Support breaking down?

I had a support ticket open for ages. Since it wasn’t urgent (anymore), I just waited and assumed they’ll eventually answer. Then the long awaited answer came: Support just closed the ticket with a general template-reply about support being understaffed, without even reading my request.

Honestly, why even have a ticketing system if you don’t bother to reply to tickets? I had to contact support several times and every time I first had to post a complaint on the forum before they looked at my ticket. That’s not how support should work, especially if your product is less than perfect.

Don’t get me wrong, I still like the idea of the Fairphone and despite some problems with the hardware and the way they handle orders, I’m still using it. But after ordering four phones for family members, I’m reluctant to recommend a phone to friends with this kind of support. They might be better off to buy a Samsung or whatever from their local mobile provider.

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The e-mail I read about a support ticket at least encourages to resubmit the ticket if the issue still exists. A pain, I know, but at least I’d hope the odds of getting a reply ever is now going to be greater. Because you’re right, things couldn’t go as they were.
I’d hope that a significant proportion of submitted requests have been solved by either the update or people figuring out how to things themselves. I’d also imagine that people have frequently put in support requests about their previous support request about their initial support request not being answered. I do hope this drastic measure means they have less overhead admin (such as following up tickets that are no longer relevant) and can now actually get back to efficiently helping people that are still experiencing problems.

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I’ve made worse experiences with my former Nokia. All they ever sent me was a generic answer. Fairphone at least tries to respond personally (and I’m sure they have less staff than Nokia had at that time).

I also think that most support tickets were irrelevant already and/or follow-ups. A lot of problems can be solved by the community here in the forum. People just have to read. :slight_smile:

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What is the problem you have with your Fairphone?

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It’s not that I have a problem with the phone itself. It’s the documents they added sending a replacement for my defective phone. They included a full bill which didn’t mention it being a warranty replacement. This led to DHL billing me again for customs, so I had to pay the taxes on the phone twice. I called DHL and they told me there is nothing they could do and that I should contact Fairphone. But since Fairphone don’t even read my ticket and close it with useless a template reply, it seems that I have to bite the bullet and cover the bill myself even though it’s clearly not my mistake.

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No that’s not at all what that means. You should contact support again and now you’ll probably get a useful reply quickly.

I resubmitted the request. But the question still stands: Why keep a ticketing system if you only handle support requests that are also discussed on the forum. I had to contact support about four times and every single time I only got a reply when I mentioned on the forum that my request isn’t dealt with. If one only handles support requests that are discussed on the forum, why not make the forum the official support channel and do away with the ticketing system? The could be a special category where discussions can be marked as solved.

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This is supposed to change now.
The automatic mail you got was sent to everybody who still had open tickers and then they were closed so now support is not overwhelmed with requests anymore.
The main message of the mail was “Please try to find a solution for your problem on the forum or elsewhere. If you have a severe issue that can’t be solved on the forum re-submit your request and you’ll hopefully get an answer more quickly.”

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I recieved an email today about my support request, they apologise for the late response and finish off the email by asking me to submit a new request. WTF???

THIS IS NOT OK!

I submitted a ticket yesterday (cracked case), and haven’t even had an automated reply to say that it has been entered. No idea where/if I can view it online to check status etc. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Hey all,

Thanks for sharing your feedback. Since the end of last year the pressure on the support team has been very high. This pressure built up because of a variety of reasons, which I’m not going to sum up all here. But in any case, I can tell you it is quite challenging to have a team of 8 people helping out roughly 100.000 customers with a huge variety of questions, working with a pre-order model with long delivery times, causing many many people to inquire on their order status. Couple that to a totally new, innovative product and internal requests to help out on other fronts, and you have yourself a huge backlog in no-time.

We had the suspicion that a lot of old requests in our system were questions to which customers in the meantime already found an answer to, which is why made the choice for a drastic measure and chose to close a big part of the old tickets in our system. @navigium and @eralaek, this means in your case that you had an important issue to solve and you received an automated message that your ticket got solved, which is indeed unacceptable. In any case I’ll make sure you’ll receive help today!

We are working around the clock to help out others in the meantime. Next to that we’re making big changes to our support structure to prevent this from happening again.

I can only thank you (again) for your patience and (again) apologise for this unprofessional way of dealing with your request. Your support makes this movement possible, why this is such a shame.

Michiel - Customer Support Manager

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Hey, I’ve seen that your ticket was submitted successfully, and will make sure you receive an answer today. That you didn’t receive any automated message is weird - so thanks for flagging this. I’m gonna find out what’s going on!

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Hi Support team,

same here - I have now, weeks after submitting my request, received the generic response email, which hasn’t helped me solve the problem (that hadn’t solved itself meanwhile either, unfortunately).
I have just re-submitted the request, and would be grateful for swift follow-up now. The issue with my FP2 doesn’t allow me to make phone calls with it, which is a pretty major limitation, considering that the product is, well…a phone.
Thanks!
Marie

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