So, I joined and paid for the whole Librem One package over 48 hours ago.
I can not log into my new Librem One account as it gives an error message.
I have emailed Purism, but heard nothing since yesterday, have written a further two emails to support to complain and try and find out an update, but no reply!
This is my first attempt to use Purism’s services and it’s been awful!
So disappointed! Makes me think if they can’t deal with this issue then buying hardware from them is not going to happen!
I went to the Librem One website, Thursday morning on my laptop so I went direct to the website.
I paid for a subscription & promptly got my receipt for payment.
When logging via the Librem One website the page reads " your account is pending, please wait & do not refresh this screen for 2 minutes unless you have completing the billing process"
The billing process was complete as I have said.
The message still shows, I can not get any furthur.
I reported it Thursday, was told Friday ( yesterday) it would be fixed by the end of the day.
It is now Saturday night / Sunday morning still no change!
I have been told that “developers don’t work weekends, so it can’t be fixed until Monday when they are in”
I love Purism, I want Purism to succeed.
But this has been my first encounter when purchasing a product & it’s been a total let down!
You can not charge people money, and when theres a problem say sorry, the guys who fix it don’t work weekends!!!
Shambles! And it does give a good feeling about future business.
Pretty sure you can, and from your description they did.
From what you’ve said there was some failures how expectations were set, as well as possibly how things were communicated.
The expectation that a small business would be providing 24x7x365 support with immediate resolution times should not have been set, regardless of whom set those expectations. There is a difference between response time and resolution time, and too often I see people expect IT to provide resolutions within the response time window. Some issues require specific skill-sets that are not available 24x7.
I think there was a missed opportunity to set the expectation of your billing cycle being adjusted to account for the initial delay to access the account, and I would expect Purism to offer that adjustment as it is a fairly reasonable thing to do. Moving the start date to match the actual start date of availability of services is something I think everyone can agree with, I don’t think that it having not yet been offered means they’re operating in bad faith, rather just something that hasn’t been brought up. It also may ultimately be necessary to re-do some part of the process which may result in issuing a refund or whatever so it may be too early in the process for the support person whom doesn’t know those details to be offering any of those kinds of input.
I’ve had some solid conversations with Purism staff regarding communications and while I think there’s always room for improvement, I’ve seen much larger companies have the same complaints raised because expectations weren’t managed appropriately.
For the support person who set the expectation on Friday of a Friday resolution, that is something that should be reviewed internally as that was an excellent opportunity to set the expectation of a Monday resolution and if it was able to be solved Friday then you’re happy that your expectations are exceeded instead of the current state where the expectations were set by Purism then not met.
It does appear that Purism did try to reset the expectations for Monday as the support staff required is not available on the weekend and I haven’t seen anything this far from Purism to set the expectation that they provide all kinds of support 24x7 so the expectation that they would have that staff available 24x7 seems to have come from outside Purism and in turn is not something I find reasonable to hold them to.
Just some thoughts on expectation management in IT support.
It really hard to know what is reasonable because we don’t know what is the nature of the problem. If this is just someone looking at your account and unlocking it or setting some configuration option for your account, than I agree that making you wait until Monday is not reasonable.
However, if Purism discovered a problem in its code on its server, then that is not something that web services companies typically resolve quickly. Not only do the programmers not work 24x7, but any code change in the backend requires testing to make sure it doesn’t break anything.
I used to work in a company that developed a web service application, and I can tell you that code changes on a running server can be tricky.
That may be, but time of day and timezones may come into play on that. I don’t know what timezones you’re in nor which timezones the required support is in nor what time of day Thursday this was reported in either timezone. I’m inclined to say between time differences and existing support requests and the implication that your first response was on Friday where they set their own resolution window as end of day Friday that I’m not comfortable holding Thursday against them as far as the time to resolution goes.
I already agreed that saying they’d resolve it Friday then not actually meeting that time is 100% on the representative that set that expectation.
Generally I’m inclined to attribute these kinds of experiences to honest mistakes as opposed to malice, I think an individual at expectations based on what they thought was a reasonable estimate and we’re wrong, because of the proximity to the weekend the impact was amplified and the experience much worse than the expectation that was set. I’m hesitant to say a whole company will be bad at support because of one person’s bad guess.
With that said I do think it is useful and important to share these experiences as it is the only way for others to find out if this is the exception or the rule, and it is also beneficial for Purism to know when and where there are problems and what can be done to mitigate them.
I don’t have all of the information nor all of the context to make definitive assessments, I’m just sharing my perspective formed in part by my own experiences.
Something else I’d like people in general to keep in mind is that if you’re now working with a separate support person than the one that you’re unhappy with, please try not to direct your frustrations at the current support person. I’m not saying you or anyone else is currently doing this, just making the connection as far as poor support experiences go and sharing something I actively try to improve about myself as sometimes it can be difficult to separate individuals from companies, but each representative is still an individual person.
I would never be rude, or direct frustrations, or use poor language in this type of situation, as thats not how I am, and I know doing such is unfair.
I have let the support team know how disappointing this has been, but this is my first experience of dealing with Purism on a business level, i.e paying for a product and it has failed hugely.
I understand there might be technical issues, but making promises and then breaking them does not give me confidence in future pruchases.
It doesn’t sound like great support but bear in mind that “Monday” is relative to a timezone i.e. your timezone may not be the same as support’s timezone.
This thread is turning into a sounding board, not a discourse of any kind. Its fast becoming inappropriate.
And before you accuse me of being a fanboy trying to shut down someone griping about The Company, consider whether your posts are actually helping anyone do anything anymore.
