Yet another request for better support (addressed at Capture One)
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Official comment
Hi Thomas,
Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback both here and elsewhere.
I wanted to take the time to write to you (and everyone else here), as I know that our support services have not been at an acceptable level for some time now.
In February, we made some internal changes and took the first steps to dramatically change the way we work in both tech support and customer service. As you mention, we were hit hard by the Russian invasion but even in the early days of the war, we were still bringing down the backlog of support requests with the help of the entire company (in the absence of our colleagues in Ukraine).
We are still working extremely hard to improve, and thankfully it is working. Over the last 30 days our median first reply time has been less than 16 hours.This of course doesn't mean that all our customers hear from us within 16 hours. Some hear from us a lot faster, and some unfortunately wait a lot longer.
Over the next couple of months, we will make sure all our customers hear from us quicker and we will endeavor to begin the troubleshooting process much sooner.
Regardless of how we work, some cases will take longer than 71 Hrs (The average full resolution time last 30 days).
I hope that you will experience first-hand the changes to our support service if you should run into a technical issue in the future.
Regarding the forum, we are also working on making it more relevant to our users. It is (and will continue to be) primarily a user-to-user forum. However, we do monitor it and as of June 1st, you will have seen Jack here in the forum replying to comments if necessary and addressing any important issues directly. He will be monitoring and addressing any issues that I (and the rest of the company) should be aware of and will also be the one working on improving the structure of both the forum and the help center.
So to sum this up: we are aware of the issues and will continue improving every single day. We see it and feel it – and our most of our customers do, too. Soon everyone who reaches out to us will see the improvement.
Thanks again for taking the time to write and for being a loyal customer, Thomas.
Christine Monberg,
Head of Customer Success. -
Yes I've had the same experience over the years - but I'm afraid it's the same with the forum here.
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I wonder what the reason for this is. The company must have at least some level of awareness of the dissatisfaction with their support. Is it just about saving money?
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Hi Christine,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm glad to hear that you acknowledge the issue.
A median first reply time of less than 16 hours sounds good. I don't believe I've ever experienced that. (Though, as mentioned in my initial post, replies from support don't always address the issue, and some replies appear to be just boilerplate text, so whether or not this is an improvement would of course depend on the replies.)
Let me just describe a typical support scenario. I make a request, and a number of weeks/sometimes more than a month later you respond. I reply more or less immediately, after which I sometimes have to wait for weeks before you get back to me. Sometimes I don't hear from you until much later when a new version is released; then I get a standardized message from the support agent recommending that I update to the latest version to see if the issue persists – regardless of whether or not the issue has been addressed in this new version. I then write back to say that the issue has not been fixed, after which more waiting, etc.
All in all you get the impression that if there's no easy solution to the issue you're experiencing, support will just brush you off hoping that the issue will go away by itself or, as if by accident, when a new version is released.
Currently, I have a couple of outstanding support requests from two months ago, and I have no idea what is happening on your side.
In any case, I'm looking forward to seeing the changes you have made.
Best regards,
Thomas2 -
Hi Thomas, thanks for getting back to me.
Yes, as you point out, we have some work to do and I can see by the list of your tickets that we do have some cleaning up to do in older on-hold cases too.
We do write out to most pending cases now, as we just released a service update. A service release is an occasion to reach out and follow up on a lot of cases, as the vast majority of cases are existing bugs that are fixed in the latest release.
I will have the team look into your ticket list in the next couple of days to see if we can offer you any updates to the on-hold cases and get back to you on the two latest tickets.
Thanks once again.
Christine0 -
HI Christine Monberg!
Thanks for Ignoring me - I just want let you know I just got the standard blah blah blah copy and paste support reply... as described above. "Regarding your question and your problem, I see that in your other ticket you have a 5k monitor which is more prone to performance issues... 5120×2880, try 3840–5120...Go to Settings - General tab..."
and so on and on.
And Hello to Thomas - respects Halelujah you have been heard! Apologies for my possibly inappropriate rude comment. (Takeover attempt) I wish you with all my heart, that there a solutions to your problems - will be found and solved. But does someone like me ever get the chance to respond. or at least the possibility of being ignored.
