Joost May Have Gone Into Public Beta But It Still Takes Them 77 Days To Reply To An Email
So after what is potentially the largest private beta ever with over 1m subscribers, Joost has finally opened its doors to everyone else and gone into Public beta mode.
As I am now a full time linux user I can’t run the application but by all accounts from using it in previous version it seems to be a nice piece of software (albeit nothing amazingly unique) and the screenshots I’ve seen certainly seem to show a really nice GUI.
But let’s forget about the beta and the software for a second and try and understand why it’s taken a company based solely online a massive 77 days to reply to an email I sent to them… That’s right, 77 days!
After signing up when it was entitled “The Venice Project” I wanted to give Joost another try but my attempts to login (or to find a confirmation email with my login details) had failed completely so I decided to get in touch with them via the contact details on their site.
This was well over 2 months ago and I completely forgot about the product and the email I sent until last week when I received a reply telling me what I needed to do to get logged in – frustratingly there was not the slightest hint of an apology for the staggering delay!
This example to me shows where some Internet based businesses are going wrong. A lot of money is being pumped into the latest technology but is it really too much to ask that some of this investment is put into some decent customer support? A bit of live support, support email ticketing or just having a contact number on the website really can go a long way into building trust in a brand.
I fully agree that this is a problem for many businesses out there. Customer support is something that can be so important to create customer loyalty. And really, in a time where everyone is swamped with advertisements about products, I believe that any company should value word-of-mouth marketing more and more.
In a startup company I can understand that it may be hard to get support organized while also working on a great number of other things, however, that does not make it any less important to figure out your service strategy. Let’s hope internet businesses will catch on to this and perhaps also try to reinvent customer services like they are trying to reinvent television/phone/whatever
Joost does have a unoffical IRC channel that was created by some of the developers early on and I can usually get a response in minutes if there is an issue from Joost staff .
irc.freenode.net #joost
I sometimes contact support so an issue will get ticketed and put into the bug tracker but most of the time I use the IRC channel for the very reasons you point out .