Unfortunately, not only can I not get any of my IM accounts to work, but I can’t even log in to their support forum to tell them about it. The whole point of this post is to leave a trackback to their blog, because Chris, the “Tech Evangelist” seems pretty responsive and there’s no other way to contact them.
He also shares my frustration with embedded video/podcasts, too. We need transcripts!
Chris, if you’re reading this, contact me here because I can’t reach anyone there.
As I expected, logging a support incident(I can log in there, just not the forum) was utterly useless. The first response said, “You’re using a beta, so there will be issues.”, missing the point of the site not working entirely, and the second response requested that I change my password to all lowercase, which I had already done based on the sticky thread in the forum mentioning this requirement.
This is the same thing that turned me off of cocomment. They have these droids working the support forum, who seem unable to do anything but make pointless and redundant suggestions to do things you’ve already tried.
Tags: embedded media, eqo, hownottodocustomerservice, IM, podcast, VOIP
[...] Learning by Doing …and trying, and failing, and trying again. « The Eqo IM/VOIP client looks promising [...]
Hello Sir,
We were having trouble with our forum earlier, so no one could sign in, sorry about that. Feel free to email me (chris[at]eqo[dot]com) and I’ll gladly look into your problem.
Also, I’d appreciate it if you weren’t so hard on our support department. Peter is one guy and he gets hundreds of requests a day. I’d be glad to explain the challenges of support as I see them via email. In the meantime, you might want to ease off a little.
Cheers and thank you for your interest in EQO.
Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist
Thanks for letting me know about the problems with the forum, Chris. I’m glad to know it wasn’t just me experiencing the problem.
I’m truly sorry I was harsh on your support department, but everything I said was factual. The first guy I heard from was Kamyar, who reminded me about the password needing to be lowercase, ignored the first issue I reported, and glossed over the other issues simply by saying “It’s a beta”. No mention of which issues I was experiencing are known issues, or workarounds, or anything.
After that, I heard from Peter, who simply suggested I change my password to lowercase. I realize that most of the people he probably deals with on a daily basis need to be told things multiple times, so I understand why he suggested that I do something Kamyar had already told me was a problem and which is listed in a sticky thread as a problem, but he didn’t mention that the forums were having login issues, and he didn’t respond to my other issues.
No matter what the reason, however, the bottom line is I had a unsatisfactory experience attempting to use your product, and trying to get support for it. I understand Eqo doesn’t have the resources to provide world-class support for a free product, but the outsourced, canned-response support thing always leaves a bad taste with me. cocomment does this, Yodlee moneycenter does this, and it sucks. I’d rather hear nothing in response than a canned response, because I know I’m being ignored either way, but the canned response suggests that I never will be responded to substantially, whereas if I’m simply ignored, there remains a hope, however slim, that someone will get around to saying something useful eventually.
BTW, installation of the java client failed on my N75. Something about a certificate mismatch.
I hate to be the anonymous internet hater. Eqo is far finer and more polished than anything I could have done myself. FYI, I probably wouldn’t have said anything if the “support” wasn’t such a joke.
In the end, I found something else that seems to work, so I’m not interested in pursuing this further. The whole point of this was to leave my feedback in the only way open to me, so I hope your company is able to take it for what it’s worth.
Fair enough sir, your support complaints are justified. Kamyar is new and Peter was likely exasperated by that point in the day. We’ll do our best to up the support levels in the future. From my experience, the better you treat support people the better support you get. It’s a slippery slope seeing as people are usually pissed by the time they get to the point of needing support, but it never hurts to be polite.
Anyway, I’m glad you’ve managed to solve your IM needs. If you are interested in giving me your Symbian beta feedback I’d love to hear it and hopefully apply it. The certificate issue you had on your N75 likely indicates that your date was not set correctly (certificates are valid for one calendar year) or that your phone doesn’t like our certificate. I can send you an unsigned version if you are interested.
Sincerely,
Chris
EQO Customer Evangelist
Best of luck at Eqo, Chris, and thanks for working so hard on getting the Symbian client working. I’ll check back in a while to see how things have developed.