But now to Christine - I'm so pi*** off. For me, this ignorance is the worst. It may have something to do with the fact that I can't express myself very well in written words, no idea...But to be fair I've moved from Apple Aperture (which was pretty cool Software for organising pictures) to Capture One and I have been happy for a very long time - it's been a great time - now I have to make peace with Lightroom. The performance issues that came in with the 4k + 1 Monitor and the hunger for vram at NVIDA graphic cards - or 5k imac - with the Support answers like "the iMac is not pro grade hardware" (It wasn't much better with the iMac Pro then either) And since more than 2 years, it is not possible to write a file name with a drop shadow in the image and then print it out with CMM / ICC profile with an Epson SC P800.
I'm so fed up - Any Sh** software can print on the Mac (DXO PL, LrC, ON1 Photo RAW, Apollo, Preview aso). CMM and CUPs is real no rocket-science. For me it's time to move on. Maybe the software will be more Pro Again and full of innovation and less community development and making blah blah blah. "Jeden Menschen recht getan ist eine Kunst die keiner kann." Unfortunately, I was not heard and it is clear to me that I am not part of the direction that Capture One wants to go. That was different, that became clearer to me in the last few years.
I am wishing the best for the future, I am confident that the direction Capture One is taking is ideal for new Mac Users or Windows + iPad users (although I'm pretty sure Lee Morris won't make the switch. But who knows) - and semi-professional amateurs who think every pro uses C1 cause you have the better color.
A loyal ex-customer
PS Sorry Thomas for my self-pitying whining and pure try to take over - but I wanted to get rid of it - it's better now.0 -
If I may, I'd like to include the handling of feature requests, as an example of support quality that has deteriorated over time.
Back when Lily appeared to handle user requests they were regularly "Completed". We know that "Completed" only means that the suggestion has been read, recorded, and forwarded to developers, i.e., many "Completed" requests are never realised. However, not even this form of acknowledgement of a feature request is reliably happening anymore.
Once in a while some feature request is marked as "Answered" or "Completed" but there are many, many in between which are not. Have they been desk-rejected? Will they ever be considered? What determines whether a request is "Completed" or not? Is it worth a user's time to write a feature request when nowadays there appears to be the possibility that only other users will read it?
I believe some of C1's best features are the result of listening to users. The moment a company gives their users the feeling it is not listening to them anymore, the company will lose users and, critically, net positive word of mouth. Users will stop recommending C1 to others and they will publicly complain about it, which is much worse than them just migrating to another product.2 -
Hi Andreas, I did not mean to ignore you. I was merely answering Thomas' very thorough comment.
I am not going to go into details about the technicalities of your issues as described in the ticket - I am leaving that to the tech team.
I can see that Isak is on your case trying to troubleshoot with you and I can see that you are very upset. I would like to make sure that your issue is resolved if possible, even if you are leaving Capture One. I will tell Isak to include the new ticket to your case too and handle it.
As I wrote in my first and second reply, we are fully aware of the fact that our support service has not been at an acceptable level. I am happy to repeat it directly to you too, Andreas. I am terribly sorry and we are working on improving it.
We listen to our customers, we really do. Unfortunately from the support side we have not been good enough at communicating that we do.
Christine1 -
Hi Class A.
Thanks for pointing out the process around feature requests.
This and bug reporting is also something that we are going to change in the next couple of months. To create more transparency into the process.
As I just wrote to Andreas, all the requests have been processed. They are taken and fed into a system that our PM team use to decide the direction of the product. That goes for all the feature requests in here as well as the ones that are submitted as a ticket.
Unfortunately we have not been good enough at ensuring that the customers who took the time to submit these feature requests knew that they were heard and processed.
It will be changed soon - I am extremely happy to have Jack onboard as he will be a big part of driving that change, making sure that your input is funnelled to the right people and that you know that we listen and take into account every single piece of feedback we get from you.
Thanks again,
Christine0 -
Hi Christine,
thank you very much for responding. Much appreciated!
