Hi everyone 
,
Thanks as always for sharing your feedback with us. It really is helpful insight and helps us find our own blindspots too. As promised, regarding all the points raised in this thread regarding longer waiting times and software issues, we’d like to offer some more context and detail to these:
Taking the lessons learnt from the Fairphone 3 launch, we staffed extra capacity in our Customer Support team months prior to the Fairphone 3+ launch and therefore we had an average of 1 day reply time during launch. As soon as the software issues occurred it became difficult to keep up. Between the delay in delivery, the questions about upgrading to Android 10, combined with the critical nature of the software issues, we believe a perfect storm was created. We had more requests coming in per day than we could handle as a team.
Our Customer Support team focussed on those that needed our help most, prioritizing as much as possible all urgent cases of non working phones, repairs and software issues. We foresaw that this could take longer than expected and proactively started recruiting additional support staff continuously since September.
Additionally, a lot of support tickets were related to software issues which needed time to investigate. Looking into these questions with each customer to clarify symptoms, troubleshoot issues and find possible workarounds took some time. As a consequence, this meant that some other questions didn’t get a reply from us until much later.
Customer Support worked together with other departments to flag and categorize these issues and identified 3 critical ones. To keep our customers updated about the status of these issues, we posted frequent updates in our blog. In this blog, we also asked everyone experiencing these issues to contact Customer Support, which further increased the backlog. However, it is important to us that we know about each case – knowing the amount of customers affected has helped us further prioritize and find clues on possible causes/trends. This resulted in us finding several fixes (shared in the same blog post). Customer Support was/is also then able to individually update each customer who has reported issues.
Based on customer feedback and internal learnings, we have now made some changes to the way we handle the occurrence of software issues in future. Currently, we have a much better response time, although we are not fully back yet as not all issues have been resolved. Most new questions received are responded to within 5 working days. However, those who are waiting longer usually have an open case related to a software issue and are still waiting for an update. The upcoming software release at the end of February should address the issues this last group of very patient customers have, however should the waiting time be too long, please give our support team a call.
Besides the progress mentioned above we also have extended our webcare team who have been able to respond to your social media requests faster than ever before. We’ve expanded our Tech Support and Quality Team to better flag, identify and reproduce any issues reported, and we have refined our internal communication processes and are continuing our work on improving the structured way we approach any concerns we receive. Our newest colleagues in the Customer Support team are at the tail-end of their training period, have settled in nicely and are ready to answer all your questions. As you already know, the first line of Customer Support has only been brought in-house in 2019, therefore we don’t have years of data to rely on, but the learning curve has been steep. We have a long way to go, but we have also made some notable improvements.
That said, if you are waiting for a reply from us we promise to get back to you soon. If you need urgent help, instead of sending a new email or a reply please give us a call.
There was also a question on our software testing. To give you a bit more insight on this, we test on 3 different levels: at the assembly partner in China, field testing in Europe and the software testing of our sales and distribution partners. In the future we plan to increase the testing process and capacity further. Part of this would also entail improving the software roll-out strategy, favoring staged deployments of a new software release. This could then allow us to closely monitor issues before they affect a large number of people.
Thank you all once again for your patience and understanding thus far. It is much much appreciated!
Best,
Rae