Sales and tech support

Question

I am extremely frustrated with the lack of support in both technology and sales. This is a significant concern coming from the co-CEO of an international marketing firm. As a result, I am now taking it upon myself to seek solutions to our needs with Trello. It feels like a Ferris Bueller moment—anyone, anyone, anyone? We are seriously considering discontinuing our use of Trello unless we get personal support.

Mike - Dreamsuite Consulting · Answer

I can't talk for Comcast but I have suffered from poor customer support with Microsoft.  Chatbots, clueless agents, multiple escalations, problems not resolved.  I think the perception of direct access is there but unless you're an enterprise customer, the quality of service is poor.  
Then there is Google, who are almost impossible to contact for anything.

Atlassian' support offering fairly represents the world we now live in I'm afraid.

I personally think it's rubbish but it is no more or less rubbish than the average.  Big companies have established that customer care is related to revenue and the more you spend with a company, the more they take customer care seriously.

Atlassian' support portal in my opinion is rubbish.  It is complicated, you have too many options to choose and so many hoops you have to jump through to submit things that should be easy.  It feels as a user cynically and intentionally done to reduce the number of support tickets created.  Merging Trello into this has degraded the quality of support for Trello too unfortunately.

But, I stand by my original statement that once you get past that, the level of support by the real humans is really excellent.  Atlassian should feel proud to have such an excellent support team and the ones I have dealt with for Trello have been amazing.

I don't know what your Trello investment is, I can see you have a premium subscription but not sure what the user count is.  If you are of a scale to look at Trello enterprise, you'll get a different level of support with 24/7 Enterprise Admin Support.

Otherwise, do what I do, play the support game and work out what to fill out to get a support ticket submitted.  Once its submitted, it is quickly routed to the right place.

As for alternatives, it's really not going to give me sleepless nights if you leave Trello but as a consultant that works in the productivity space, my honest opinion is that you fit the solution to your needs and if you rate being able to talk to a customer service agent higher than other features or functionality, look into other software.

In my experience, the simplicity, flexibility and functionality for the price makes it a value proposition that you'll struggle to beat with other software.  Also, the Atlassian Community is probably the strongest community out there, full of experts who can answer 80% of questions without you needing to contact Trello.

On that note, you still haven't actually said what technical or billing issues you are having so it is difficult to be able to put that to the test

P_ Blake Renda · Answer

Mike:
Thank you. We also use services from providers such as Comcast, Microsoft, and others that serve millions of users, allowing me to call an agent right away or chat with one in real time. With Trello, that's not an option. I could waste hours navigating through landing pages to find solutions or alternatives.

Mike - Dreamsuite Consulting · Answer

Hi @P_ Blake Renda

As a Trello consultant and not an Atlassian employee, I am curious to hear where you feel you are lacking support.

Trello has ~1million active users so you are never going to get a 1-1 personal service from Atlassian for Trello.

That said, you have just joined a community where you will get a great level of service from Trello experts, Atlassian support staff and people within the ecosystem which more than makes up for it.

Please let me know what areas of support you require both in terms of technical and sales and

I will try to help address your specific issues.