I'm very glad to hear that feature requests have been processed and it has just been a matter of not letting us know as well.
Your response and the attitude you communicated make me feel much better about contributing with constructive feedback in the future.
Thank you!0 -
@Christine Monberg, Thanks. I'm looking forward to hearing from your support agents.
@Andreas Neureiter. Your frustration is completely understandable. I've been on the verge of giving up on Capture One myself several times – because of the crippled and malfunctioning keystone tool (for which there was a fix/update not so long ago, though a disappointingly half-hearted one), the issue of disappearing masks which went unfixed for a long time, the handling of larger catalogues, etc., all of this severely compounded by the lack of support. And at the same time you see resources being poured into the iPad app, new features, etc.
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Hi Christine,
I have one further comment regarding support.
It often happens that a support agent forwards an issue and related information to the RnD department. What happens then is unclear, except that you have to wait again, often for a very long time, and often you don't hear back from any of them, and you have to write and ask if there's any new information about the issue, or if they need any further information from you. And then, after more waiting, you get a polite reply brushing you off once again.
This, telling users that an issue has been sent off to the RnD department, after which nothing happens, comes across as yet another way of postponing the issue indefinitely by passing off the responsibility to someone else to whom the user has no access.
Best regards,
Thomas1 -
@Class A; thank you. I appreciate the feedback.
@Thomas; the process now is that our tech team tries to reproduce, we send it off to R&D who then investigates further. They reproduce, look into other similar cases and finally consider if this is a bug or not.
If they can't reproduce it normally goes back to us for us to continue to solve the issue. If they can reproduce it, it gets logged as a bug and they work on a fix.
Similar to the feature requests, we have not previously been good enough at coming back to the users with info. We are doing that now and will continue to improve on that process too. So when a bug is confirmed, the ticket is put on hold until a fix comes out. When a fix is released, we write out, encouraging people to download the new version.
But we can be better at communicating status - so this is why we are changing this process as well.
Christine1 -
Hi Christine,
Thanks for the clarification of this process.
Thomas
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Hi Christine!
Thanks for the answer. Please fix (forward it) the multilingual bug on this website!
I stumbled across a bug on your website yesterday. Or I realized there is one. I don't see any posts (even in search - on https://support.captureone.com/) that are newer or published after the Capture One 20 (13.1.3) release notes. / If I change the language to US English, everything is fine / there! I just realized that.
Story behind: I was a beta Tester for the iPad (until the sliders had to move in the wrong direction) and was quite confused as to where to put my feedback. That communication and reporting of feedback and bugs is public on Facebook? I found out about this way too late via a YT video from David. (I thought - a way to exclude long-term users). And so I thought that this C1 forum is a remnant of better times, and no ones cares.
Best Andreas
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Hi Christine,
I've been waiting for two months now for a solution to this issue (#147215). I haven't yet had as much as a suggestion of what to try in order to solve it, and none of the questions I've asked about potentially related error messages in the log files have been answered.
I've received a reply from support today saying that the issue is still with the R&D department, and that it's assigned the status "To Do". So it seems that it's not your support department alone who's to blame for the state of your customer support but also the R&D department, and possibly the communication between these two departments.
Thomas
. . .
PS. For the sake of illustration, here's a screen recording showing a colour tag being added to six images and subsequently removed (by pressing Cmd+Z); after both actions Capture One becomes unresponsive for about 40 seconds.
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I think this is another case from Capture One of "talk to the hand cause the face ain't listening."
Support requests, feature requests etc. are read and passed on, but they're read by us frustrated users not C1 and if passed on, it's into a limbo of forgotten requests.
I have no idea how Capture One expects to survive in the future unless they start listening to users and actually doing something about the problems with this program. An iPad version? Meh. I'd rather have the basic functionality and legion of problems fixed before adding new ones. No doubt there are enough in the iPad version to keep C1 busy for a decade.
C1 is not cheap. It's aimed at professionals. Yet it has the functionality of shareware and treats users like rubbish. I'm very disappointed in the whole experience and would find it hard to recommend C1 to anyone I liked and even harder to pay for an "upgrade".
