MC Clients,

I received several PM's requesting we allocate more internal resources towards the online forum... as a result you may have noticed a recent increase in forum participation by MC team members...

Have merchants found value in the increased participation?

Is the value great enough to continue the effort?

Are the quality of responses meeting (hopefully exceeding) expectations?

Are the response times meeting expectations?

Your feedback is appreciated.

The staff does add valuable info to the forums. It is great that you would seek to have them participate more and more. Only thing that I notice is, that they are too quick to promote Value Added Services from that cost $$ instead of thinking more like a merchant who may not necessarily have the resources to spend more $$ and not being so quick to sell . Sometimes I wonder the intentions. Are they sales people or support people for the forum? Participants? Right?

This is a great point and question Rick.

The MC team members I appointed for "regular" forum activity are support personnel (not sales people).

I have instructed them to point users towards our products and services when appropriate (example- if a user is looking for a way to establish better link pop... they have been instructed to explain several methods to build link pop organically as well as educate merchants we offer a link service to help in that capacity.

You do bring up a great point and there is certainly a fine line that should not be crossed. We certainly don't want to be perceived as "overselling"- especially in the forum.

I'll keep an eye out for this and make sure support issues stay within the support role... and the "selling" is held to relevant areas. Thank you for your feedback.

Captain,

I do think their participation is very important and as mentioned above they might refrain from the sales side until after they have given some helpful tips or tricks.

One other thing, it seems that those techs that used to help with HTML and give us good feedback and exmaples are no longer here. It sure would be nice to see that again.

Doug

Thanks for that feedback. Can you clarify the second point for me? Maybe a specific example from "what we used to do"?

It's something I am interested in.

Chris

Personally, I miss James. He is a big loss to this forum. In the beginning (and I'm going back almost 2 years), whenever a merchant asked a question, in less than 1 day it was answered and discussed. In the past 6 months, the trend has been that you ask a question and its likely to be ignored by MC staff. Other MC buddies jump in, but one can tell MC staff has visited but do not reply.

One of the things that imbued me to monsta was the participation of MC staff in the forums, and I welcome their recent activity after what seems like a long absence. Its a great assest.

I realize that not all merchants are fully aware of your 'Value Added Services', but I too feel MC Staff are to quick to mention them in the forums, plus I'm baffled as to how the large list of extra services in the admin panel can be considered 'News & Updates'. It just feels like where ever I look your trying to sell me something.

Not to hijack the thread, but ditto on the News & Updates section overselling.

I believe that has been discussed by the development team. Ultimately, we want it to be a positive experience when someone visits their admin panel. I'll keep you posted (again, sorry to hijack the thread).

Thanks everyone for your feedback. We recognize the value of participating in the forums and have committed to responding with a great degree of frequency.

I was very concerned that there was a perceived lack of care by s in their own forum. Our goal is to answer posts specifically directed to MC staff within four hours. Anything urgent should still be sent in via ticket or shared on the phone.

I will also communicate to the forum team to be watchful of being too "sales-ish" unless the specific fix to a post might be the value-add service that offers.

Good feedback. It goes without saying that we appreciate everyone's participation in the forums. It's nice when we can have very specific things addressed. Oftentimes when a topic is started, the original intent gets lost if others post comments that do not contribute in a healthy way to the discussion.

Back to the original topic:


Thanks all!

Chris

Sure,

One example is the time that James helped us out with creating sitemaps, providing great examples. It was awesome and many merchants received the benefit of that assistance and if you do a search you can see other times he helped with reviewing sites and giving tips on how to fix code errors etc.

If you do a search on function calls and the drawstring functions you will also see the types of assistance that MC merchants were used to getting.

Sometimes if we step back and look at what once was we can learn from those things and evolve to a better place today. Yes times change but attitudes do not have too.

Doug

Alright, that is what I was looking for. Thanks for your help Doug.

Well said.