Survey results: What our ex-members (4 months) think of JoomlArt products and support

Hi Guys,

Feedback from users, be is positive or negative is critical for any business and helps to take the right steps to make sure that the expectations of users are met. We reached out to our members who did not renew their membership in the last few months to check whether we are on the right track or are losing the trust of our members.

What our ex-members think of JoomlArt support

A total of 1,673 members who did not renew the membership were contacted and around 15% chose to reply back, (we knew the feedback rate would be low as the member is no longer active thus have less inclination to respond to questions).

We limited the survey questions to bare minimum and focused mainly on two issues.

1. Are you happy with our products?
2. How would you rate our support team?



Other questions were:

3. Would a discount coupon help you decide on renewing your membership?
4. Based on your experience, which areas we need to focus and improve on?

The Questions 1 & 2 were to get an overall idea of user experience with our current product line and support channels. Question 3 was to evaluate if we should run win-back campaigns based on incentives and Question 4 was to get the feedback which would help us to improve user experience and products, which may help us to increase the user retention past with increased renewals.

Survey results :

1. Are you happy with our products?

Are you happy with JoomlArt products?

More than 80 percent of our ex-members are happy with our products. It means we have 20% more to go.

80% satisfaction seems good for a start but that 20% voting “No” needs to be contacted again and reasons sought and fixed. 80% good feedback is nice to show around but those 20% dissatisfied people hold the key feedback to issues our products and policies, which if unfixed can result in consistent lower renewal rates.

It's easier to retain a customer than to convert a visitor and more loyal customers one have the more stable the business is.

2. How would you rate our support team?

Before, we interpret the results I would like to say how our support workflow is:

Every morning, all new queries and overdue questions are pulled to ticket system. New questions are divided to the support team and owner of overdue questions pinged as a reminder. The internal support team then over the day follow-up threads and tickets from past days and answer all new questions over the day. When the load is less we pull the new questions again in the afternoon for assignment.

The questions followed up by our mods are not lined up unless they hand over the issue to internal support team.

Some of the important rules the Internal support team has to follow are:

1. Reply all assigned tickets/ threads every day, if overloaded ask for help and in case of difficult issues ask for dev team help but still reply to user asking for more time.
2. If user is developer member, avoid saying no and help with all minor customization support. Why? Because they already have decent coding and Joomla skills and always have less questions but crucial to their projects and membership plan allows them to access custom support.
3. Help all users with demo site alike display, config issues, and bugs, even if it's related to other extensions or Joomla itself. Most of them are newbies to Joomla itself and in dire need of encouragement.
4. Say No to all major customization requests with a polite explanation whenever possible and avoid sales activities via technical support. Support is expensive and time-consuming. Politely say No to all ex-members asking for support.

With the above insights, I hope the below results from the survey would be easy to interpret.

How would you rate our support team?

1. Excellent: Mostly from users with decent Joomla and coding skills. Loyal members and members who follow support policy and provide us all details and get the right answers.
2. Average:
• Satisfied users who believe that there is scope for improvement.
• Happy with support but not with the 24 reply time.
3. Poor
• Mostly the cases where the support period is elongated due to less information available or bugs which require dev team focus.
• Complaints of poor documentations.
• Overdues from support team (mostly during the weekend off).
• Does not follow support policy guidelines but expect us to guess the issue and fix it no questions asked.
• Denial of customization services or denial of support for 3rd party extensions.
4. Don’t get me started : (very important)
• Newbies with no experience of Joomla, server requirements.
• Performing upgrades without following upgrade guide and no backups and angry by our inability to help in such cases.
• Hacked site with no backups and feels let down in our inability to help him.
• One-line support questions with expectations for immediate response. These cases take a long time to solve.
• Denial of support deemed custom work by the team but not by user.
• Really bad support from team member (yes, it can happen).

Some positive and negative feedbacks (randomly picked):

1. You guys and gals are the best!! I am just overloaded with work and haven't renewed yet!
2. I am very satisfied for what I get for my buck.
3. I am already a happy customer I don't know why I received this mail.
4. The products we've used has been pretty straightforward to set-up so have not needed much support.

1. In Joomla 3.0, templating seems to be getting much more complex. I spend a lot of time trying to customize templates which used to be easy.
2. Your support was excellent until the release of the Uber Template. The ACM Module had issues right out of the gate. When I brought up the problem in the UBER forum, the first suggestion was to install the quickstart template, after all it works on my (the tech's system). After that support was down hill. The same installation issue existed in the next release, and until a USER diagnosed the problem, it was *not* a problem. It appears it never made it to the developers.
• My next problem, took the support tech approximately 2 weeks to resolve. Only because he had "internet connection problems", then forgot I was waiting, even though I opened a support ticket, where I was told the Original Support Tech was working on the issue and we cannot help, so we are closing your ticket if you need support re-open a ticket.
• It appears that non-paying users were receiving support before paying members. So, I am no longer a paying member.
3. I used Bookshop template, the demo site is excellent but I found it hard to reproduce aspects of the template when not using the quickstart package . So, documentation.
4. More lightweight Joomla templates. There are a lot of templates that looks wonderful but slows down the performance. I decided not to renew my membership because I don’t have projects that involve Joomla based sites. Probably I will renew my membership when there is a project.
5. Templates need to be easier to update.

What we are going to do about it?

1. Reduce Mondays overload by providing limited support on Saturdays. This should also reduce the raised on Friday replied on Monday complaints.
2. Get in touch with the users rating support as Average, poor and Don't get me started and get more specific feedbacks and try to resolve them.
3. Be more passionate towards the Joomla! newbies and encourage them to explore and learn the basics of Joomla. Coz even a minor hiccup if unresolved moves them away not from JoomlArt but even from the Joomla itself.

Co-operation from the users is very important for enthusiastic support from the team. Those who provides details of issues and site access on request get their issues resolved really quick as the team does not need to replicate the issue and user site environment for investigation.

Thank you for your patience with this long post. We'll do our best to make our service and products better. Should you have any suggestion, don't hesitate to tell us in the comment section!