JC
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Indeed, it's difficult to imagine that development and maintenance of the iPad app hasn't taken up resources that could have been spent on solving some of the many issues with Capture One.
An iPad version? Meh. I'd rather have the basic functionality and legion of problems fixed before adding new ones. No doubt there are enough in the iPad version to keep C1 busy for a decade.
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> Thomas Kyhn: ...it's assigned the status "To Do"
Meaning, tongue in cheek, a fix will be in v23 at the earliest :-).
Thank you very much, Thomas for starting this thread. Your first post brought important signs of a life-form on the other side. May the boilerplate robots never return.
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Hi Andreas, thank you for pointing out the issue with the language - we are working on fixing it. Reg. the feedback on iPad, I believe it was done in a closed Facebook group, but this was a decision specific to the ipad release.
Hi Thomas, thanks for following up with me here. When our tech support team can't solve the issue (meaning find a solution or a work around) we escalate to our R&D department (Just as the agent has done). As she has also written you, as soon as the R&D department have looked in to it and come back to us on it, Marian will get back to you with an answer. I understand that this can be frustrating, but I can tell you that the case has been discussed internally, it is assigned to two reports that sits with R&D and Marian has done what she can. I understand that this is not an answer that solves your issue here and now, but I can't tell you that we can do anything differently.
And to loop in both John Clark and OddS.:
Our R&D teams prioritize their work based very much on the reports that the tech support team does on behalf of our users. So you reporting the bugs are essential to making sure that the priority is actually helping as many of our users as fast as possible.
As mentioned before, we listen, we forward, we work together with our R&D team to make sure they have all the information they need. And we are improving all the time (more to come, as mentioned earlier).
Launching the iPad version has had zero negative impact on that.0 -
Hi Christine,
Thanks for your reply.
I'm not blaming the support agent for this; I'm sure she has done what she can, and I have no doubt that she'll let me know when she hears from the R&D department. The problem appears to be with Capture One's general handling of support, which individual agents don't bear the responsibility for.
I'm just frustrated that this has gone on for two months, and that it has – up until your message now – been impossible to get any information about what's going on, except that the issue is the with the R&D department and marked as "to do". I've asked about possibly related error messages in Capture One's log files and have received no reply – this, apparently, is also something that depends on the R&D department. You should think that it would be possible for the R&D department to give out at least some amount of information, so that you know that something is in fact happening, perhaps also answer questions that support agents are unable to answer.
This extremely unforthcoming approach to customer support is making me reconsider whether it's a good idea to rely on Capture One.
Thomas
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"Our R&D teams prioritize their work based very much on the reports that the tech support team does on behalf of our users. So you reporting the bugs are essential to making sure that the priority is actually helping as many of our users as fast as possible. "
I'm not sure what this means really. You prioritise bugs or features or whatever the tech support team (of one?) thinks the users really want?
I've just had a hard drive fail. This means everything has to go to a new disc with a new name. While C1s appalling handling of reconnecting libraries and images is not a bug as such, it's just a really bad "feature". A negative feature, a road-block, a train wreck, call it what you will. There may be a logic there, perhaps one based on trying to create a multi-platform app but that escapes me.
Doing the reconnection process with Aperture was quick, simple and logical. Once a folder was selected on the new drive, Aperture was smart enough to understand that if the file structure was the same or similar, it would automatically connect everything it could. C1 doesn't even come close. For a program that supposedly is for professionals, that's a major waste of time, therefore money.
Given that something else comes even close to C1, users will jump ship unless these things are looked at. However, this is not a bug as such. It's just third rate interface design.
JC
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> Christine Monberg; ...to loop in both John Clark and OddS
Don't worry too much about me :-)
Thomas Kyhn wrote: "The problem appears to be with Capture One's general handling of support..."
I think he tells you that it is a management issue in the Capture One organization. And I will add that it starts at the top level, that is where it must be fixed.
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I think he tells you that it is a management issue in the Capture One organization. And I will add that it starts at the top level, that is where it must be fixed.
