a bug that has already been fixed) when we also have tickets and bug reports that need to be addressed on the current builds.

2 hours ago, FZ said:

4. 90 minutes go by and I don't receive any reply from support or updates on whether or not they are doing anything about the issue. My site is down and I don't know what is going on. I don't know if I should restore a backup or just sit tight and wait indefinitely for somebody to help me.

This is not support. This is an outrage. 

If your company cannot provide proper support for paying customers, why on earth should we pay for it? 

You should usually always make backups before upgrading, just in case something does happen.

Second, I'm not aware what time it is where you reside, but it was roughly 1:30AM Eastern Time when you opened your ticket, so support times are naturally going to be a bit slower. You then received a reply only 7 minutes after opening the ticket informing you that you accidentally posted your ticket in the wrong department, and that the ticket was being moved for you.

Keep in mind our SLA is actually 48 hours, and your tickets are all being addressed well within this time window.

I see you have also already received a reply to your ticket from Marc as well. As he told you, uploading a new copy of files from all products should not cause you any issues whatsoever, assuming the files were uploaded correctly. The most likely issue is that you have accidentally uploaded the wrong version of Nexus, in which case re-uploading everything with the correct package should resolve the problem.

[FZ]

I have backups and I have now restored the site to just prior to when the new scripts were uploaded. Hopefully the next attempt at upgrading will go better.

Regarding your hosting - sounds good, but my site has storage needs of 80GB so looking at the prices I'm afraid you have priced yourselves right out of contention for me. I host on a VPS with Site5 for $99 a month and have been doing so for over 10 years. They have undoubtedly the very best customer service I have ever encountered. You guys would do well to follow their approach to support, especially at level 1. 

[MADMAN32395]

21 minutes ago, FZ said:

I have backups and I have now restored the site to just prior to when the new scripts were uploaded. Hopefully the next attempt at upgrading will go better.

Regarding your hosting - sounds good, but my site has storage needs of 80GB so looking at the prices I'm afraid you have priced yourselves right out of contention for me. I host on a VPS with Site5 for $99 a month and have been doing so for over 10 years. They have undoubtedly the very best customer service I have ever encountered. You guys would do well to follow their approach to support, especially at level 1. 

80gb for a website? but as for IPS's response time, its phenomenal. They have a few agents replying during the weekend. a few somewhat at night (us), and full force during "working hours"; But I do agree with Josh. 

[FZ]

1 minute ago, MADMAN32395 said:

80gb for a website? but as for IPS's response time, its phenomenal. They have a few agents replying during the weekend. a few somewhat at night (us), and full force during "working hours"; But I do agree with Josh. 

It's a photographic website. Lots of pretty pictures going back to 2006. 

[Josh H.]

If you need additional storage, you can always host your gallery images on Amazon S3. Then you can have the best of both worlds.

You would need to upgrade to 4.x to take advantage of the Amazon S3 storage engine, however.

[bradl]

Those of us who are looking to focus on community management rather than software maintenance and hosting management (presumably your target CiC candidates) are somewhat unlikely to set up and configure S3 storage without at least an iPS-specific cheat-sheet on setting it up for this use case. The Amazon "help" pages are somewhat opaque to say the least.

[Morrigan]

I think that there is a disconnect here. No offense.

Something that I've been very excited/proud for IPS about is that they are only supporting current versions of software. There are big reasons for this! Primarily your protection!

3.4.9 has been posted for over 3 weeks. That has given you plenty of time to determine a downtime and upgrade your community, no matter the size. It wasn't a light update, this was a security update. Ignoring it is something that is your issue and not IPS's. This is something that the are mitigating with their security update reminders on the new IPS 4.x series. Holding them responsible for "possible" issues while you're running an outdated and a known security risk is not something that can be pinned on IPS.

I understand your grief about the site down time, and I agree with you, that's frustrating. That is why I coordinate my upgrades with times IPS is open. If something goes wrong then I can reach out for an emergency situation. It is rare that an emergency situation arises for me, if they do they are always fixed within a short period. In fact half my site, the important parts, went down and I submitted a ticket and it was solved within hours.

[FZ]

I am in GMT +2 time zone on a different continent to the USA. 

The upgrade was a fail because communication between IPS support and their customers is not clear and to be blunt it is not friendly either. I run a few of my sites on WordPress and I bought the AVADA theme for it about three years ago. I haven't paid a cent since the initial license purchase but they still give me the most amazing, friendly suport I have ever had. So do my hosts. These guys, not to much. Way too aloof. 

Sorry, we're going to have to disagree on support here. 

[Morrigan]

Feel free to disagree with me but free support can be amazing but I disagree that it's the best support. I've have free support nightmares as well as success stories in my belt. Sadly I have more nightmares than success stories.

