Problematic support

Hi @dylantov, we rarely receive 1-star reviews so I’ve taken the time to reply in a way that would be helpful to others reading this thread in the future.

I was disappointed to see how your support ticket had progressed and a refund did seem like the best option for everyone in this case.

The time between replies was definitely slower than the norm (we do our best to always reply within 24 hours). The delays in your case were mainly due to the issue being so unique and to our team being unavailable for health and family reasons (the timing just didn’t help).

We couldn’t reproduce your issue on our own test sites and haven’t seen it happen to others, so it took a while to figure out what was causing it.

When running our tests on your staging site, we pointed out how we had managed to get the plugin working on one page but not another, so there seemed to be something strange happening but we weren’t able to put our fingers on it.

The initial investigations had shown that the staging site had many plugins requiring updates. Unfortunately, even after working with you to address that problem, we weren’t able to make the plugin work well with your setup.

We did run an internal investigation with regard to your live website, as promised, and it turned out that there were no changes made by our team on that site, including any of the theme files. We take these things very seriously and have had a policy in place for many years not to make any changes to a customer’s live website. As such, we believe that something else happened to cause that change to happen, but I understand that it would be very difficult to narrow it down from your end.

In the future, I do recommend using a plugin such as WP Activity Log when providing access to your site to other people (this is one we use ourselves). It would help you narrow down what happened in such situations and would also help people like ourselves figure out the potential cause of a problem when working with you.

Our team has already started internal discussions to learn from this experience and do better going forward, so above all else, I want to thank you for your patience with us over the past few weeks. A 1-star review is never nice to see, but at the end of the day, they reflect someone’s personal opinion which they have every right to share. All we can do is learn from it.

Hi Mark,

This is a fairly disingenuous response – for some of the following reasons:

1. It was not a matter of minor delays in responding to support requests. There were periods where it took up to two weeks and three follow-ups to get a reply.
2. I spent two months trying to trouble-shoot this with you and several hundred dollars of external development support. At multiple times I suggested we had reached an impasse and suggested we proceed to refund, but your time in each instance asked for additional time.
3. The change we identified on our live site was also made to the staging site. It occurred immediately after your team asked for login details to the live site (and when you were the only people with access to the staging site)
4. It also occurred in conjunction with the addition of a new page to our site called “My instagram feed” which is created when somebody activates and plays with your plugin.
5. Our theme files had a new modified date when accessed via ftp that was within a very short time period of the above page being added to our site.
6. On both live and staging, our theme was reverted to the generic version (without any custom modifications that had been made to enable critical site functionality)
7. Only your team had access to the site during that period. Our only other wordpress login is my personal one that is locked to my ip.
8. At no point in your internal investigation did you ask us for additional verifying information e.g. file modification times to cross-check against times your support was logged in. This investigation seems to have occurred independently of us-and without you having access to the information we reviewed.
9. If I had to hypothesise what occurred, a member of your team updated the theme file on staging and then accidentally copied it across to live with the staging plugin.

Accidents happen. And a simple apology and explanation of how it occurred and how you will prevent it happening with future clients would have been sufficient. I would have taken the refund and moved on.

However, I would be concerned if I was any future client that:

1. Something like this occurred
2. That as a company you are ducking responsibility, and focussing on the PR aspects rather than the fact that you took down parts of our site during business hours and outside your support times (so we had to work to rectify it ourselves)

• This reply was modified 2 years, 2 months ago by dylantov.

I’m sorry, @dylantov, we didn’t deal with this situation well enough.

An apology is definitely warranted. Although I sent you one in my final email after the refund was processed, looking back at my personal conversation with you on Messenger (where you had reached out, aside from the email), I offered my help and informed you that we’re investigating the issue, but at no time had I apologized. That’s on me.

My reply above was definitely not meant to come across as disingenuous or as any form of PR strategy. That’s just not what we do.

As you saw from our personal discussions on Messenger and via email, we started to investigate what happened as soon as we saw your report.

We are definitely at fault for the delayed replies, no matter what caused them, and that’s something we’ve already implemented improved policies for so as to avoid it happening again in the future.

We’re also discussing better ways of handling refund requests on more technical requests and those we cannot reproduce internally or on other sites. In your case, we tried to help solve the issue before going ahead with the refund, which we often do successfully. In this case, we didn’t do enough and made mistakes along the way.

Your hypothesis is the same conclusion we’re coming to as a team. Even if there’s no way to confirm it, we reviewed what happened and the only reason for the live site to be impacted was for your staging site to have been pushing changes to live. Despite the fact that we were not aware that there was such a solution installed on the staging site during our testing, we could have done a better job of understanding your setup and time constraints before making any changes.

Please understand that we’re not ducking responsibility in any way. Quite the contrary. Discussions have continued even until today to figure out what we can learn from this and everyone involved is very aware of where we struggled to live up to our own high standards.