If You Depend On Disqus For Commenting, Don’t Count On Technical Support
by Alex Vermeule posted August 4th, 2009 at 13:40
When you have an issue and you need a company’s support organization to fix it, what is the most important driver that impacts your satisfaction?
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?
- Focus on providing a quick solution
- Improve the automated initial response email:
- Always thank people for contacting you (they have an issue with your service)
- Include ways people can contact you
- Include global support hours you can be reached
- Mention your Service Level Agreement and response times
- Are there any files that you often need to quickly resolve an issue? Ask them as quickly as possible
- Point people to the FAQ, just in case they haven’t seen it
- Improve your response times (get more people/better tools)
- Use tools/text templates to improve your productivity in answering emails professionally
- Try to understand what kind of customer you are dealing with (beginner vs technical experienced, etc)
- Communicate on his/her level
- Avoid using the word ‘problem’
- Repeat your customer’s question in your response to verify if you understand him/her correctly
- Include a signature that tells your customers point 4), 5) and 6)
- 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
- Just say you are sorry if you experience any delays
- Listen to your customers if they tell you they are not happy
- Put the customer and his/her experience in the centre of what you do
- 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.
Tags: Customer Satisfaction, Disqus, Service, Support
Categories: Real-Time Web
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Alex,
Your support issue was only a failure due to the inconsistency of your mail servers at that time. When there is an issue with communication of course things will not go very well. There are also emails I sent you not included in that slide show, and I really feel that you may have manipulated this support instance or maybe your email servers were having issues receiving them as I pointed out. Ideally I would like every support request to go smoothly but sometimes they don't. I hope my timely reply to this post is an example of our response time and that we do care about our brand and commenters. With that being said, thank you for trying out Disqus and I hope you give us another shot down the line.
Giannii
Dear Giannii,
Thank you very much for your quick response and feedback.
My issue with support was not about getting failed deliveries for help@diqus.com from you mail server. Before I was unable to reach you, already 11 days had passed without a solution.
I have not removed any important e-mails, only the automated replies that you get when you send an e-mail to ‘help@disqus.com’. If there are any message you would like to add to the deck, please e-mail them to me and I will be glad to add them.
(Please see the rest of my reply in the next comment)
I have used disqus on many occasions and have nothing but glowing words for them. Not just on a business but personal level 'they get it'
I'm actually wondering if you actually exist or if you are a robot. instead of having pictures of you looking like some kind of internet playboy on your website and twitter background why dont you just build your own chat if your so frustrated with others instead of wasting your time on slideshows showing various emails back and forth. what pointless drivel filling up the tubes of the internet. if you think you can do better make it yourself!
And i have no idea what you mean about 'losing' to the other sites. i'm perfectly sure there will be enough 'traffic' and 'people' to go around. after all we roughly only have 10% of the worlds population using the internet at the moment anyway.
Stop trying to be clever. you just come across as desperate for attention. your comments are pointless and self seeking. stop living your life like a strategy and wake up and smell the coffee.
the coffee is the good part!
Dear Phil,
Thank you for visiting my blog and thank you for your comment. I am glad to hear you are happy with Disqus.
You are more than welcome to visit me some time when you are in the Netherlands if you are wondering whether I really exist. My point in this post was not about the product Disqus. I like to improve things, that’s why I’ve written this post.
Thanks again for caring enough to share your comment, it definitely put a smile on my face
It would be pretty boring if everyone replied, “Great post! I completely agree with you!”. It even made me consider changing my avatar hehehe.
Cheers,
Alex
From Google's error messages I can see where Phil thought you were up to no good, it looks like Google thought you were a spammer for a couple of days there too ;P
I think you should definitely give Disqus a second try next time you decide to renovate your blog's comment system. I've had nothing but positive experiences with their software and staff. And I think they're both a few notches above Intense Debate.
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for your comment and great to learn you had a positive experience with Disqus.
RE: the error message: Your explanation does not clarify why I was able to send an e-mail successful to giannii@disqus.com but not to help@disqus.com in the same mail (that last address being on the CC-line)?
I find it hard to believe that think Google sees two of my independent e-mail address as spam accounts. I have just taken another closer look at the error I got back and this is what I think this is happening/has happened: when you send an e-mail to help@disqus.com you get an automated reply back, containing your original message.
