Just to address this review since it’s been a while since it was left, and I want to make sure that it doesn’t come across like we didn’t respond to it. We responded immediately to it. Our COO and support team initially responded directly to this customer within 10 minutes of this review being posted to see what was going on here and to help. What is clear is that there was definitely an ongoing issue with that MLS feed that our team had been working on with the team at MLS Grid. The customer had every right to be inquiring about the status of the issue. Very frustrating problem.
To a lot of our customers’ chagrin, we don’t give ETAs on resolving issues because what can seem like simple issues can often turn into bigger projects to properly resolve. We usually say that it’ll be “at least x amount of time”. I’m sorry that you were told that it’d be fixed in at least two weeks and that it took longer than that. The issue turned out to be much bigger in scope than we had originally thought. I know that the customer was reaching out looking to get an update on this issue, when the situation that caused this review took place.
For exactly these kinds of situations, we track and keep incredibly detailed records on absolutely everything that our team receives or sends: calls, voicemails, emails, chats, etc, everything. That being said, this customer is a website developer who has been great and has brought us a bunch of business, so this really is disappointing that they had this experience. We’re really sorry about it. They represent a number of agents that use our platform, so we may have missed something, but we’re pretty sure that all correspondence was responded to. We’re not perfect, and things do occasionally fall through the cracks, but we try our best to not let that happen. We certainly apologize if that happened.
To address the assertion that we were unresponsive to 18 calls, we can only see 8 calls for their number that were made within a 25 minutes period on 11/7/2019 (link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/pvsn8184ly6yg7k/call-record-wp-org-review.jpg?dl=0) which is about 5 days before this review, at a time when our team was temporarily unavailable to answer the phone while working with other customers.
Once our COO got on the phone with the customer on the day of this review (Nov 13th), Alan found out that she was used to our old answering service (Ruby) which picked up every call and was expecting that same experience. This answering service was great in picking up all the calls, but was expensive and didn’t really provide the level of help our team can provide and consequently created other problems. So about a year ago we have the calls go directly to our support team. This effectively means that not all inbound calls can be picked up if the team is busy on other calls, etc.
In this case, with these 8 calls, no voicemails were left. They were hung up before hitting the voicemail. You can see in the attached image (linked above) that our team picked up another inbound call (to a direct extension number) once they had gotten off a previous call. It’s not that we weren’t picking up the phone, and it certainly wasn’t that we were avoiding this customer, it was case of unfortunate bad timing and receiving a voicemail. We’re sorry that this came across this way, we understand that perception matters, but we were doing the best we can, and because no voicemail was left these calls didn’t show up to our team. All voicemails are transcribed and a ticket is created in our helpdesk ticketing system so we don’t miss these kinds of things, so we can avoid situations that prompt reviews like this. If you look at our other reviews, you’ll see that this is an unfortunate outlier.
We’d like to think we’re still a fantastic plugin, that being said we absolutely did have some data issues with that MLS, which unfortunately happens with MLS feeds for all IDX companies from time to time, and it’s something we hate more than anyone. We 100% understand the frustration that it can cause. But to say that we’re not responsive across a range of communication, isn’t how we do things and in looking at our tracking records we’re not able to see that any emails or chats from this customer went without response.
We’re not for a second saying that we didn’t miss something, just that we can’t see it from the accounts that this customer had contacted us on previously and since. Regardless, it’s awful that they ended up feeling this way about our level of support, since our team has a well-deserved, great reputation for being responsive, friendly, and helpful.
As always, buyer beware, but it’s also contextually relevant to know that this customer, from our records did not cancel (from what we can tell). We provided a $400 discount on their next annual renewal, to make up for these issues. We want to do right by our customers and treat them like we’d like to be treated. We hate that this happened and want to make sure that we made it as right as we can. We’d love to keep on working with this developer, and Alan, our COO, has reached out a few times by email proactively in the past 4 weeks since this review to make sure she was okay.
If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at 1-800-478-0181 or [email protected].
Scott Lockhart
CEO – Showcase IDX
