A quick solution to your problem.

That’s because you did not even wanted the problem in the first place. When there is no quick solution available, other drivers become important that impact your satisfaction:

• Response time
• Technical knowledge of the support engineer
• Support engineer’s ability to communicate (empathy, understanding, managing expectations, etc)

Very often, when you are not satisfied with a companies’ support, it’s because they failed to deliver on one or more of the drivers just mentioned.

Now how does this relate to the title of this post?

This post is a story about my support experience I recently had with a company called Disqus. They provide a commenting system for blogs/sites and I hope this post helps you to make a well considered decision on what commenting system you want to install on your site/blog.

The Story

A couple of weeks ago, I installed Disqus as the commenting system for Alexve.com. One of the reason I started to use it was because Robert Scoble is using it on his blog as well. Before installing it on my production site, I tested it thoroughly on my development site where everything worked just fine. However, after installing into production, one particular posting’s comment count and actual comments were not showing up. Since that post had 15 comments, it was only fair to the people who commented to get that fixed. 

So I reinstalled Disqus and imported of all my comments into the system a couple of times. As that did not solve the issue, I checked the FAQ/Wiki. It turned out I wasn’t the only one with missing comments as there is a checkbox in the Disqus WordPress plugin, that tells you ‘Check this if you have a problem with the counts not showing’. Unfortunately, the extra imports and enabling this option had no effect at all: that one particular posting still wasn’t showing any comment counts nor comments. At point I decided to contact Disqus and ask for their help.

The Support Experience

Here is the chronological overview the support experience with Disqus:

What Made Me Very Dissatisfied

Disqus is a free service. However that does not mean the support experience should be poor. You can hopefully understand why I am very dissatisfied with the support received and switched to IntenseDebate for comments on my blog. In a nutshell:

• No solution provided
• Extremely poor response time, or response at all
• No expectations management (or Service Level Agreement)
• No Empathy
• Not Listening to my feedback
• Not Answering my questions
• Not Communicating at my level

Providing support by e-mail is a difficult because you cannot see or hear the person you are serving. When only providing email support, it becomes very important to read, listen and show that you care about your customers in your responses. If something is not clear, you should ask for clarification. Again and again.

How Can Disqus Improve Support?

1. Focus on providing a quick solution
2. Improve the automated initial response email:
3. Always thank people for contacting you (they have an issue with your service)
4. Include ways people can contact you
5. Include global support hours you can be reached
6. Mention your Service Level Agreement and response times
7. Are there any files that you often need to quickly resolve an issue? Ask them as quickly as possible
8. Point people to the FAQ, just in case they haven’t seen it
9. Improve your response times (get more people/better tools)
10. Use tools/text templates to improve your productivity in answering emails professionally
11. Try to understand what kind of customer you are dealing with (beginner vs technical experienced, etc)
12. Communicate on his/her level
13. Avoid using the word ‘problem’
14. Repeat your customer’s question in your response to verify if you understand him/her correctly
15. Include a signature that tells your customers point 4), 5) and 6)
16. Don’t set the priority of your reply e-mails to ‘low’. This sends out the message you don’t find these e-mail conversations important
17. Just say you are sorry if you experience any delays
18. Listen to your customers if they tell you they are not happy
19. Put the customer and his/her experience in the centre of what you do
20. Consider investing in a real support system that integrates with your site to provide web based support (e.g. Clarify)

A note to Giannii, the Community Manager at Disqus: Please consider this as open feedback to the whole Disqus team on how Disqus can improve the support experience for its users. This is nothing personal. I am sure you are doing your best to serve all Disqus customers, answering tons of email, tweets and that this impacts the quality of the support I received.

Last, a personal note to Fred Wilson (investor in Disqus): you should consider investing in a technical support team for Disqus too otherwise they might just loose from Js-kit or IntenseDebate. I’m not the only one who has recently removed Disqus from his site.

What’s Your Experience With Disqus?

Have experienced something similar? The complete opposite? Please let everyone know by sharing your experience via the comments on this post.

If You Depend On Disqus For Commenting, Don’t Count On Technical Support

What are your thoughts on this post? Share your reaction by leaving a comment!

A couple of weeks ago, there were post flying around the web claiming once again that blogs were dead and that you should drop it in favor of lifestreaming. While I am a big fan of lifestreaming (I have a dedicated lifestream page on my site), I do not believe that blogs are dead.

I believe the opposite is true and that blogs are evolving. In the past, a blog would be a ‘single voice of a person’. Nowadays, blogs have become the voice of a community, driven by technology that is starting to make real-time conversations possible. With this post, I’d like to share some solutions that can help your blog stay ahead of the game and move into the era of the real time web.

Make It Easier To Have a Conversation

With the rise of social networks and tool such as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, etc, conversations are happing around the web. So how to you encourage people to have their conversations on your blog? The answer lies in the innovation of commenting systems that can help you bring back the streams of conversations back to your site. They are making ‘real time’ conversations possible.

There are currently three solutions that facilitate better conversations:

• Disqus
• IntenseDebate
• Js-kit’s Echo

So why should you should consider to implement one of these products?  Because they make it easier for your visitors to engage on a conversation with you and other readers. Here’s how:

• Integration with Facebook Connect, Twitter OAuth and 3^rd party services
  A reader’s identity can now flow from their favorite social network to your site. They do not have to create a profile and upload their picture anymore to leave a comments under their own online identity. This makes the commenting experience a lot easier and more sociable, as you can see who you are talking to.
• Comments are threaded and more
  Although threaded comments now come with most blogging platforms, these systems provide a massive improvement over those standard solutions. Your readers can comment very easily on other comments, subscribe to comment updates via e-mail and even leave a reply by video if they wanted.
• Broadens the conversation
  As a visitor leaves a comment, they can share it with their friends across their favorite social network. So effectively, they share your content too – broadening the conversation and driving new traffic.

Which one to choose?

In terms of functionality, the solutions mentioned offer almost the same feature set. And when one of them introduces new functionality, it doesn’t take long before the others catch up. Disqus seems to be the most popular choice amongst blogger, probably because of the fact that high traffic sites such as Mashable.com or Scobleizer.com have been using it for a while now. As you can see, I have choosen to use Disqus on Alexve.com. It is a solution that works on several platforms, including WordPress. My experience so far with the technology has been great, although I’d like Disqus to improve their response time on support tickets…I am still waiting on a proper response and resolution for a ticket that I logged almost a week ago.

UPDATE: As you can see, I have removed Disqus from my site completely. Disqus failed to resolve a simple comment count issue on one of my blog posting and provide decent support. I’ve contacted them more than 10 times in the past two weeks via e-mail/twitter, asking for their help. They just didn’t listen…I was really excited about Disqus and its functionality but because of the extremely poor support experience, I have taken Disqus off my site and now switched to IntenseDebate. 

Would you consider upgrading your commenting system? Which solution would you choose and why?

How to Move Your Blog Into The Era of the Real Time Web

What are your thoughts on this post? Share your reaction by leaving a comment!