Customer Satisfaction: Talk to Us!
By Aharon Rabinowitz
Published on Thursday, March 24th, 2011
By Aharon Rabinowitz
Published on Thursday, March 24th, 2011
We recently sent out a survey to many of you to find out about your experiences with Red Giant products and customer service. Here’s what we learned:
- 59% consider Red Giant products “excellent quality”
- 34.5% consider Red Giant products “good quality”
- 96% would recommend Red Giant products to a friend
- 53% have interacted with customer service in some way.
Of those that have interacted with customer service:
- 42% say we are always available and responsive (excellent)
- 44% say we are usually available and responsive (good)
- 12% say we are occasionally or rarely available and responsive (average or below average)
- 58% say we solve all their problems (excellent)
- 30% say we solve most of their problems (good)
- 9% say we solve some or few of their problems (average or below average)
- 45% had an excellent overall customer experience
- 48% had a good overall customer experience
- 6% had an average or below average overall customer experience
So it sounds like, we’re doing an excellent job for about half of our customers and at least a good job for 90% of them. And while we’re pretty sure that almost no other plug-in company can claim the same level of customer happiness, we do not compare ourselves against others when it comes to customer satisfaction. We compare ourselves against what we think customers deserve. And we think you deserve the best.
So, now, we turn to you to ask what can we do to make your experiences better. Please sound off!
March 24th, 2011 at 5:20 pm
Well, I have to agree with the blog about the products. They are interesting. Targeted.
And Functional. I have to completely disagree with the support of the products. I
have owned Red Giant plugins for years now and as a Hobbyist I know I’m on the low
end for support priority, but I’ve always felt that support from red giant is like a used
car purchase. What you get is what you get.
Case in point is the latest support case I have. After 2 weeks of no responses, I called
and was given excellent apologies. Why they even gave me some software. (which I felt
guilty about accepting). Soon after I got an email asking about the problem and saying
it was a priority. However, 2 weeks after that, I had to call again to get any help.
Eventually I did talk to the support person, but it was as if he didn’t know anything
about the plugin. More importantly after 4 weeks nobody at Red Giant even looked at
the test case I specifically made to show the issue. The support agent eventually said
that he would look at it and call me back…. We are working on the next 2 weeks and
still no solution.
The sad thing is that I could probably post this question to Creative Cow and have an
answer within a day or two. Right now, I’ve given up on Red Giant Support.
Conclusion: Products great… Support buyer BEWARE!!!
March 25th, 2011 at 6:50 am
I don’t have anything to say about your service because I haven’t used it. But I do have things to say about your plug-ins. Let me preface with I own just about everything you make, and every working day I use your plug-ins! So I love them!!!
Some of the plug-ins need some love in my mind. Like Holomatrix, great in concept but precomp style of achieving the effect prevents me from wanting to use it. It is a comp mess.
Text Anarchy would be awesome if it could use comp cameras and retain vector form. If I am missing something please let me know, but this plug-in feels dated.
I was going to bring up Datamator (spelling?), but it was dropped. That was a great plugin-in theory, but ever so painful and slow to use. Personally I would love an infographics plug in. 2D charts, bar graphs, etc… If I want to do 3D I will do that in C4D.
I would like to see more Text/Motion graphics plug-ins. I despise Apple’s Motion but like it’s the replicators, generators, behaviors. Things to help me make cool things quickly. God help me, I used Motion the other day to make Sparkles…. I am sorry Lord!
Sparkles!! haha anyways
Just my thoughts,
Adam
ps. I was to marry Looks! So awesome
March 25th, 2011 at 9:29 am
opps, I want to marry looks.
March 29th, 2011 at 5:15 am
Mark, Thank you for your response, it’s a bummer you didn’t receive good support from us. As I’m sure you’re aware, to control spam and any inappropriate content, we view and approve comments before posting them. But I feel it is important to post your comment because it points out we are not perfect and have some work to do. I had our team review your case before I responded and discovered, in fact, you didn’t get the best support from us in terms of timeliness, and I apologize for that.
I can assure you’ll never get bad service from us because we don’t care or that we treat certain customer differently. It’s almost always because we had a spike in customer service during a short period of time, which is a management problem, or my problem. These spikes are caused by new releases of OS’s, new graphics drivers, bugs in our software, and other things that cause things to break. This is precisely what happened during your support interaction.
To improve, we have recently added staff, bought a new phone system, added more shifts to our online chat system and adopted what we call a “Plus One” policy that keeps customer service overstaffed by one person to better handle spikes.
There is a simple ratio we follow in customer service, it’s the sucking to awesome ratio, we want to be awesome more than we suck. That is precisely why we did the customer service survey and made it public. The only good news I can offer is the more we suck in customer service the more free stuff we offer you to make up for wasting your time and causing frustration And it is difficult to make money when you give away free stuff, therefore we need to suck less.
- Drew Little, President Red Giant.
March 29th, 2011 at 9:07 am
Drew,
Thank you for the posting back. I’m not meaning to be a complainer, this just happened to be a open forum where Red Giant asked for comments. I do appreciate that you looked into the issue to verify it. As you mention, spam and inappropriate content is horrible for all.
However, to make my statements a little more understandable regarding the “hobbyist” support. Here is a case number(10797) from 12/10/2009. It was never answered. A new version of the Particular program has been released since then, but this just re-emphasizes the support issues that I have had. Not just recent, but throughout my experience with Red Giant so I’m cautious of purchasing plugins. I don’t like to complain without cause. Nor do I want to only complain. Therefore, let me end with some positives. Red Giant has some very good plugins! They rarely(if ever) crash on me, and are usually easy to use. I like Red Giant TV as a great way to showcase/teach the plugins.
Thanks for the opportunity to vent.
Mark
April 6th, 2011 at 5:57 am
Mark,
The issue you have experienced in Particular is a known bug (unfortunately), it’s on our engineering list but does not have a schedule yet. I verified that you are on the notification list for when it’s fixed and will receive an email.
We appreciate your business and will do our best to improve.
- Drew