To me it nearly sounds like you have never coordinated or requested assistance with an upgrade if you were unsure of the outcome or have a large community. I know that over the 8 years that I've been an IPS license holder, that when I'm fearful or have issues that IPS is always there to hold my hand in the dark.

My only recommendation would be to stop walking through the forest alone if you are having so many issues in the past and moving forward.

[FZ]

You are really making a lot of assumptions about me in your post Morrigan. They're all wrong, btw. 

[Morrigan]

There isn't a single assumption in my posts. Please do not read into my posts further than they state.

If statements are not assumptions. They are conditional statements based on possibilities. The only thing I stated was that you never contact support to coordinate an upgrade with assistance if it was necessary. I also recommended that if you are having problems upgrading to use IPS as an asset.

Please do not make assumptions about what I'm saying without reading what I'm actually typing. I do not write ill will as I do not believe in it. I believe in love and peace on the internet.

[FZ]

You're assuming that I know nothing about IP Board, or that I have never done these upgrades before! I have done some serious under the hood stuff with Invision products on my own without any help from IPS in the past, including merging two completely different IPBoards from different sites into one massive new site running the same database. Successfully. 

This should have been a simple upgrade but because of poor communications from IPS it ended up becoming a problem by having the wrong files uploaded to the site that caused the entire thing to go wrong right at the beginning. The response from support was not friendly and not all that helpful because I had no idea whether they were working on the issue or if I had been left in the dark to resolve it myself. All while the clock is ticking and my site is down. That's the issue. Poor communication. Unfriendly replies that are more accusatory than helpful. 

It's not what I expect from a paid support licence. That's why I wrote this post so that they can perhaps learn from it and hopefully improve their service levels without asking people to empty their wallets every time. 

[Morrigan]

Where in the world did I say that I assumed that?

I don't make assumptions about level of knowledge whatsoever. I can't say where anyone's knowledge level is because I know members from developers to people that barely run the software.

It's amazing that you've done things under the hood! It means that you really are dedicated. I'm the same level of dedicated. Look at my sig. You see that Fangirl sig?

Even I have problems upgrading, changing stuff etc. It doesn't mean I'm demeaning you. I'm actually offended that you think that my posts are intentionally demeaning you. It has nothing to do with that in any way. I am a long time user of IPS products and I still plan my upgrades around times they are there in case things go to hell.

Simple upgrades! Sure! I work in tech support! Simple is not always simple! Especially with variables involved. I've seen worse on something that should have literally been far simpler than even what you're describing.

Again, I ask that you not assume things about me as I certainly didn't assume things about you. I understand your frustration, if I were there I may be in the same place, if not more so. I'm not demeaning your plight, nor your frustration. I know, for me, as an end user/admin, that I plan for the best but if the worst is to happen? I have a way to make sure that it's fixed as quickly as possible. Whether that be that IPS be online and staffed, I have a backup to restore and restest on my test board or what.

[MADMAN32395]

2 minutes ago, FZ said:

You're assuming that I know nothing about IP Board, or that I have never done these upgrades before! I have done some serious under the hood stuff with Invision products on my own without any help from IPS in the past, including merging two completely different IPBoards from different sites into one massive new site running the same database. Successfully. 

This should have been a simple upgrade but because of poor communications from IPS it ended up becoming a problem by having the wrong files uploaded to the site that caused the entire thing to go wrong right at the beginning. The response from support was not friendly and not all that helpful because I had no idea whether they were working on the issue or if I had been left in the dark to resolve it myself. All while the clock is ticking and my site is down. That's the issue. Poor communication. Unfriendly replies that are more accusatory than helpful. 

It's not what I expect from a paid support licence. That's why I wrote this post so that they can perhaps learn from it and hopefully improve their service levels without asking people to empty their wallets every time. 

even the "experts" need a little help sometimes; I know what I am doing as well. but sometimes I need to submit a ticket and just deal with it. They are following their SLA that you paid to subscribe to... if your site is broken and non-functional they do have a critical button. but during non-working time, it's quicker but not as fast as normal working hours. You also have to think, if you are self hosted, they have to fight against your configuration (as everyone is a little different on their setup). 

I also have 3 pages worth of tickets,,, I have yet to pay for one ticket... and most are replied within their 48 hours... majority well before it hits a 12-24hours... so their support is pretty awesome compared to other companies.

TLDR; welcome to the joys of living in another country/timezone (that isn't lined up with the timezone of the business)

 

I don't know why you choose to be salty when there are so many other flavours.

[FZ]

So what you're in effect saying is that it's wrong for anyone to complain about what they perceive as bad service? We should just leave it as it is and hope for the best? 

[MADMAN32395]

1 minute ago, FZ said:

So what you're in effect saying is that it's wrong for anyone to complain about what they perceive as bad service? We should just leave it as it is and hope for the best? 

