Revision of Support Contact System

There have been recent complaints about problems with the support request system, but the problems go deeper than restoring the mentioned lost functionality. The system has problems which cause unnecessary work and confusion for both contributors and support employees.

The system doesn‘t (or at least not visibly) assign a unique identifier to each support case.
The system has no memory: an unresolved support request can only be handled with a new support request. This needlessly multiplies the number of support requests and leads to confusion, misunderstanding and duplication of effort for both submitters and responders.

I therefore propose a more comprehensive revision of the support request system along lines used successfully by many other HW, SW and service providers on the Internet.

Each support request should receive a unique identifier (perhaps a serial number) to be used in all correspondence.
Support requests should be conceived as discussion threads or dialogs instead of single interactions.
The entire history of the dialog between requestor and responder(s) should be visible to all participants.
Each reply from support staff should result in an e-mail notification to the requestor, and each reply from the requestor should result in a notification to support staff. Based on the fulfillment of point 3 above, these notifications need only contain a reference (presumably a link) to the thread or latest response and need not contain any discussion content.
Since IMDB support evidently doesn’t want e-mail replies from requestors, replies from requestors should be submitted on the web page showing the discussion history as described in point 3 above.

I could go on and on but believe that the salient points are covered above. They reflect the type of system used in many different service desk offerings.

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Peter_pbn

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3 years ago

Although IMDb refers "additional quieries" to the contact form, it is also possible to simply reply to the email.

This was highlighted as a benefit of the current system when it was introduced:

https://community-imdb.sprinklr.com/conversations/data-issues-policy-discussions/new-contact-us-experience/5f4a79e68815453dba8f0ec7

(edited)

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rsbrux

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1.3K Points

@Peter_pbn

Thanks for pointing that out. As you mentioned in the referenced thread 4 years ago, this is not at all obvious, and IMDB has evidently made no effort to respond to the feedback they recieved in that thread, despite having explicitly solicited feedback!

Furthermore, it is clear from that thread that the new system lost more functionality than I realized, since the old system apparently had a „contact history“ (as suggested in point 3 of my original post). I haven‘t found anything of that sort in the current system.

The thread you referenced mentions technical difficulties. Many of these could likely have been avoided if IMDB had simply licensed one of the many excellent service desk applications instead of „rolling their own“ ,-)

(edited)

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3 years ago

bderoes

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3 years ago

rsbrux,

You may want to upvote your own idea,

As Peter_pbn said, you _can_ reply to a CS email. And if you've kept a copy of what you originally sent, you can paste that in.

But if you have multiple issues being submitted (separately) to CS, lack of context information in the reply makes it impossible to respond properly. I hope that is _not_ by design, to discourage use of the Contact system entirely.

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rsbrux

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@bderoes Thanks for the tip, I have done as you suggested, and upvoted my own suggestion. Unfortunately, I have no copies of my submitted contact requests, some of which were quite detailed. Judging by the responses I received, most of them were not completely read or understood by the responding support employees. It never occurred to me that the IMDB support system might be so primitive as to let them disappear into a (at least from my point of view) „black hole“. ;-{

(edited)

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3 years ago

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rsbrux

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1.3K Points

3 years ago

On closer examination of the responses to my support requests, I see that

Requests do have an (invisible) unique ID; which is embedded in the „Reply to“ address.
The responses also include the text of the original requests. They are just hard to see because they are so far down and in small light grey type.

This doesn‘t chang the points in my proposed revision, but it does mean that the existing system could be made much more useful with a few minor changes:

Make the unique ID visible. Other ticketing systems usually include it in the subject line.
In responses, reduce the space between the responder‘s text and the text of the original request.
In responses, format the text of the original request the same as that of the response (same size font, same print density).
In responses, invite the recipient to *respond by e-mail* instead of by means of an additional support request. This would preserve the continuity of the dialog.

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rsbrux

Revision of Support Contact System

Peter_pbn

rsbrux

bderoes

rsbrux

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