Photrade.com – Where is the Customer Support?

Posted by Justin Korn
on October 23, 2008

As I announced yesterday, I entered a photo contest being put on by DPS and hosted by Photrade.  Late last night, my mother tried to put in a vote for my image, but instead ended up on the Photrade home page.  She IMed me asking how she could vote for my image.  I was a bit confused and just told her to click the “Vote” button at the bottom of the page, but quickly realized, as I visited the page myself, the link I was handing out was going to the Photrade homepage.  I checked my uploaded pictures and sure enough, the image I had submitted to the contest was gone!  I couldn’t believe it.  I had not racked up a ton of votes yet (about 10), but who knows how many votes I lost due to my picture vanashing.

I quickly wrote up an email to the email address I obtained on the contact page to let them know my picture had disappeared and see if I could find out what had happened.  Here is what I wrote:

“To Whom it May Concern,

I had a picture up on photrade that was in the recent DPS photo contest.  I checked it out this morning and my picture was gone, deleted from the site completely.  Can I get a explanation of how and why this happened and possible an message next time with a warning before it happens??

Thanks and I look forward to your response.”

And here is the canned response I got back (notice, no mention of my personal issue):

“Hi Justin

Thanks for taking the time to write to us – we really do appreciate it. We experienced some issues with our servers/database which resulted in the site data being down for about 1.5 hours this afternoon.

Our tech team was able to get the site back up quickly, but some of the data has been corrupted and is not currently on the live site. They are currently working to restore the data, and we will post to our blog with the status as soon as we know something.

This is the first time that we have had this type of issue. I apologize for this, and we will do everything we can to get it fixed and make sure that it doesn’t happen again. Thank you for your patience, and please don’t hesitate to contact me if there is anything else that we can do for you.   Rest assured this is not the level of service or support that we are committed to – we take this very seriously and we are doing everything we can to get it fixed.”

I never once asked about the site being down and the response I got never once mentioned anything about why my picture is missing.  I guess I could assume my picture is part of the data that “has been corrupted and is not currently on the live site.”  To top it off, this email was signed by the VP of Marketing (I’m leaving out names here).

Now, I totally understand that every email might not be able to get a personal response, but I do expect every email to be read.  If someone had actually read my email, they should have taken the time to directly correlate how their issue becomes by issue.

I was starting to think more about using Photrade for possibly selling images, but if this is the customer service I am going to be getting, I think I’ll be taking my business elsewhere.

In any case, I resubmitted by picture to the contest and I’m still looking for votes.

Till next time…

[UPDATE] I rolled over to Photrade’s blog to check out what was going on and they have a post up about the issues they have been experiencing.  Like the email they sent me explains, they had a database go down which took the site down along with it.  They got the database back up rather quickly, but are experiencing some data corruption.  What I found out new from the post was that some of the accounts and photos that were created yesterday are part of the set of data that is corrupted and they are working on restoring the lost data.

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  • Krista - Thanks for your response and tweet.

    I think the email you sent out was appropriate, but when I read it, I didn't feel like my issue was part of your original issue. The first paragraph reads:

    "Thanks for taking the time to write to us – we really do appreciate it. We experienced some issues with our servers/database which resulted in the site data being down for about 1.5 hours this afternoon."

    Further on it mentions data corruption, but nothing specific (probably because you didn't know yet), and my reaction was to be unhappy with the canned response.

    If you want my personal opinion, I think it would have been best to send out a message saying something about the outage, that my issue is probably being caused by this outage, that you guys are working on it, another email (or blog post) will be sent with more details, and if my issue isn't resolved by the solution after the follow up, to contact you directly.

    I really hope Photrade makes it through these growing pains. At least you guys are growing and I hope your customer service department grows along with it.

    Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

    Justin
  • Hi Justin

    We got literally hundreds of emails about this yesterday (and hundreds today), and the option was to either provide a standard message and respond quickly or answer each email individually, in which case we would not have responded to everyone until next week. Given the seriousness of the issue, we felt that it was appropriate to provide a quick response that explained the issue. If an email was a part of the database issue (which yours was) we sent the same standard response.

    We usually do provide individual email responses, however due to time constraints this just wasn't possible. We are experiencing some growing pains right now and are working to scale things like customer service, as we know how important it is.

    I'm sorry that you were disappointed with our level of service, and hopefully in the future we can better meet your expectations.

    - Krista
  • Tim - I agree and I mentioned that I understand they probably have a ton of email flowing in. However, since they took the time to respond, I'm assuming they read my email. If they took the time to read my email, I think they should personalize it to my issue beyond saying, "Hi Justin." Maybe they didn't read it and all emails they received during the downtime received the same canned response.

    In either case, I understand they have a ton of emails, but I'd rather get an auto response saying, "We are currently experiencing issues...we'll get back to you when we have those fixed." Or something along those lines. Their email kind of does this, but rather tells me to check their blog for updates.

    In the end, I guess I just don't like canned responses and think they could do better, even while experiencing database issues.
  • That sucks truly, but be realistic. How many emails do you think they get on a typical day? 202? 515? I have no idea.

    Now, how many emails do you think they got during or about the outage? 77-204 times that!? I would not be surprised if that was the case.

    To be honest, I'm surprised you got a response (as quickly as you did or even @ all)! I never heard a peep about the outage (other than not being able to log in all afternoon) until I saw their blog post about it this am....AND I do think it was a lot longer than 1.5 hours was it not?

    My point is, I'm sure they had bigger fish to fry than dealing with lost contests. I'm sure everything will be restored in due time.
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