Customer Service Questions Concerning International Customers

Mark, if we respond to this thread in public, everyone in the world will see that we love our overseas customers so much that we give them priority. This is a dangerous topic for us to respond to.  We run the risk of creating fueds and nationalistic pride battles, turf wars, and preferential treatment debates. There is no way to please everyone all the time...

so here goes...

First let me address phone calls. Normally, you are in good shape to give us a call, it's just a little trickier with Logos 4 release timing.

We actually already give preferential treatment to international callers. When someone calls and identifies themselves as calling from overseas, we send a message to the entire staff asking for the next available agent to take the call. This usually works out great. Our international callers who are paying very high rates to call us at their own expense, and don't have the luxury of the USA/Canada toll free line, get helped asap.

Right now, this is a little tricky, because we are in an "all hands on deck" situation with the flood of calls we are dealing with from the Logos 4 release. We would still treat an international call with the same urgency as we always do today, the only difference is that there may never be someone readily available to take the call on the spot, and there is no way to hold that call in limbo and not put it into the queue. So right now it is a risky call to make from overseas if you don't want to wait on hold for a potentially long period of time.

We find that the majority of our international customers are already using email as their preferred method of contact right now. So what are the options for phone support? Well, we could set aside a dedicated rep or two for international calls only. That way all international calls would go to a separate queue. Unfortunately you can easily see the problem there. What if there are two reps and they both get a call at 10:00 AM and both calls last an hour? The next guy to call at 10:01 AM is still on hold for an hour. Then those three calls were the only calls that day, and the international reps are sitting on their hands doing nothing, while there are so many customers that we want to serve with excellence right away in the USA too. We can't dedicate a group of reps to sit idly by while no international calls are coming in and not help the US based customers...

You see the problem. There is no silver bullet.

So that brings us to your email question:

Again, same problem and the truth of the matter is that Logos 4 is a temporary bottle neck in the system. The problem will be over before we can spread the word enough to the world to fix it.

For now, the simple solution is to put the words INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMER in the subject line and we will attempt to prioritize those emails. Even so, as you can imagine we are inundated with communication in every department and in every form. Even moving to the front of the line may require a little patience with us.

We are trying to roll out the release of Logos 4 slowly and steadily, while still making a big splash, truth be told, we still have not even sent the NewsWire email message with the announcement, and we won't until things die down a little bit more first. (Die down, not "go away", we need to keep a little momentum going...and we can't keep loyal users from getting the new product just because we're busy!)

So if you actually live in a country other than the USA or Canada, feel free to put INTERNATIONAL CUSTOMER in the subject line to get priority, and remember that it may still take extra time right now to get back to you. Also realize that it is highly likely that some cheeky?/clever?/sneaky?/rascally?... Americans will most likely try to sneak their emails to the front of the line the same way. They may not feel anyone should get priority tratment and they may jump in there too.