Ticket System
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I don't have a problem with it. The extra features that come with the Enterprise version I'm unlikely to use anyway, and if I was, I'm very unlikely to get round to using them within 2 weeks. I'll only be trailing the basic features which are included with the free version anyway. And it's a common marketing strategy.
At the end of the day, if I get a cool product for free, I'm happy.
I could do without quite so many sales calls though.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I don't have a problem with it. The extra features that come with the Enterprise version I'm unlikely to use anyway, and if I was, I'm very unlikely to get round to using them within 2 weeks. I'll only be trailing the basic features which are included with the free version anyway. And it's a common marketing strategy.
Problem is, I don't want to take a bunch of time determining which parts are free and which are not and figuring out what to set up and what to not and I sure don't want to expose it to other people on the team and have to explain all of that and hope that they don't start using something that will disappear. If it was only me, maybe I'd take the effort if I was really in need of a new product. But just to casually try it in a multiple user environment, nope. It's the same as not giving us a trial at all.
Yes, it is a common strategy. So is spam. Doesn't make it good and doesn't mean that they shouldn't expect upset potential customers.
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@scottalanmiller said:
It's the same as not giving us a trial at all.
Eh? It is a trial.
As you mentioned, it would be awesome if you setup the free product first for something like 2 weeks, then they enable the extra features so you can try them out (granted it would be better if you could choose when to start your trial of the extra features and turn them off on your own schedule).
This would allow you to build up the free, low cost option first - make sure it's working as good as it can be before you add the extra cost features. Then see if you really need/want the extra features.
I think they won't do this because they now that many people will just opt to be cautious and just keep the more expensive package, even if they could have lived without it.
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@Dashrender said:
Eh? It is a trial.
Yes, A trial, but the trial that I requested. I can't see what it will look like, act like or function like. It is a trial of something different, related, but different. So I can't test what I need to. It's A trial, but not the trial we agreed to.
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@Dashrender said:
I think they won't do this because they now that many people will just opt to be cautious and just keep the more expensive package, even if they could have lived without it.
I doubt that that is true. People do not consider a free trial and just say "oh well, $500/month, that's not that much."
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
I think they won't do this because they now that many people will just opt to be cautious and just keep the more expensive package, even if they could have lived without it.
I doubt that that is true. People do not consider a free trial and just say "oh well, $500/month, that's not that much."
From free to $500/month, no you're probably right - but then the free product wasn't a trial - it's free.
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@Dashrender said:
From free to $500/month, no you're probably right - but then the free product wasn't a trial - it's free.
Right, I'm not attempting to get a trial, I'm trying to try out a free product. I did not request a trial nor agree to one, it's a forced thing to new users of their free product.
Or should I say "prospective" new users. I'm no longer a potential customer, that kind of tactic means that they and I do not agree on how our relationship will work. They think that they can treat me poorly and I don't agree. Relationship done. I've looked at Zoho for a number of things in the past, but if this is what they think of their customers, I don't need the headache. There are plenty of competitors and I will just work with them. It's not evil, it's just bad customer service and not something someone who genuinely cares about their customer relationship does.
I just consider my time and my team more important than Zoho does. It's their prerogative to only allow free use to people who agree to an enterprise trial. Nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with us no longer considering them a vendor option because of it.
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Here is another way to look at it...
Zoho's Hope: That pressuring us to get addicted to features we have no interest in seeing and then taking them away will convince us to become higher revenue customers.
What actually happened: We felt that the customer service problems were more than we want to deal with and don't feel like being bothered dealing with them.
It's like any relationship interview. Sometimes the interviewer is really aggressive believing that they hold all the cards and the potential employee is desperate for a job. But if that employee is not desperate and has any ability to choose, then a bad interview from the company perspective will cause them to not be able to hire the good candidates because the good candidates will just go somewhere else.
Same here. We are not desperate, we already have a free, hosted ticketing system. We don't need another. It was casually mentioned and we casually were going to "interview" the system to see how it was. What we got was an aggressive, obnoxious company that used pressure tactics with the assumption that we are desperate. We aren't, they "failed" the interview and we've turned them down.
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Tagging @vidya to make sure that Zoho gets the feedback.
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You've could have just messaged him since you're the only one who is really complaining
My issue is that it will take me at least 2 weeks before I even get around to doing a proper trial. If companies want me to trial their software then they really need to make it 6 months.
But I'll let you know how I get on, if anyone is interested. My first impressions are pretty positive.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
My issue is that it will take me at least 2 weeks before I even get around to doing a proper trial. If companies want me to trial their software then they really need to make it 6 months.
Well there might easily be a six month trial, I didn't sign up for any trial and got two weeks. If I actually wanted one, maybe it would be six months.
I agree that a proper trial takes way more than two weeks. But I often need to test, share and discuss nearly immediately - which I cannot do because of this.
So my insight is that this is the worst possible way to do it, the trial is poor for people who want one and a problem for people who didn't request one. Hard to see who it works well for, but easily to see where it fails for both key categories of potential customers.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I could do without quite so many sales calls though.
Can start giving out the robot number from the other thread.
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@BRRABill said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I could do without quite so many sales calls though.
Can start giving out the robot number from the other thread.
That's a great idea actually. Course then you can't listen in. It's 214-666-4321. Yeah, I bookmarked that right away.
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Update. I'm not getting on too well with Zoho Support. There are areas that feel a bit half-baked. Like the data import routine. I tried to import a spreadsheet of our existing tickets and it errored with "mandatory field omitted" but it didn't tell me what field that was and there appears to be no documentation. So I was having to guess and use trial and error. That feels a bit sloppy.
But the killer is that there is a delay between e-mailing a ticket and it appearing as a new ticket. The delay varies between 5 minutes and 20 minutes. That doesn't seem right, we obviously need tickets submitted by users to be created instantaneously.
It may be an issue with our setup. However, I posted a question in the forum (which appears to be the only way you can contact Zoho support) but after 19 hours my question is still "In Moderation". It hasn't even appeared in the forum yet, never mind been answered. Free products can be great, but they need an active forum to make up for the lack of paid support.
I really like the product, but feel it is a bit too rough at the edges and the lack of support is a big problem.
I'm about to start another trial of Zendesk because they've made some changes since I last looked at them.
Failing that, it looks like we'll be using RT because my colleague really likes it. I'm not too keen on having to run a in-house server with Sendmail and Apache when there are free or low-cost cloud based alternatives, but if it does the job and is easy to maintain I'm happy enough.
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It's taking 5 - 20 minutes on a system that they host for you?
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Correct. No idea why but I'm sure that can't be normal.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Correct. No idea why but I'm sure that can't be normal.
If it takes that long for a forum post to go up, maybe it is. Doesn't sound like the issue could be on your end. I assume normal emails don't take long to get around. Do you have GMail? Open a ticket from that, if it takes a similar amount of time... it's not you.
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Most ticket systems allow you to change how often it polls the email inbox.
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It's not polling, we're sending an e-mail directly to Zoho's servers, which they then process.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
It's not polling, we're sending an e-mail directly to Zoho's servers, which they then process.
They would be polling. While it is possible that they build an email server expressly for the purpose of their ticket system it is safe to assume that they did not. What all systems like this do is drop the email into a filesystem or database and then another system connects either directly or over IMAP and grabs the email every ten seconds or ten minutes or whatever. Same as how Spiceworks does it, for example. Polling is the only reasonable way to handle email in this manner.