(Please see the rest of my reply in the next comment)
This means that the help@disqus.com sends out an email to anyone contacting it. How many e-mails does this generate on a daily basis? And how many of those message end up in a receivers spam/junk folder? I know I at least found one of those automated e-mails in my spam folder.
If you look at Google’s help at https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans... you will see they listen to user reporting spam and take actions when required. If google somehow ‘blacklisted’ help@disqus.com, that would explain why I was unable to reach it and able to reach giannii@disqus.com in the same e-mail.
Maybe I will give Disqus another try later. First going to look at Echo from JS-Kit.
Thanks again!
Alex
I also understand that you would like every support request to go smoothly, so do I. That’s why I’ve written the post. Hoping you will get some support and other resources to improve the whole support experience for Disqus users.
Please understand that I have shared my customer support experience and shared my feedback openly not to attack you in any way. Your reaction today and leaving a comment on my personal blog, shows me you do care which is good to see. I’ll be watching the Disqus solution and other commenting systems like IntenseDebate and Echo and testing them for my clients on this website.
Have a great day and thanks again.
With kind regards,
Alex
Hey Alex, I'm posting from the Disqus team.
I just spoke to Giannii about this issue and I'm pretty familiar with it as well. We've had some problems contacting you, as Giannii mentioned above. I'm sorry you had a poor experience and I'd like to help fix this. That said, I stand behind Giannii's response 100%. I know how our support works and I'm proud of it. Sometimes things happen, as it did here, and we'll happily resolve this in any way we can.
Daniel
Hi Daniel,
Thanks very much for dropping by and leaving a comment on this post. Also good to see you stand by your staff, which is always the right thing to do.
As you can see in my post, I do think there are areas for improvement in your customer support. These are general recommendations coming from someone who has been in support for more than a decade.
RE: Contacting me, Can you please let me know how you were having difficulties to contact me? I ‘m on mail 24×7, on almost on every social network, have my own site with contact page (even publish a vcf with my phone number there). Really like to understand what went wrong.
RE: fixing the issue, I am really sorry but it is just a little too late for that. I do think it’s great of you (and Giannii) to come and visit me on my blog and leave a comment. That shows me you do care. For now, I’ll be using another commenting system and keep an eye on Disqus.
Thanks again for dropping by.
With kind regards,
Alex
Hi Daniel,
Thanks very much for dropping by and leaving a comment on this post. Also good to see you stand by your staff, which is always the right thing to do.
As you can see in my post, I do think there are areas for improvement in your customer support. These are general recommendations coming from someone who has been in support for more than a decade.
RE: Contacting me, Can you please let me know how you were having difficulties to contact me? I ‘m on mail almost 24×7, on almost on every social network, have my own site with contact page (even publish a vcf with my phone number there). Really like to understand what went wrong.
RE: fixing the issue, I am really sorry but it is just a little too late for that. I do think it’s great of you (and Giannii) to come and visit me on my blog and leave a comment. That shows me you do care. For now, I’ll be using another commenting system and keep an eye on Disqus.
Thanks again for dropping by.
With kind regards,
Alex
There were some issues reaching your mail server. But let's put that behind us. Hope you'll take a look again soon.
Hi Daniel, I use good Google Apps for this domain. I have shared my thoughts about what happened with the help@disqus.com address in my reply to Andrew in the comments above. I think it is related to the amount of automated emails you send out using the help@disqus.com address and recievers marking that as spam.
If your support encounters difficulties reaching customers, perhaps they can switch to Twitter as an alternative. You seem to use it quite heavily already. Anyway, I am ok with putting it behind it us. Hope this post has set some change in action. Will definitely keep an eye on all commenting systems enabling real time conversations such as Disqus.
Hi Daniel,
Thanks very much for dropping by and leaving a comment on this post. Also good to see you stand by your staff, which is always the right thing to do.
As you can see in my post, I do think there are areas for improvement in your customer support. These are general recommendations coming from someone who has been in support for more than a decade.
RE: Contacting me, Can you please let me know how you were having difficulties to contact me? I ‘m on mail 24×7, on almost on every social network, have my own site with contact page (even publish a vcf with my phone number there). Really like to understand what went wrong.
RE: fixing the issue, I am really sorry but it is just a little too late for that. I do think it’s great of you (and Giannii) to come and visit me on my blog and leave a comment. That shows me you do care. For now, I’ll be using another commenting system and keep an eye on Disqus.
