I love Aweber. It’s one of the best products I use in my business, but sometimes support conversations border on the absurd. Luckily, Aweber is such a high-quality product that most people will rarely need support at all.
A friend of mine who’s not had much luck with Aweber support sent me the following support conversation he just had. It had me laughing so hard I was literally in tears…
Customer: Hi, can you direct me to instructions for importing a suppression list?
You are now speaking with Aweber of Customer Solutions (CP).
Aweber: Hi Customer
Aweber: http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/498 [users' note: this is NOT the correct link]
Aweber: you do not want to do this
Customer: I don’t?
Customer: what?
Aweber: why would you want to import a list of unsubscribes?
Customer: I have a list of customers hosted at 1shoppingcart. I can email them from there.
Customer: my leads are hosted with you
Customer: I want to email everybody (using both services), but I don’t want people to get duplicate emails
Aweber: Explain to me exactly what you want to do
Aweber: the list of leads you want to import….who are they are where are they coming from?
Customer: hmm, I’m not sure how to put this more clearly….
Customer: I want to import a list of my BUYERS’ email addresses…
Customer: they are hosted at 1hshoppingcart.com, and I can mail them from that service.
Customer: But some of them will also be on my AWEBER prospect list
Customer: I want to email everyone, but not have duplicate emails
Customer: so I thought if I 1) Got a list of my buyers from 1shoppingcart and
Customer: 2) used that as a surpression list so they would NOT be emailed IF they were on the AWEBER list…
Customer: then I could email both lists with no duplication
Aweber: if you create two different lists, within your AWeber control panel, one could be “purchasers” and one could be “prospects” for instance…..
Aweber: you could import these lists of leads into their respective list in AWeber, and send out your messages to include both lists
Aweber: our system will automatically remove the duplicates
Aweber: (people who appear on both lists will not receive more than one email from you)
Customer: that would be great, except that everyone I import would have to confirm their subscription again, and probably would be too busy/confused to do so
Aweber: any leads that you import into AWeber, have to verify
Customer: exactly
Aweber: because although they already bought something from you in the past, this doesn’t mean that they want to continue to receive emails from you
Aweber: so, for this reason, we would send them the verification message to make sure they want to continue to receive more info from you
I am glad to see others are having the same crazy-making conversations. AWeber’s education seems so phenomenal on their website and videos, but over-the-phone just doesn’t cut it.
I had an appalling/ridiculous customer service experience with Jeff, who really just seemed to not be listening at all. I think I was shocked because I always get amazing help from computer tech support geeks. Smart, quick, and nice.
I need to make one more call over there this morning and I hope to have an intelligent, on-the-ball rep answer. If not, I’m going to look at the competition.
So far the product itself though is great. They just need to get their tech support to match.
Just to let you know, they don’t hire tech savvy computer people, just customer service people. You do not need a college education to work there, you just have to have “people skills”. You don’t even have to know computers, you get taught everything. They do this to save money. Their tech support does leave something to be desired.
Well, thankfully they have such an outstanding product that it’s pretty easy to forgive them for any shortcomings in the area of support – at least for me it is.
Yes I have to agree. The product rocks. The “Customer service” needs a rethink. Aweber is one of only a handful of tech companies I know who’s tickets are not answered by the developers who built the product.
Here’s another tragic Aweber support moment and an issue I keep coming up against of them not allowing list merges or imports of subscribers who have already been verified.
–start –
Customer: Hello,
I have 2 lists. My main list with about 800 subscribers and a smaller list with about 150 subscribers.
I originally created the smaller list to segment my subscribers, but I no longer need to do this and would now like to merge the smaller list with the big list.
How can I do this without everyone on my smaller list having to re-confirm their subscription?
Both lists receive the same content and relate to the same website and products. Since they have already subscribed to my list, I don’t want to make them subscribe again (to the other list) and risk lots of unsubscribes.
—————–
You are now speaking with Aweber of Customer Solutions (CP).
Customer: By the way I have read the article http://www.aweber.com/faq/questions/218/
Aweber: Hi Andrew. Unfortunately there is no way to import that list over to the larger list without the confirmation message going out. The reason for this is that your lists can be completely unrelated.
Customer: I understand this issue, but in this case the two lists receive identical content
Aweber: Yes, however there is no way that we can distinguish that when you are doing the import
Customer: Ok. Let me ask another question. Lets say I was using GetResponse and had an existing list of 20,000 subscribers. If I was considering moving all of my email marketing over to Aweber, how would you accommodate me?
I obviously would not want all my subscribers to go through a second opt-in process simply because we are changing email companies. We would risk upsetting many of them and losing potentially hundreds of subscribers.
In this situation you could also not verify the validity of the content or data, yet I’m sure you would have a process to accommodate this as a business practice, otherwise you would never attract any new customers with existing lists (of which there are many) switching over to Aweber.
Aweber: If you used a serious email program previously that required the verification of subscription by clicking on a confirmation link in a message, we would be able to log into that previous account and view record that each and every subscriber had done so. At that point we would be able to temporarily lift the restriction and allow you to import.
Customer: Ok. So what I am asking for is no different. All the subscribers on my list have used Aweber’s own confirmed opt-in process to verify their subscriptions, which you would be able to confirm by logging into my account and viewing the records.
Aweber: There is no way for me to allow you to do that without sending the confirmation message. If you would like to discuss this further you are more than welcome to contact a manager at 1-877-293-2371.
Customer: Then your policy seems rather contradictory. Perhaps it only applies to “highly valued” customers. Thank you any way I shall call and request to speak with a manager. But I know this has been done in the past for other (larger) customers. I don’t see why we should be treated any differently.
cheers
Andrew