Yes, I am a contractor for MTD/CIS. I used to own a flashlight company that made similiar products. For CIS, I setup the division and trained the people based on my experience. I also started the products, website, ecommerce system, etc. Now days, I design products, fix the website, tweak the ad campaigns, etc. I have also contracted with other companies doing related and unrelated work. Customer service is handled at MTD by Maria and Anna. Anna is going back to school so this summer it will be just Maria. I am the only person from the company that reads the CPF. The CPF makes up a small fraction of our sales now days thanks to our improved advertising. Back in the 'good ol days' the cpf made up most of our sales and in fact it was the cpf that helped us get started almost 10 years ago. But the market and the cpf have changed since then.
Customer service in a forum post is a tricky thing. It can be hard to correlate forum posts to emails, etc. Ideally, the most efficient process would be used and that would result in the most rapid resolution. Just as I said in the welcome letter at the top of this forum, it is better to simply start with an email or phone call. But some people like to fire off an email, wait a couple of days, start a cpf thread, fire off another email, etc. It is like we are twitter or a slot machine or something. Customer service takes time and all the frantic messaging doesn't help. Countless times I have logged onto the cpf in the morning, saw a new post that made it sound like we hate our customers and then audit the email, talk to Maria, etc. Turns out that once again people are just not being patient. Our response times are typical for a small company. Phone calls really are best. Emails are second but they do get lost and that just makes people more frantic. Coming on here and starting a thread doesn't help. It just turns the cpf into an email system.
Forums are best when they convey new information, not just act like private messaging services. It is the same thing every time, my package is lost, is this blemish normal or should I be concerned, etc. If I respond to every one of those, I encourage the rise in noise for this forum. There was a time when I did that and the forum just became a giant email board. New people said they got a very negative impression from visiting the forum (the ratio of good to bad news in email is well established). So even though I badly want to answer every problem right here it takes will power to wish the person well but not say anything. Every post I grit my teeth and ignore, encourages the next person to actually email or call. Otherwise, they would all post since that provides the quickest satisfaction (but not the quickest resolution).
So it is a choice between appearing to have slow customer service and products that always fail. Most small companys with a forum presence opt for the first choice.
Of course this thread, like the welcome thread will be ignored by most. At times, my strongest post is the one I don't make. I wish our relationship was better.
peter