Yes. Customer support is clearly underprioritized. The fact that it sometimes takes weeks before your support department responds to new requests would seem to indicate that the department is either understaffed or disorganized. And the disconnect between the support department and the technical/R&D department means that as soon as an issue isn't entirely simple and it's passed on from the support department to the R&D department, you're no longer in contact with whomever is supposed to deal with the issue, and as everything goes through a support agent, who appears to be left in the dark too, you have no idea what is happening, or if anything is happening, and you're just left to wait, sometimes, as in this case, for months. For purportedly professional software it should be obvious that this isn't a tenable approach to customer support.
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@Thomas:
As mentioned earlier, we are working on improving this process to increase resolution time and transparency for you all. So while the current setup up is not ideal, I would like to state once again we are aware, we are working on changing this, but these changes don't happen over night.
Step 1 of this process has been to bring down the first response time, so you all know that we are here and are investigating your issues. We have done so successfully and will continue to bring it further down along with full resolution time and other key metrics that we know are important for our users.
Step 2 is to rearrange our workflows and escalation process to other company departments (Test, Product teams and R&D). This is in progress.
Step 3 is to ensure that the processes are more transparent for you to see and know that you are being heard. This is in the planning stage.
@John Clark: "I'm not sure what this means really. You prioritise bugs or features or whatever the tech support team (of one?) thinks the users really want?" - For bugs this means that every time a user experiences an issue which we classify as a bug we create a bug report. That report is logged with all other reports on the same issue. Our product and tech teams look at these reports both in numbers and in content to understand what impact this has on the individual user and how many users are affected by this and make their prioritisation accordingly.
For feature requests or UI requests this mean that every time a user sends in an actual feature request or in dialog with our tech support describes a desired workflow that is not possible in Capture One at that time, our agents create a feature request with our product team. That feature request includes details on the actual feature request but also details on who that feature would be relevant for (the requester's genre of photography) and more to make sure that when they decide to work on it, they have that additional information in place to design it the right way or maybe do something else that accommodates that need but in a different and smarter way.
So I would love for you to create a ticket with your points on reconnecting libraries and files and please provide as much context as possible. Our team will take that request and make sure the product team gets it.
Regarding communicating if and when features are changed/introduced we still have some work to do, as mentioned. Right now following our social media channels and reading the release notes is the best way to stay updated on our feature innovations. But again, we are looking in to seeing if we can change that so you will get a better insight into the status of the product development.
For everyone; I appreciate the dialog here and the constructive criticism. I take it all in.
I am in no way trying to downplay the experience you and some of our other users have had, but I really need to share with you the progress to emphasise that we do take this seriously and the team has made massive improvements over the last 6 months. Just last week we got a satisfaction score of 88,3%, our first response time average was around 12 H and full resolution time was 50 H. That is not to say that we are where we want to be yet, we still have some cleaning up to do before we can work on changing some fundamental processes to ensure a stabile service level.
So thank you for your engagement. If I can leave you with just 1 take-away it should be: We are listening and improving accordingly.0 -
Hi Christine,
Thanks for your reply.
One thing, regarding the satisfaction score and response time averages. This sounds good, but – assuming most support requests are relatively straightforward and easy to solve – it doesn't necessarily say much about your handling of less simple support cases.
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Without bombarding you with data and charts, I can tell you that the improvement is by far most significant on the difficult technical side (which accounts for 38 % of all of our tickets). But again, we know that we can improve even more and all this critique also comes from the fact that the starting point for the improvement was very far from ideal.
We are on it.0 -
Hi Christine,
Can you put me in contact with the R&D department? It’s been two months now. Capture One is close to unusable (becomes unresponsive, sometimes for more than a minute, even with small actions such as rating an image), and I haven’t yet seen any attempt from you to help solve the issue. What, exactly, do you expect users to do in a situation like this? Use other software than Capture One?
Thomas
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Hi Thomas. Let's not do double dialog. I understand your frustration, I do. Marian will reply to your message with the same question shortly.
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Hi Christine. Thanks. I'm looking forward to hearing from Marian.
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