DAZ soon and life here in Dazland
daveso
Posts: 7,005
We're told DAZ employees, etc do not read the forums. They should. There should be a separate subject area devoted to feedback to DAZ staff. I guess they don;t have time to worry about what their customer base thinks?
just a thought, at no one - but, you cannot depend on anything at DAZ other than DAZ in undependable. Its like DAZ soon. Nothing stays the same and what changes may not change for long, and it may not be worth the change. What should change doesn't. Its frustrating.
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What actually do you expect? Serious question.
First - direct communication with staff as there used to be many years ago.
Next - Get the website functional. Fix the search function, in the store and here in the forums.
Also - Come up with a sales technique that isn't always changing and always takes a math degree to figure out what is happening. It gets pretty tiring having to do math magic for the sales. Like the other day... hy, an item cost $2... awesome.
I'm sure others have additional ideas
I do know the solution though.
I cannot speak to the state of Dazland, but there is generally a huge crunch on the tech world in terms of things that affect staffing and development. I am hopeful that Daz is able to hold on to its niche in the face of these challenges, but there are challenges. I am increasingly fearful that there will be a lot of unpleasant fallout in the midterm from the driving forces behind these challenges, and that what we end up with may not be worth what it costs.
As you say, Daz staff and PAs used to participate. Unfortunately this frequently elicited unproductively negative resposnes, with people brining up their personal hobby-horses however indirectly related to what that poster actually did. Given that daz people have jobs to do, and PAs content to make, a lot of them simply found participation an unproductive drain on their time and emotional resources. We are all the losers as a result.
The idea of a feedback thread is actually not bad, is it? And it's a concrete proposition that sounds absolutely doable.
Maybe we could have another thread for DAZ to put announcements in concerning things we're interested in but that are atm treated like state secrets for reasons I don't understand. Like the current situation with Mesh Grabber 2 not being released. Does really nobody read the respective thread and see the mounting frustration there? Why not just put out a nice little statement saying, 'We appreciate you looking so much forward to this upcoming product of ours. Unfortunately, there are technical problems and the release will be delayed for at least XX days'? There's often so much secrecy involved that I really don't get.
Daz does discourage PAs from pre-announcing products, in part to avoid situations like this.
makes sense for sure.
Mmmm... I have to begin with a bias; I have a close family member who is an HR executive who deals exclusively with dealing with problems so I have low tolerance to forcing employees to deal with a public interaction where there is no expectation of customers being either polite or sane. I had just finished an article in BoingBoing about how the anime channel, CrunchyRoll, having to shut down its customer forums because a) we can't have nice things without abuse, and b) people somehow loose all of their inhibitions when dealing with forums. I hope people realize that Daz3d does use surveys (filled them out), focus groups/ beta testers (I have been in one and beta tested too), uses real sales figures, and communicates with their vendors. There are issues that are irritating such as the search functtion which will require the site to go offline for a substantial period of time for installation, debugging, training, and people will still conplain when some function or bit of data is lost in the transaction (visualize the number of products that must be made available for search and then triple checked). I suspect people won't be as enthused when they are inconvenienced by the transition which will happen sooner or later. As for the economics and annoyance of sales, no one ever seems to put up real sales figures to compete with Daz3d's internal sales figures so that might be a start to achieve what you want. The Mesh Grabber 2 situation is an example of the complexity of all of this. I suspect the store would love to have a working version to sell. The P.A. making it is almost certainly working as hard as they can to have the product work; it is very possible that they have no idea how soon it can be released. Your frustration won't make the product get to the store any sooner. Forums are funny things. The bulk of consumer product complaints are due to user error which is very noticable if you read the forums carefully. It would probably be much more productive if issues were properly documented, calmly submitted through the proper channels so that "X store does not have a Catchup sale at this time of year that requires buy-ins and makes 45% more in the month of July" rather than "I don't like these sorts of sale".
this is what I mean. I buy from people that interact, etc. Right now I've contaqcted 3 companies that I bought items from, one was a tent that was $600. No return communication. I will never buy from them again. The others the same, pre-sales questions. No reply, no sale. Simple as that. DAZ does respond sooner or later to tickets. I've actually had pretty good response overall and things were handled to my satisfaction. I would really like a much faster response, but I'm not unreasonble and realize they are busy. I do miss the capabilty of just picking up the phone, dialing the 800 number, and getting an instant answer from a knowledgable customer service person. That is a rarity in today's world.
Edited to say I think being older, I've seen a lot of very good customer service, and many today don;t know the difference, as its been bad for most of their lives. There are a few golden companies around, but they're few and far between.
I understand that, but if there was just more communication, people would be more understanding, and generally, a little pre-release buzz would actually be a good thing for the PAs and DAZ too, wouldn't it? I so enjoy looking forward to a great new release of an item I can really use, or would just love to have for whatever reason. It's so much more interesting and engaging than just popping in casually to see what's on the menu today.
Also, as posted above, there are quite a few PAs who do participate actively in the forums, as you mods of course know, and I never see any rude or disrespectful or overly hobby-horse-ish interactions going on. People post in their commercial threads to express their excitement for upcoming items, and then after the release they ask questions and post their experiences and renders. These are all very interesting and friendly threads. So the concept of engaging directly with the customers seems not such a bad or tricky one really. Same when DAZAnne or any of the other employees do post directly.
