I am very sorry PMPro and our paid support did not work out for you. We processed your refund as soon as it was requested.
I don’t like 1 star reviews. They suck, and we try to avoid them. But worse than bad reviews, I don’t like that you wasted 4 months and dozens of hours trying something that wasn’t going to work.
Your refund request and review have prompted me to look over our ticket support history with you to figure out how we could have done better. Could we have gotten an acceptable solution to you sooner, or barring that helped you to move on from PMPro before you wasted so much time with it?
It’s too late to help you avoid the struggles you went through, but here are some things we are thinking about.
> They make it sound so easy.
This is something we are always working on. A few years ago, I had the team scrub the specific word “easy” from our website. We don’t want to lead people on. It’s not easy to build a website or manage a membership operation. At the same time, we don’t want to scare people away. There are many non-developers who set up PMPro and our Add Ons, and it would be just as bad to scare away a user who would have found value in our plugin.
It’s hard to strike that balance. A while back, we started labeling our Add Ons with difficult ratings. Many of the ones you were working with were scored to require developer support.
The specific features you needed, while often requested and something that one could imagine might be easy, actually required a developer to set up and test. To our credit, we pointed this within 2 days of opening your first ticket. We pointed this out repeatedly to you as you tried to move forward on your own.
> BP integration will do what I was asking all along and none of them mentioned that.
Our team is instructed to try to take a step back when users request something to see if we can get at the real business needs. Sometimes there are alternatives. We sometimes get caught up in answering specific questions and aren’t able to do this. In reviewing your initial ticket with us, I don’t believe that recommending BuddyPress, which is a large plugin with many of its own moving parts, was an obvious answer to the questions you gave us. However, when you submitted technical follow up tickets, we should have picked up on the frustration you were having sooner, to prompt us to look for alternatives.
Here are some other things we are planning to do in our support to avoid similar situations in the future:
* We’ve updated the “How much support can I expect to receive?” section on our pricing page to include more detail about the cases where developers are required or not. (If there are other specific sections of our documentation you felt were misleading, let us know.)
* From now on, when we recommend a customer find a developer for support, we are going to note that on the user record. This will make sure that our support team has this context when handling new tickets from the same customer. We want to avoid leading customers on by supporting specific technical issues, when the greater issue is that a developer is needed to manage the work in general.
* We are looking for ways to make it more likely for customers who post multiple tickets have the same staff handle those tickets. We work in a first come, first serve basis, and whatever support agent is working will get the next ticket in the queue. In your case, you had 5 different agents help you across at least 5 tickets, and each agent had to rediscover and re-recommend that you wouldn’t be able to do what you were trying to do without developer support. We can add some flexibility into the queue so agents are more likely to work on tickets for customers they’ve worked with in the past. If the same agent had seen your follow up tickets, they might have stopped you earlier or been able to step back and figure out the business requirements and if there were non-coding solutions that worked for you.
* We are going to more strongly recommend alternatives (or simply moving on from PMPro) when customers express disappointment in our support costs or the costs for recommended development. In some cases, we will be more likely to proactively refund customers and let them know that our paid support is not a good fit for them.
* In other cases, we will simply remind customers that they can get a full refund. While our written policy on the website is a full refund within 30 days, in practice we will do a full refund whenever technically feasible. You might have felt locked into using PMPro because the 30 days had passed and you didn’t want to lose out on the money you spent. In reality, you could have gotten a refund in August instead of waiting until October.
Sorry again for the frustration we’ve caused. Thank you for sharing your thoughts here, and prompting us to improve our products and support.