What I am saying  as you took out of context like you did with Morrgan and just added your own twist to it to make it favor you....

is that support is going to be slower outside their normal working hours. as you are submitting at a non-work hour. You seem to be getting upset over something that really doesn't need to be upset about.... 

 

because looking at OP. Looks like you submitted to wrong department (which causes delay), you had server configuration issues (which causes delay; as they dont support servers, they support software) and yes, they will tell you to upgrade before they look at it; 1. because issue may have been fixed in patch, and 2 3.4.9 was a security patch anyway.

 

again.  I don't know why you choose to be salty when there are so many other flavours.

[craigf136]

Bottom line is this, whether it is 90 seconds or 90 minutes without a response is not bad customer service.

You go to a company such as Sky TV, Virgin Media the online ticket response time is 24 to 48 hours as standard. You cannot call support "poor" after 90 minutes with no response, you cannot call support inadequate when you yourself are running an outdated and "insecure" version of the software IPS supply.

It makes them look bad and it makes you look bad if anything happened to you or your customers data because you couldn't upgrade. Running a website and making data secure and fixing vulnerabilities should be a priority for you.

The solution has also been supplied in the support ticket from what I can gather from previous response. 

I was with Hostgator for a while, not by choice but through a previous admin. It took 9 days, yes 9 days for a ticket response from them, now that's bad support - personally any response within 2 hours is fantastic, resolution within 24 hours great. 

[FZ]

I guess I am just used to better service and communications from other software vendors and providers. 

 

[Martin1980]

6 minutes ago, FZ said:

I guess I am just used to better service and communications from other software vendors and providers. 

 

OK bye. 

[Charles]

I do feel you may just have very different expectations. As others have pointed out here, we do provide good support. Sure we sometimes make mistakes but we do try to serve all our clients. Take your most recent ticket for example:

• You submitted ticket: 20 January 2016 - 02:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:38 AM (7 minutes later - we were asking for more information)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:41 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 02:43 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:05 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:47 AM (it was at this point you become unhappy in the ticket - 1 hour and 16 minutes in)
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 04:54 AM (at this point we were very confused what was going on)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:47 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:56 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM
• IPS Staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:26 AM
• We never heard from you so IPS staff again replied as a follow up: 22 January 2016 - 03:29 AM

We have not received any replies from you since 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM. From the time the ticket was opened to the last we heard from you just 3 hours and 35 minutes elapsed. I personally feel that's very good support.

I am extremely confused why you chose to post this topic rather than simply replying to our staff so they can further assist you. In the time you took to type out this post we probably could have resolved your problems. If you are still having issues please do reply to us as we have not heard from you since 20 January at 6:04am and we're now well over two days past that. We stand ready to assist you  

[Woodsman]

6 minutes ago, Charles said:

I do feel you may just have very different expectations. As others have pointed out here, we do provide good support. Sure we sometimes make mistakes but we do try to serve all our clients. Take your most recent ticket for example:

• You submitted ticket: 20 January 2016 - 02:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:38 AM (7 minutes later - we were asking for more information)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:41 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 02:43 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:05 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:47 AM (it was at this point you become unhappy in the ticket - 1 hour and 16 minutes in)
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 04:54 AM (at this point we were very confused what was going on)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:47 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:56 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM
• IPS Staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:26 AM
• We never heard from you so IPS staff again replied: 22 January 2016 - 03:29 AM

We have not received any replies from you since 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM. From the time the ticket was opened to the last we heard from you just 3 hours and 35 minutes elapsed. I personally feel that's very good support.

I am extremely confused why you chose to post this topic rather than simply replying to our staff so they can further assist you. In the time you took to type out this post we probably could has resolved your problems. If you are still having issues please do reply to us as we have not heard from you since 20 January at 6:04am and we're now well over two days past that. We stand ready to assist you

This is totally inadequate... I would expect staff to be in the next room drinking up all my coffee....

[m@t]

IPS has done here a very good job what the report of @Charles definitely underline !

Sometimes an mistake happens - ok everywhere are working humans and this could happen 

Everything within 24 or 48 hours is VERY GOOD customer care service !

@FZ

And you get a lot of response within some hours ! As well others pointed out here too that with self hosted websites can happen EVERYTHING and most of the time it is an lack of the customer/user, we have all made here mistakes in the past, maybe clicked to fast or have not looked at something or just simple forgotten it

Please read this carefully - Charles is 100% right

47 minutes ago, Charles said:

I am extremely confused why you chose to post this topic rather than simply replying to our staff so they can further assist you. In the time you took to type out this post we probably could have resolved your problems. 