From my own memory, when the Platinum Club existed, one of the perks were previews of new products. The perk was taken away because people would take the proprietary information and post it on Daz's business competitor's sites (the Poser/Daz studio wars were hard). It is hard for people to understand in this internet world but not all publicity is good. Likewise, if you haven't seen the intense amount of work that people like Richard Hazeltine do to prune out the unpleasantness, I ask you to take another look. I have communicated with more than a few P.A.'s since Daz3d found through... other channels, and it is a persistant problem of them having to nuts, creeps, and stalkers.
Sure! Daz reps can come address us forumites. Oh wait, a Daz rep already did that, coining the term here (presumably the term already existed elsewhere). Use of that term here gave some of us a long-lasting source of ironic mirth and mild irritation. I don't really care to have a lot of contact with Daz reps. I don't need to be addressed. I would like someone there to post some basic information in answer to unanswered questions. Perhaps that's not possible or practical - The answers might be "Not sure, we don't really know." Not much to say, then.
I am surprised and grateful that I get invited to participate in surveys. That's kinda cool. I usually have something to say. Not sure that's always a good thing.
As for sales, my spending is not really that different than it used to be. There are hot times and cold times. Some new sales are not like the old sales. Some are surprisingly better, others are worse.I like to participate in the better ones. I take more advantage of gift cards now. I suspect that will continue. That's obviously to Daz's advantage - They get a chunk of my money before I've even bought anything. Since I do buy the GCs, I guess they're doing something right.
Forums are sort of a trap - Many people get in trouble on forums. It's surprisingly easy to do that. And that could be why some people avoid forums.
I think some PA participation on forums is nice, though even that is a slippery slope. Unfortunate.
I think it would be a great idea to have a Daz staff member pop in once in a while or even have their social media person keep an open thread. Customers get increasingly annoyed and I know I personally would want to know that Daz actually cared about us.
Seems we have very different expectations from DAZ, or other vendors/companies. maybe it's because i work in retail management and have to deal with entitled customers daily. For me, as long as I can see the product, get a good deal and it works, then I have no need to contact or interact with anyone. I have no issues shopping here, I can usually find what i want/need, there are always deals and the handful of times i had to put in a supoort ticket, they eventually got taken care of.
I am not opposed to having a DAZ interaction forum, might be fun, but considering the staff are probably busy doing their normal jobs, they would have to promote or hire someone to be the forum contact person since it would probably end being a full time gig.
Agree.
. Transparency is good, and I would bet my last dollar that DAz cares about it's buyers more than you think. I think DAZ participating here would be a waste of an employees time because all of us have different perspectives and you cannot cater to most of the people all of the time and frankly they have a ton of cheese on their plates already. No room for whine. Frankly, there is no pleasing us as a group. I think that's why we have moderators. Important stuff from the masses does get heard vis them. Our individual thoughts are not even on the back burner and never will find an audience here because sometimes we fail to see the big picture as we focus on this or that detail. It's hard to see the forest when we focus on trees.
Forums can help too. Remember that dang animation plug-in that they recently offered as a freebie that came with a free trial and it had a memory hole completely locked everyone's Daz like it was some kind of trojan horse, and the community 50/50ed the heck out of it because otherwise it would have been months and a backlog of support tickets that would still be unanswered? You want community feedback. Full stop.
If DAZ is afraid to get bogged down in unhelpful comments they'd have to delete, I'm kind of confused, b/c isn't this what the mods are doing all the time anyway? By this logic, they should just close the forums altogether. I understand that we can be annoying, and there's trolls and all that, but I do think we're pretty helpful too, for each other and also concerning DAZ problems, as was pointed out above. Also, it used to be supposed to be more than just a shopping place.
But I figure even a pure announcements thread for things that the mods pick up on the forum that people are interested in would be great. Like, When will the X sale start? What about product Y? Have we noted problem Z, and when do we expect it to be fixed? It's a really common thing for other websites to post explanations and apologies when things don't run smoothly. Here, DAZ usually lets the mods take all the rep and the blame and keeps mum. Maybe we could change that at least?
I'm not sure this would be more productive for anyone than the current set up. Forum threads almost invariably become cluttered by users arguing or trying to correct each other (and yes, I realise the irony here in arguing back); tickets can be submitted concise and free of clutter.
I guess you'd be in the position where any answer given by Daz staff was inherently given the okay to be shared (they'd already be doing it!), but in most cases that's a relatively minor advantage.
Yes, I would absolutely like more support and reponse from Daz - I've had some support tickets languishing entirely unresponded to for months (including some that could be closed, as they've been fixed by updates, but their system seemingly won't let me mark a ticket as solved until I have a response) - but if Daz has to budget their support resources, I'd rather their time was spent on reading specifically submitted reports rather than massive forum disagreements.
Sure, sometimes we want community discussion of an issue, but that can happen, and then people put in their tickets off the back of that, once they have all their details sorted out.
