Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jameslk | Hacker News Reader

Just don't expect a response from their support, even if you're a paying customer. I've reached out multiple times for different issues via email and haven't heard back. Trying to find their support email was hard enough since it seems to only be randomly posted in their community support forums:

https://replit.com/talk/ask/Where-can-I-contact-technical-su...

https://replit.com/talk/ask/How-to-change-username/7326/1894...

Here's what paying customers see when they press on the "Get help" button: https://imgur.com/a/9U8WGme

> Check documentation

> Ask the community

> Request a feature

> Check out recent updates and changes

> Report a bug

Funny enough this company should come up since earlier today I tried to reach out to them over Twitter. Just crickets so far.

I get being a startup and all is hard, but if you're taking customers money and the only way to get help is community forums, that's pretty inexcusable.

EDIT: They've responded to me via Twitter now. I really like the Replit product and I think it's pretty innovative. I've commented about it on HN before in a positive light. It's unfortunate they haven't given as much attention to their customer support and that I had to post something negative here to get attention. I do hope they make a change. It would be a net benefit for their customers and their brand overall.

Hi James -- we do pride ourselves on our customer support and as you've seen on Twitter I do a lot of support personally too, and have my email publicly to help people.

In this case, it was a technical issue -- we're still trying to understand what and why it happened but GMail automatically trashed your email and so Front didn't assign it to our support staff.

Here is a screenshot from Front: https://imgur.com/a/POb5hEE

Nonetheless this is good feedback and we'll do better in the future and make it easier to contact us from the site.

“GMail automatically trashed your email”

Maybe if customer support is important to you you should consider not using a notoriously unreliable email service.

> notoriously unreliable email service

The things I read on this forum

I mean, here's one instance where gmail's uber sophisticated AI seems to have classified a seemingly legit email spam?

For a company that prides itself in customer service, I don't see any other way but to run their own email exchange (ala Amazon) because their private systems can then discern between email-ids of paying customers and spam, if nothing else.

And then they couldn't use their resources elsewhere because maintaining your own email server is notoriously hard if you want good uptime.

Managed services make sense in many cases and dismissing them isn't always a good idea if that's done so easily, without further consideration.

I don't get that. Normal downtime is about the hardest way to fuck up email. I believe the last time my small office mail server didn't deliver legitimate mail was when I was 18 and haven't quite figured out yet what the hell was running on all these computers, and it literally ran a week with disk full.

I mean there are things about Gmail that might make one think - I shouldn't use this as the email of my business if it is important to me - lots of them exposed and upvoted on this forum.

What do you recommend?

I've run my own for 15 years with no problems. So I recommend learning how to set up postfix. If you prefer not to do that, people here seem to praise fastmail pretty uniformly.

For a small startup, I like GrooveHQ. It’s like the Zendesk experience but less janky, much simpler, and well suited to a small team. Just have your support emails forward to Groove. Will still be email support from your user’s perspective. You can keep your current workflow going but turn on forwarding to try it out.

In my experience, any ticketing system will be a huge improvement over using a shared gmail inbox for support.

Hi,

Appreciate you reaching out to us and being patient. Our average response time is under a day, but it looks like your emails were being archived before reaching our shared inbox. Either way this is on us and we are looking into why it was the emails never got to us as well as the issue you reported. I have also responded on the email, so will continue the conversation there.

If you (or anyone else) does not hear back from us after reaching out feel free to add urgent to the subject line or cc me obaida@replit.com to the email and I will make sure we get to it.

Thank you!

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