Pigsback - Free Gifts For Clicks!

Thank you droopsnout. First time tried the crossword and won. Beginner's luck. Cheers

Many thanks to Darragh for the answers. What a pity so many of them told people to do what they had already done: email postmaster!

I am concerned that he requests people to include their MSE username in any communication. Why? How does it help the enquirer if PB can tie up the PB username/account with MSE? I can see no advantage to the PB-er, but I can see that it helps PB to identify more readily those people who have a pop at PB more readily than they would like!!

I note that we are asked to include "MSE Forums" in the subject line of our enquiries. People have already done this in the past, and some people still didn't get an answer. I don't therefore see how this gives "preferential treatment". For what it's worth, a similar request and assurance is given on PB's own forum, but people there still complain that they don't receive emailed responses.

It seems to me that PB require a more sophisticated Customer Service email tracking system, so that unanswered emails don't get "lost".

I was also disappointed by the number of answers that were of the "I don't understand how/why that happened" nature. That said, I do know that the general public can be unbelievably daft when carrying out transactions, and that the best constructed systems can fall prey to even the most innocent piece of unpredictable naivety!

However, I appreciate that he must have spent quite a lot of time in typing the answers. The real test comes, though, in actually doing the research to find out all the answers to the questions to which he responded with an "I'll find out" response, or similar.

The very fact that Darragh has begun to deal with these questions is encouraging. So Happy New Year to Darragh and all at PB, and we wish you continued success as the business develops.

hi darragh,

giftaid is a tax benefit for registered charities. if the person donating is a UK tax payer, the charity can claim back the tax, i think that makes a £1 donation worth £1.28 to the charity. i'm not very well so i haven't found any links for you, it's mentioned in martin's new book so is probably on the MSE site somewhere.

about the missing boots or L2S vouchers - is it possible to email everyone who's waiting to let them know that they're on a waiting list? i have emailed to ask if my boots voucher is lost in the post. no reply. no offense, but there's no point in my shopping through your site if the rewards aren't going to turn up. i'd rather go through a cashback site. i don't have any tracking problems, i've had my points for shopping through pigsback but those points are worthless if they don't turn into a reward at some point.

thanks,
jelly.

catanna4u wrote:

Dear Darraghd,

I was wondering if you could include tesco vouchers with your rewards. i know it will come in handy for my grocery shopping

Or what about Luncheon Vouchers as they can be spent in any supermaket. Would be handy to save them up for christmas better than the saving stamps/cards as you are then not locked in to one shop. And can get the best deals from each supermarket.


Yours

Calley

My post is going to be in regards to this post:

----> Can you have an automated reply saying when our email arrive so we at least know you have them rather than waiting 3-7 days for answers?

-*-*-> Not automated, no. The risk of auto responses causes problems with spam senders - we'd get such a volume of rubbish email into the office that the mail server will grind to a halt due to the quantity of responses that might be generated.

In other words - say you sent a reply and we sent an auto response, but you had an auto response (as some people do) saying "thanks, I'll get back to you as soon as possible" - our auto responce would hit yours and they'd be sending each other mails all day.

Open that up to all the spam and virus senders (validating email address with responses etc) and 250,000 email addresses of members and see what fun we'd have?

What I'll do is we'll ensure we answer and acknowledge every email (whether we resolve the issue or not) within 24 hours of receipt of the message. Again
spam filters and not being added to safe lists can cause issues and we're looking at ways around this at the moment.

Firstly, i believe this is poor practice of a company. The main problem i see on this website is the customer service. Why do you think so many large companies provide auto responses to customer questions. Generating an auto response gives the customer a sense of feeling their question is being pushed along the paths and being dealt with.

What you are saying about the loop of an auto response is true, but this only happens if there is poor coding [well actually this could never happen in the case that i will suggest]

Spam filters can be a poor excuse to emails not being answered. Spam filters work in many different ways, but there are ways to stop getting Pigsback email filtered as spam. Also, I cant quote figures but i believe a large number of cases of service providers have a Junk folder. Spam is not simply deleted once detected spam [although i can be in some cases] but is more commonly placed inside a junk folder. If every email was responded to i believe that you would see a smaller number of complaints of not getting a response.

This is the way I think you should handle pigsback emails:

Firstly invest [this will pay of in the future i can assure you] in a good email support desk. This can all be set up with different filters etc so the MSE subject can automatically be forwarded to you. All the handling of emails will be done via the internet, not through an email client.

Therefore you replies will look something like:

Next thing to do is limit the ways in which they can contact you. Don't have open email address such as your personal email address. They shouldn't even know any email address exists.

On the website you should have a form like the on at refer a friend (obviously quite a lot different but you get my point). You can they have all their open/closed tickets. WOW! that means emails wont get lost as they are all kept on the server

You can also have an image automatically generated such as the one below, I'm sure you will have seen this somewhere but this example was taken from Yahoo



So on the site they can submit their question and get their answer. When they have filled in all the boxes (having the email support on the actual website provides lots of benefits such as you will know the account it was sent from etc as some might not send from their registered email address, can also provide browser information etc) their question can have an auto response (we are dealing with it...) and the question is then piped through to the support desk.

These are just my suggestions on how i would do it If you buy a decent enough help desk and use the correct methods to go around email support then your customer support will greatly improve.

I hope this makes sense, and remember i think i have quite clearly written, this is only my opinion.

[Oh and something like http://www.propanelsystems.com/ is some example software]

~ Matt