[FZ]

51 minutes ago, Charles said:

I do feel you may just have very different expectations. As others have pointed out here, we do provide good support. Sure we sometimes make mistakes but we do try to serve all our clients. Take your most recent ticket for example:

• You submitted ticket: 20 January 2016 - 02:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:38 AM (7 minutes later - we were asking for more information)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 02:41 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 02:43 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:05 AM
• You replied again: 20 January 2016 - 03:47 AM (it was at this point you become unhappy in the ticket - 1 hour and 16 minutes in)
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 04:54 AM (at this point we were very confused what was going on)
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:31 AM
• IPS staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:47 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 05:56 AM
• You replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM
• IPS Staff replied: 20 January 2016 - 06:26 AM
• We never heard from you so IPS staff again replied as a follow up: 22 January 2016 - 03:29 AM

We have not received any replies from you since 20 January 2016 - 06:04 AM. From the time the ticket was opened to the last we heard from you just 3 hours and 35 minutes elapsed. I personally feel that's very good support.

I am extremely confused why you chose to post this topic rather than simply replying to our staff so they can further assist you. In the time you took to type out this post we probably could have resolved your problems. If you are still having issues please do reply to us as we have not heard from you since 20 January at 6:04am and we're now well over two days past that. We stand ready to assist you  

I have no problem with you reposting in here the actual contents of my ticket so that the whole world knows the particulars. However, that's unlikely to achieve anything seeing as IPS have adopted a somewhat defensive stance to this honest criticism in the first place.  

1. When I uploaded the incorrect files (which I had no indication at all were incorrect), my site simply stopped working. I panicked because when I did the upgrade to 3.4.8 just a month earlier (also at support's insistence), I had no problems. Why now would I have problems? 

2. Your guy replied in 7 minutes by initially telling me I had sent the ticket to the wrong department. Great start as far as courtesy goes. He then said that I hadn't provided him with the details of which site is affected. I only have 2 licenses. Both have all the necessary access details on file. All he had to do was look at either of them and it would have been immediately obvious which one of the sites was in trouble. He might also have looked at my previous tickets to see that the site I had been told to upgrade before was the same one I was having issues with now. 

3. I replied 4 times with the correct information, at this point completely in the dark as to whether your guy was doing anything at all about my site being completely offline. Why did it take IPS from 02:38 to 04:54 to respond to a critical issue that they had already responded to earlier? THAT is where the wheels fell off for me as far as patience goes. I now had to initiate a complete folder restore for where I had the wrong files in place. That took a long time because my host was in the process of backing up the VPS when the issue occurred. 

4. I eventually got my files restored 6 hours later and at this point I decided to put the site back online before trying to upgrade again. 

Six hours may not be a long time for you. It's a long time for me. 

What I find more annoying than anything with this episode is that you don't want to accept the criticism I'm giving you on anything. It's not your fault. It's my fault. If you knew anything about customer relations at all you would never have responded in the way you have. That's on you. It's your business, not mine. I'm your customer. 

[Woodsman]

1st off

1. When I uploaded the incorrect files (which I had no indication at all were incorrect), my site simply stopped working. I panicked because when I did the upgrade to 3.4.8 just a month earlier (also at support's insistence), I had no problems. Why now would I have problems?

It is your responsibility to download the correct version files So you can stop blaming others for your misfortune.

2nd There are people here actually trying to help you and all you did was slap them in the face.

Quote

2. Your guy replied in 7 minutes by initially telling me I had sent the ticket to the wrong department. Great start as far as courtesy goes. He then said that I hadn't provided him with the details of which site is affected. I only have 2 licenses. Both have all the necessary access details on file. All he had to do was look at either of them and it would have been immediately obvious which one of the sites was in trouble. He might also have looked at my previous tickets to see that the site I had been told to upgrade before was the same one I was having issues with now.

(A) Where is it wrong for somebody to inform you that the department you sent the ticket was not correct? After all you sent it they were only trying see to it that your ticket went to the correct location. (B) They always ask for your details. One reason is to verify you are really who you say you are and not some hack that accessed your account.... Sounds silly but Godaddy, Microsoft, Asus and others do the same. This is for your protection as well as any possible changes that may have been made to your account that they are not aware of like URL and password changes.
(This is where I walked away from 4 tech support sites)
(C)

Quote

 He might also have looked at my previous tickets to see that the site I had been told to upgrade before was the same one I was having issues with now.

Some people seem to think that  you as a tech support agent have more time on your hands than what the clock allows in any given day. So therefore they have the time to hunt down and read all correspondences from other tickets... Where you my friend should have been willing to give all pertinent information to get the ball rolling in your favor.

But I guess it is always better to blame others for your plight and misfortunes rather than taking a good look at a situation and ask yourself "How can I make this situation easy for others to fix" rather than blame and avoidance.