Seconding this, one of the primary reasons we went with AX instead of some of the competitors was the easy access to support. Not sure if its intentional to go from a chat-style support system to “email only”, but it does feel like customers should have at least been notified this was going to occur. Hopefully its just a side-effect of upgrading UI/UX elements and not an intentional move.

Cheers!

To give everyone the full background on this:


Once upon a time we used Intercom for the chat icon, and that was our full support system. Each conversation was essentially a “ticket” that was picked up and worked by our support team. As we grew we needed to upgrade our helpdesk system so we’re now using Service Cloud. That way we have actual ticket numbers, better tracking and reporting, and all the good stuff that a proper helpdesk system has. So that pop-up chat window, while still named Chat, does’t yet have an actual chat feature and is now an interface to search support or open up a ticket rather than emailing support@automox.com. We are planning to add chat back in now that we’ve done the transition from one system to another, but I don’t have a firm date on when that will happen.

In the meantime, that brings up another question that usually comes up at some point in the lifetime of a community, which is having an adjunct group chat system such as Slack or Discord. Is that something that folks would be interested in? That way if you do have a quick question you can pop in there and ask it and get a realtime answer from me, one of the support folks, or another Automox user.

Thanks for the backstory, definitely understand switching support systems that offer more robust features. However, as a customer it can be frustrating when systems get deprecated/disabled without notice, especially when they were hailed as a selling point for becoming a customer in the first place.

+1 for a chat style community, I’m in most of my vendors Slack groups, and I find it to be way more efficient & engaging than traditional forums.

We do try to make sure we give advance notice on those sorts of changes, so sorry for dropping the ball on this one and not making sure we got the message out soon enough and to a wide enough audience. That one’s on us!

I find having a chatroom to be a good complement to an online community. It gives a place to both get quick answers as well as for experts and power users to discuss answers to community questions before posting. I’ll talk with some folks here and see if we can get something like that going.

@Nic from Automox,

The Bubble chat icon says “Chat with an Expert”. We expect to chat with real expert and not automated Otto. Also, I’m able to chat with one of your support before we signed the agreement. Then after its all OTTO.

Thanks,


Ulyssis

For context, while the chat did let you enter your question directly, it’s all the same amount of support staff answering those in the same timeframe that they’d reply to chat. It’s not like you’ll get slower support by putting in a ticket than you would have in the chat window, as we just used that interface for all of our tickets.

I would agree on the need to have an expert available via the chat. That was the biggest selling feature in moving away from our previous patching solution. While email support tends to be decently quick sometimes you just have a question that would take 30 seconds to answer, or you go through the whole process of answering Otto’s questions just to get an error at the end and have to start all over again.

Thanks to @Mrichards we how have an Automox community slack:

This is a community-run chatroom, so not an official support channel, but I and other Automox folks will be in there to answer quick questions.