Contacting Customer Service and Technical Support
For a complete list of contact phone numbers, email addresses, hours of operation and links to LiveRep and Support Forums, please visit our main Contact Us page.
Two other commonly asked questions:
Q. Why don't you offer a toll-free number for customer service?
Q. I didn't get a response to a recent email. What's the best way to email for help?
Q. Why don't you offer a toll-free number for customer service?
There were a number of factors behind our decision to discontinue toll-free support in May of 2003. It wasn't an easy decision, nor one we took lightly, but based on the factors listed below, we felt the change was a timely and necessary one. Here's why:
* Keep our pricing as competitive as possible. While price increases may be inevitable, we didn't want rising service costs to drive any further pricing pressure.
* Residential long-distance rates lower than ever. In most cases, consumers can now get long-distance rates as low as .02 to .05 cents per minute. If we took the average customer and calculated the expected costs to call us via a toll number vs. a toll-free number, we estimated the change would cost individual customers less than $1/mo.
* Reduce confusion and increase consistency.
While we traditionally offered 800 or toll-free support to eSignal users, support for Advanced GET software was serviced by a toll number in Ohio. We also introduced several lower-priced products (MarketCenter LIVE, Advanced Get Charts, QuoTrek, eSignal Basic, etc.) and with those much thinner margins, could not justify toll-free support. We felt the confusion created by supporting different types of service, for different groups of customers, would eventually lead to reduced service quality for all.
* Expanded Service Offering. As a result of the savings from eliminating toll-free service, we were able to re-direct those funds to other areas to expand and enhance the services we provide:
Online Training - through the use of WebEx, we now conduct live user training each week at no cost to subscribers. We have also built a library of eSignal Movie clips so users can learn more effectively 24/7.
Expanded email and LiveRep support. We added a swing shift of email support to compliment our current staffing from London and California and we now monitor and respond to emails 24 hours a day from Sunday afternoon to Friday afternoon. As a result, we've dramatically reduced the average response time for all email inquiries.
Improved documentation via the eSignal KnowledgeBase. This KnowledgeBase (aka KB) is now the primary place we store all documentation and technical support material for all of our eSignal products. You can browse by category or use the powerful search options to find just what you need. Best of all, with over 30 internal contributors, more information is added to the KB each day and it's available 24/7.
Continued expansion of Account Maintenance. We've added more functionality to Account Maintenance so now, more than ever, you can make changes directly to your account at anytime. Whether you're wanting to add a new service, cancel an existing service, update your credit card, etc, Account Maintenance is always waiting to help.
Continued success of the eSignal Support Forums. Far surpassing even our high expectations, the eSignal Support Forums have become an integral part of the eSignal experience. Not only do we have dedicated Community Support Representatives ready to help but you also gain the invaluable perspective of thousands of existing eSignal users from across the globe.
In closing, it's never easy to take away a service that customers value but we felt the benefits of eliminating toll-free service far outweighed the consequences. We are always eager to hear your feedback so feel free to email the Customer Service Management team directly with your comments or suggestions.
Q. I didn't get a response to a recent email. What's the best way to email for help?
Like many businesses today, we are dealing with a serious deluge of unwanted email (aka spam) hitting our servers on a daily basis. It's not uncommon for us to get upwards of 1 million spam messages in one day! As we place automated filters in place to combat these unwanted messages, we run the risk of filtering out legitimate email from customers. As you can imagine, there's no way we can visually scan hundreds of thousands of emails each day so we have to rely on intelligent logic to keep our servers from being inundated. Even if the filters accurately function 99.9% of the time, that still means we may lose a handful of legitimate emails each day.
In order to deal with this situation, we ask that customers use email forms, rather than directly send messages to a given email address. We have hidden special coding inside these forms so our filtering logic will always let these messages pass through to their intended target. All of these forms are available on our main Contact Us page.