I very seldom have a need to speak to a PA about their product or anything else. The only thing that annoys me about Daz and the forums is when DAZ announces something, everyone is excited, and then you never really hear another word about it. For YEARS sometimes. LOL.
Whenever I have an issue with anything, it's usually another forum member that helps me with it. barbult comes to mind. She's always such a nice person and so helpful and knowledgeable :).
In fact a lot of people thought it was a Daz Studio issue, since the plug-in was released within a couple of days of a DS update. I can't recall if some forum people also figued the issue out, or at least the proximate cause, but it was an internal effort (from people not involved with the third-party plug-in development) who identified the issue, worked with the developers on fixing it, and alerted the froum team so that we could tell peole what the issue was.
I think a big part of the trouble with communication is all of the people are expected to agree with the DAZ belief system even if it's obviously wrong. Like, if you entered a "ticket" and you've been waiting one and a half years without a response, the next time somebody tells you to submit a ticket for a problem, it will seem frustrating and pointless. But you can't call it frustrating and pointless, or tell that person this absolutely isn't going to work. And when somebody replies and says their ticket was resolved promptly and perfectly, that doesn't make anything you said about the fifteen year old ticket untrue. It's like everybody is supposed to ignore reality and act as if everything is perfect.
Personally, I don't want the forums to replace the support department (there are some advantages to having tracking numbers, insulating pA's from dealing with unruly customers, giving staff time to do research and repliocate the problem etc...). The informal ad hoc help in the forum is definitely a help and I think it makes a nice complement to the support department rather than a Thunderdome system wit the person who spams the forum gets the most support (i can't imagine how it would work otherwise if you require support to pause their work, read through the various forum comments, triage the issues that are not due to user error, move those ahead of the people who have ticketed support questions. Unfortunately, support questions aren't all equal to each other; the bulk will be user based errors or errors that are due to unique computer ideosyncrasy, followed by issues that only the creator/PA can solve, with issues that DAZ3D can solve. Sooner or later, you will run into the bottle-neck of an issue where a missing texture must be supplied by the PA (for example) so you must wait for the PA to reply even if it takes months. No one is saying everything is perfect. What we are saying is that the forums are gathering place for users to discuss things and there are official channels for doing the sort of stuff that requires tracking.
The ticket system is OK in theory, but now fails miserably in practice. When was the last time you submitted a technical support ticket and actually got a problem resolved? I no longer get any human response to technical support tickets at all. Only sales support gets a response.
I think you've summed it up really well, Nemesis10.
A week ago, actually....
The point was not that the ticket system should be replaced. The point was any time a person has a valid complaint, somebody says they have had the opposite experience, as if that means you were lying or something. And someone says there is no actual problem with whatever you complained about. Problems never get addressed. That can't be good for business. A business with that practice can only survive if there's a monopoly. And that survival might depend on the product being some kind of necessity.
Your reasoning is why I don't want the forums to become a secondary arm of Daz support. First there is this idea of a "valid complaint" where people forget that this is their opinion of a complex situation. It is not that people think the conplainer is lying. It is a requirement that an issue can be replicated on a lot of different rigs; if several people can get the product to work properly while one person is having problems, the likelihood that the problem is something specific to the setup of the person having the problem. Moreover, there is that pesky problem of someone with incomplete knowledge and experience trying to tell a company that has survived 24 years in a rapidly changing environment against fierce competitors that they simply don't know how to run their company.
Let's take "search" for example.... We all agree that it is pretty horrible here. Daz3d is very aware of it. Sooner or later, they will overhaul the software that provides the backbone of the website. It will be expensive (the more future-proofing required, the more expensive), take a long time with the store offline for a protracted time which will cost the store both income, PA's and users (people tend to forget the store if it is gone for over a month), will require a ridiculous amount of labor to recategorize and re-index a vast number of products. Since they will have to triage effort and cost, there will likely be a cull of some products in the store since how do you rationalize spending money and effort for something that you may sell one or two copies a year. People will complain. Nonetheless, someone will post at least once a day that "search" is terrible here as if the technical and business people have never heard this before as they sit in their offices planning ways to make the solution least miserable for everybody.
In an ideal world, people would come in politely, well informed, using one standardized method, respect boundries, and not back seat drive but this is not human nature. I have a favorite story about two customers in a bank. One of them needs a pen to sign a document and can't find one. All the tables have the remains of a chain that once tethered the pen to the desk save one esk which has a pen still chained to the desk. He uses it and gets back in line. He says to a fellow bank customer: "Can you believe this. We trust them with our life savings and they chained down a 25 cent pen!" The other customer says to him: "Yes, that is because we know how trustworthy they are and they know how trustworthy we are".
I'm not even sure about sales support tickets getting responses now. I've been waiting over 2 weeks for an issue with a $150+ order so... the refund deadline is getting close...
But like others have said, question about sales support waiting times tend to be met with someone saying "actually mine got sorted out super quick so it's probably on you" and that's not exactly productive.
I don't think people are saying "actually mine got sorted out super quick so it's probably on you" as much as "actually mine got sorted out super quick so it's probably random and based on how many tickets and how complicated the tickets are that they have to process at any given time".