I have been using amember for over 2 years now and have been an avid supporter and satisfied customer. But, recently over what I thought would be a simple upgrade to vsn 3.11 we have lost thousands of dollars and our business has been negatively effected. Unfortunately, now our product delivery and affiliate system is tied up into a solution that doesn't seem to be well supported in the event of problems. It's been 15 days now and though I've gotten a couple responses in that time and some of our earlier posts were answered, support has dwindled to a silent graveyard of communication while our business is still suffering. At the moment it seems support tickets are completely being ignored. Honestly, I hate to hang up my amember coat after buying 5 licenses and recommending this software to dozens of other marketers. But, after this experience, I will not be buying any more licenses and will not recommend amember to anyone. If this forum allows honest testimonials, here is mine. If you are serious about your business and downtime is not something you can live with, don't risk it on a software company that doesn't offer quality support. You'll end up losing like I have.
Hi Ring00, I am sorry that you are having difficulties with your upgrade to 3.11 and support. I have been seeing a 24 hour response time from the support team (exception of weekends). You mention that some of your earlier posts were answered, I'm seeing this as your first post to this form under this user id(http://amember.com/forum/search.php?do=finduser&u=13728). Just out of curiosity, what was your reason for upgrading? Did you test the upgrade in a test environment before going live with it? Did you back up before your upgrade? Are you able to restore from your back up? What kind of problems are you having, perhaps we (the community) can help.
I'm sorry for troubles with support, ring00. My apologies. However, although - there was 2 reasons for delay - firstly, you have provided incorrect ftp info. Just to understand - aMember support team currently handling several hundreds support tickets every day. And even for everyone, it is not a problem and does not take much time to verify ftp info before sending, nobody is doing this. Secondly, we should warn you, but anyway - by sending add-on messages every day you move your ticket to the end of queue - because we are handling older tickets first. It is how our support system working and usually it is correct, and it caused such long time in processing of your ticket. This and only this caused that you ticket was unanswered several days. It does not happen with other tickets and such delay is not considered normal for our customers.
I have been satisfied so far with the responses and response times from aMember Support. That said, I haven't yet had (knock on wood) any critical, downtime-causing, lost business types of problems. In this case, a businesses reputation depends on being able to get problems resolved within minutes or hours, not a few days. If a problem with aMember blocked my paying subscribers from getting access, I'd be getting a lot of angry e-mails and my hard won customer loyalty would start to plunge as fast as George Bush's popularity has. I think it would be a great idea for some alternate pathways for resolution for mission critical issues such as this. One idea would be for aMember to offer paid emergency support. I'd gladly pay for quick help to resolve something that brought my business to a halt. Alternatively or in addition, assembling a list of aMember freelancers - people who are available for hire for short-term emergency fixes - would be a valuable resource. Andrew
ring00, just out of curiosity and for the aid of others in the future. What was the problem that you had and how was it solved?
Andrew, we are going to offer such service in near future. The problem of ring00 installation was not-updated file amember/admin/upgrade_db.php. For some reason, file was kept from previous version of aMember and database upgrade for 3.1.2 has not been finished. This caused SQL errors during new customer signups. It really took more than it should take, and I am sorry for this delay.
I have never had problem with amember support always answered my problems within 24/48 hours but as my site has developed I too would be hard pressed if site was non functional for any reason and would be happy to pay for an emergency support system either as a pay per problem or by an annual subscription method.
Not to beat a dead horse, but one thing that I think would be extremely helpful if either the customer or support posted back into these forums the true problem and solution for issues raised in posts. Frequently I see "Resolved Offline" or "Problem has been fixed, details in ticket" but no follow up here on what was wrong and how it was fixed. While I agree, an emergency support would be a very nice offering, continuing to build searchable knowledge in the community forums will also go a long way into helping us help ourselves.
Totally agree with what you say regarding a self help knowledge base. An emergency support facility is more of an insurance really that if things do go bad in a way that disables a site there is help and advise available quickly.
I too think it would be very helpful to see the resolution of these issues out in the open so we could all learn from them. Sometimes I feel bad (OK, not bad - lame) for contacting the Support Desk for every little issue. I'd much rather review a forum such as this with past problems and their solutions so I could learn from it and potentially solve some of these problems on my own. There will always be site-specific issues and things that are more easily just fixed by Support rather than explained in a forum post but I'm sure many issues come up over and over again. With a little guidance, we could be fixing these ourselves and take some of the load off of Support. This would leave them more time to address unique/new issues, emergency issues, or to work on new features and enhancements. THanks Alex - looking forward to the availability of an emergency response system. Just my two cents. Andrew