Ticket System
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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.
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Sure. What I meant was it's not configured to poll our mail server. I can't see anywhere to set the polling interval, though surely it can't be set to 5 minutes or longer by default? I'd expect it to poll every few seconds.
Why is polling the only reasonable way anyway? Why wouldn't a large cloud provider like Zoho use a more real time solution?
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I would not expect them to allow you to configure the polling on their end, if you could why would everyone not turn it all the way up, all of the time?
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Good point!
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Sure. What I meant was it's not configured to poll our mail server. I can't see anywhere to set the polling interval, though surely it can't be set to 5 minutes or longer by default? I'd expect it to poll every few seconds.
Why is polling the only reasonable way anyway? Why wouldn't a large cloud provider like Zoho use a more real time solution?
I wonder if it's faster if you use their email service?
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@johnhooks said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
Sure. What I meant was it's not configured to poll our mail server. I can't see anywhere to set the polling interval, though surely it can't be set to 5 minutes or longer by default? I'd expect it to poll every few seconds.
Why is polling the only reasonable way anyway? Why wouldn't a large cloud provider like Zoho use a more real time solution?
I wonder if it's faster if you use their email service?
One would assume that THEY are using their email service and from the sounds of it, it sucks. This would make me wary of using it. Twenty minute delays on email delivery is not fun in this day and age.
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So apparently ManageEngine ServiceDesk can run on Linux: https://www.manageengine.com/products/service-desk/help/adminguide/introduction/installation-linux.html. I may have to spin this up and see if I can retire Jira.
