Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Customer "support" from Blogger

Ok, I mentioned that I have to share the e-mail I received from Blogger support... here goes:
Hi there,

This is an automated update from Blogger Support. We are currently focusing all of our efforts on Blogger in beta, and are unable to provide personal responses to other issues. However, we do have some other resources to help you out.

In the Blogger Help Group, experienced users can answer your questions, or you may find that your question has already been asked and answered in the archives. We also have a Blogger employee monitoring the group to provide assistance. You can visit the help group here:
http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help

Note that widespread operational problems, if they occur, will be addressed on our Status page to keep you updated:
http://status.blogger.com/

If you're interested in learning more about Blogger in beta, please see Blogger Help:
http://help.blogger.com/bin/topic.py?topic=9083

Thanks for your understanding, and thanks for using Blogger.

Sincerely,
Blogger Support


That's a direct cut-and-paste. An automated response to say "We won't help you, we're far too busy working on other things." This goes for every single one of their existing users. Whatever support problems people have are no longer Blogger's concern. How's that for the most awesome customer support ever?

Here's a thought: why not spend some time debugging the existing service first, and THEN dump the beta feature upgrades in?

Ok, that's my mini-rant. Back to I-cording.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

C'mon over to WordPress! The water's fine... :)

Anonymous said...

Sometimes the bug fix IS the new beta. Soem bugs may be so incredibly bad and difficult to fix so that it's not cost-effective to fix it and cheaper to push out a new version. As a programmer, I've seen his several times. Yes, it may be frustrating for users, but resourses are not infinite and one has to make compromises in deciding how to fix the problem.

chacha / Jen said...

The two things that people constantly complain about are connection problems/downtimes and the photo upload tool, which aren't listed on the upgrade features page.

I admit, they're adding some nice features: dynamic archiving, post categories... if the upgrade also takes care of the existing problems, that's great. However, I have trouble believing that they wouldn't list "fewer outages and connection problems" and "improved photo tool" front and center if those were things that were being fixed.

For a free service, Blogger is usually pretty good, which is why I was so surprised by the fact that they've just stopped providing user support altogether.