Better workflow/explanation needed
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Penny Delaney User
I reached my subscriber limit on my current plan today. Knowing that was going to happen as soon as a loaded a new batch of external subs I'd received, I went to look at pricing/options and realized I was actually on a higher level plan than I thought. I chose to downgrade the plan, trusting the site when it said it would automatically upgrade to the higher subscriber tier if/when I crossed the limit. But it turned out the downgrade turned OFF my auto-upgrades and wouldn't even let me do it manually, putting me in a position where I wasn't going to be able to add new subscribers at all for almost a month, presumably including people trying to subscribe via the form on my website. I was deeply frustrated but eventually figured out I had to cancel my downgrade before it would allow me to increase the subscribers tier, because the system couldn't handle a request to increase the price on my current plan while a downgrade was pending. I understand I should now be able to go in and re-downgrade to go into effect as of my next billing cycle. I get why the extra steps are necessary, but if there isn't a way to make the system understand the concept of downgrading the plan but increasing the subscribers, then it should be much better documented that this is how it'll work. The AI chat bot had no idea, I had to wait for a person to help me with this. (He was great, by the way.)
Madina Umirbek
Thank you for posting, Penny Delaney User! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you describe any specific points in the process where additional documentation or guidance would have been most helpful?
- Were there any particular features or options you expected to find in the system that were missing or unclear?
- How did the experience with the AI chat bot affect your overall perception of our customer support?
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Penny Delaney User
Madina Umirbek
- I kept getting a big, red warning box saying I was over my subscriber limit and had to upgrade--but I thought that was supposed to happen automatically. Using the same term, "upgrade," for both the plan type and the subscriber tier is confusing. It felt like it wasn't going to actually let me move forward unless I paid for the higher plan type, since everything saidthe subscriber tier upgrade would be automatic. It wasn't clear that the automatic upgrade was deactivated because I had a pending plan type change.
- The feature that seemed to be missing was the supposed "automatic" upgrade to the next subscriber tier. Nothing clarified this wasn't happening because of the attempt to downgrade the plan type. Eventually I noticed the big red boxes on the upgrade page included an "enable automatic upgrades" link that was greyed out. That's what clued me in to needing to cancel my pending downgrade, upgrade the subscriber tier on my current plan, and then re-do the downgrade after that. It still took a couple of tries to get everything done in the right order.
- The chatbot was completely unaware of this distinction. When I explained it, it kept saying it "should" work automatically and kept telling me to check for the word "scheduled," which I think was a reference to the downgrade that was set to go into effect with my next billing cycle. The answers it gives are WAY too long--huge lists of steps and references that were too much to parse in response to a fairly straightforward question.