Hello all... I'm Joe Fedor, Director of Product Management at Printable. I know many of you personally, and many of you online here. I wanted to take some time to address the topic of the last several days regarding customer support. I've been with Printable for seven years, and, like all my colleagues here, I take my relationship with our customers quite personally and have been watching this thread with great interest.
- First, I want to thank all of you for your input. - Second, I appreciate everyone's acknowledgement of the positive aspects of their experience with Printable, alongside those areas where you feel your customer experience has been less than optimal. - Third, I'd like to talk about some what we're doing to help. One thing I won't address personally is support operations and procedures, although I am involved here at Printable in helping come up with ideas for us to deal with our growth. As has been mentioned by other posters, we have recently seen a few key members of our support team move on, which is always difficult to deal with in a growth cycle. However, we are rapidly bringing several new team members online, and you will notice the impact of these excellent and professional individuals. Also, we will be making changes to support procedures, operations, and staffing over time in our effort to improve your experience. Now, what I will talk about in great detail is what we have on our product roadmap to make our product line easier to use and more intuitive, in order to decrease or eliminate the need for interaction with customer support in the first place! The common goal of these initiatives I am describing is to improve your Total Customer Experience (TCE) with Printable. To that end, we have embarked on a multi-pronged effort to address the continued improvements needed vis-à-vis the supportability of the Printable line of products and services. This effort is involving almost everyone at Printable, from engineering, through product management, QA, doc, training, IT, support and CPM's. It's a continuing journey, with milestones but not an end point, and will be an ongoing part of our "company DNA" going forward. Here, I've outlined the concrete and measurable steps we're taking to make major improvements to the product lines, across all fronts. We will maintain a palpable sense of urgency, focus and steady progress on the below tasks, and much progress has already been made. These efforts are in addition to, but tightly coordinated with, our ongoing product roadmap features and enhancements. ------------------------- Online Help/Documentation ------------------------- We will be abandoning the knowledgebase.net implementation within FusionPro Web in favor of an online, context-sensitive help system, that will act as a tutorial for all tasks that can be done within each screen of the Manager. We will ensure that this is use-case based, and should greatly enhance the self-sufficiency of our product. Over time, we'll add content around frequently asked questions, tips, and examples. In addition, we will be adding standardized tool-tips, and right click menu items for frequent tasks - across most all of the editable data entities within the system. ----------- User Guides ----------- We are making improvements to our FusionPro VDP User Guide, as well as creating documentation for our Job Express product, and enhancing the install and support documentation for our FusionPro Direct product. ------------------------------------------ User Interface Standardization and Updates ------------------------------------------ We will be reworking much of the currently disparate means of performing operations in the Printable Manager, and focusing on a few key standards for performing operations that will provide a much more intuitive and self-discoverable means of using the product. This includes navigation, editing, grids and tables, hierarchical "tree" navigation and so forth. We're working closely with support, our CPM's, and key customers on these improvements in all areas of the products. ---------------------------------- Tracking and turnaround of defects ---------------------------------- We are implementing a new defect tracking system across the company, to match the one currently in use for our VDP systems. With this new system, we can greatly streamline how we track and report on defects submitted by customers, providing them answers quickly about resolution and increasing our general Service Level Agreement metrics with our customers. The defect count has been steadily going down, and we'll continue to look at root causes of reported issues, as always. --------------------------------------- Tracking and turnaround of enhancements --------------------------------------- As our product roadmap becomes more detailed, and extends further into the future, it's more and more likely that requests from customers are already planned for, and have an existing release date. It's important to get that information back to our customers quickly, and if a new feature, the Product Management team will have streamlined means of answering the request. -------------------------------------------- Publication of enhancements and new features -------------------------------------------- We have a very current release notes process in place, and if you do not receive these release notes, you should take advantage of them by going to http://www.printable.com/email and subscribing to them. We'll continue to ensure that our customer base is well informed and made aware, in a timely manner, all of the features and enhancements that go out every month. This helps let you know about new features, but for existing features that you may not be aware of, we are planning on subscription-based content, probably in a newsletter format, to let you know about features that are not newly released, but that you would find useful. ------------------------------------------------ New Features for streamlining complex operations ------------------------------------------------ We will continue to streamline and make more intuitive many of our more complex operations - especially in the areas of bulk uploading of content, bulk editing, image and asset handling, and variable data product setup. ------------------------- Next Generation Reporting ------------------------- We will be not only reworking the infrastructure of our reporting systems, but allow it to be customizable by customers - thus providing you better insights into their workflow, tasks, throughput, and lessening your dependence on Printable for implementation. -------------------------- Highly integrated products -------------------------- We have several large initiatives to continue to bring our products together more synergistically. This includes: - A major effort to tie the creation of templates within FusionPro Desktop to the setup and publishing of those templates into versioned and variable products on FusionPro Web Stores. - Our Rules engine that is so effectively used within our variable templates will be broken into a separate server product, and be made available to our ProspectLinks product, thus ensuring further continuity between our Links product and our VDP engines. This will also include a better, more efficient way of specifying complex rules for Versioned and Variable product web forms in FusionPro Web. We have been very busy carefully prioritizing and resourcing the above tasks, based upon quantifying the pain we're solving for in the field, and the continued improvements to our measurable ROI to you, our customers. These are our plans to make our product easier to use, and therefore more supportable, and to make you less reliant on customer support, which will in turn improve our ability to provide the best possible response times. Thanks for taking the time to read this - we are listening. JF BTW - Look for information on this forum within the next two weeks on the availability of the soon-to-be-launched Printable Web To Print forum. -- Users of FusionPro Desktop have unlimited free email support. Contact Printable Support at [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- View FusionPro Knowledge Base, FusionPro Samples at www.printable.com/vdp/desktop.htm -- You are currently subscribed to fusionpro as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- -- Note: All e-mail sent to or from this address will be received or otherwise recorded by the e-mail recipients of this forum. It is subject to archival, monitoring or review by, and/or disclosure to someone other than the recipient. 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