Thanks again for dropping by.
With kind regards,
Alex
I've had a great experience with Disqus. They've always been very supportive and highly responsive. They walked me through setting it up for my Tumblr and I would highly recommend using this service to anyone who wants comments integrated.
I've never had anything but over-the-top support from giannii at disqus, so it is hard for me to imagine the experience you had. That said, I know that sometimes things don't go as planned, so I can appreciate your frustration with your experience. However, I think the overwhelming amount of followup on *this* post from both giannii and the CEO of the company speaks volumes about their support, and makes your over-the-top headline look like pandering.
This is the point where take advantage of the fact that you are publishing "new media" rather than print. And, unless you *are* only trying to create linkbait, you go back and edit the title, and add an update to the top to the post, about how the company HAS responded.
Hi Thomas,
Thank you for visiting my virtual home and thank you very much for your feedback.
You are right that the response from Disqus is quick when the conversation is out in the open. If only they had listened earlier when I had a 1:1 conversation and fixed the technical issue, I would not have written this post at all. Funny thing is, I even started out as a promoter of the service.
RE new media/title: I just created this post to share my experience about Disqus’ technical support with anyone. Just to show I am * not * about link bait, I will remove the word WARNING and add the word ‘Technical’ to the title, so it is clear I am talking about Disqus’ technical support. The title was written to get Disqus’ attention to this post, which was exactly what happened.
(Please see the rest of my reply in the next comment)
I still stand completely behind my content and view; We live in a day and age where anyone can share their experience so it becomes utterly important that companies always care about their customers. My post contains clear feedback on areas where they can improve their technical support. I just hope they do something with it.
With kind regards,
Alex
This was a very interesting post to come across.
Currently our company is investigating whether or not to use Disqus (both for ourselves, and our clients).
I believe Alex's writing and slideshow is incredibly well done, and very insightful.
Irrespective of any issues regarding email providers, Alex's initial email was received by Disqus, in which he clearly identified the issue he needed solved. From that point onwards, Disqus's support failed them.
@Disqus support: Irrespective of whether you could or could not contact Alex via email: a simple visit to Alex's website would show you a myriad of alternative methods for contacting him – with a solution.
As for the comments which followed, I believe Alex has been incredibly polite (where others have not!) and sincere with his replies. Phil’s comments were inflammatory, Giannii’s abrupt, and the rest smell like ‘sponsored’ to me.
As for the title and content, I’ve found the entire post to be very useful in the decision making process for our company.
I discovered the post having Google’d “Disqus negatives” – and am glad to have found an honest assessment of one user’s experience.
I had my doubts about Disqus the moment I noticed the grammatical errors on their homepage. A company that does not have an internal QA process to ensure their own homepage is up to scratch is not overwhelming me with confidence that they’ll have a solid support process.
Keep up the good work Alex. And don’t mind the “Sneue Herders!”
Kind regards,
Chris (multi-award-winning, Australian/Irish, digital professional)
Hi Chris,
Thank you very much for your supportive words and taking the time to share your thoughts. Also great to read this post has been useful to you and has helped the decision process for your company.
Hope you have an awesome day!
With kind regards,
Alex
Ya, gonna have to agree with Chris and Alex on this one. We're looking at supporting a ton of large social media sites, and have had problems just trying to use it on one site. The response time from Disqus has been slow, defensive and off-target. A closer look at their code showed many flaws and I just rewrote it to get rid of all the memory leaks and time out issues (in regards to the wordpress plugin). Of course I have no control over the response errors I'm getting from their servers or the lack of explanation about what they mean. But I would guess it's either incorrect credentials or the server is busy, offline, etc., as I have not altered any of the data being sent. I'm kind of amused that intensedebate is being used here. I looked at that too, but it failed as well. I think these products are not built to scale. Some of our sites have hundreds of thousands of posts. You can't loop thru every comment in every post in one browser session. =P
I'm not here to take digs at them. I haven't really had enough interaction with Gianni to know what he's like. But there lies the problem as stated above. Waiting 48 hours to get a reponse that is the developer's equivalent to "Is it plugged in?" is just frustrating.
Bingo, once I finally was able to get an error message back that was more than just a number, I got this, even though I've tried updating the API Key on both ends:
API Key does not allow access to this forum.
And I am passing the correct short code.
Disqus goes great with Facebook awesome work Disqus.