Please could you spare a little time?
I am concerned that when I try to get information, I often run into great difficulties because I cannot understand the language that you use.
I know that there are many other people like myself who find that your explanations in forum topics or in the help assistant items etc. do not help as much as they could because of your jargon or slang that you use every day when you are working.
To illustrate that I use a quote from Penny in a topic, (apologies Penny).
I think she puts the situation very succinctly.
More than that, I believe PN actually need to have at least one non-techie working there alongside the team that write the DIY guide on the portal, to make the instructions "idiot-proof".
I don't mean that in any derogatory way - I can find my way around most aspects of website building, mail and ftp now, along with a limited amount of cgi, php and mysql ... but it's taken ten years to get here.
The 'old hands' in Support will recall having talked me through the simplest of procedures, to begin with (like how to ftp) because I don't "think like a techie". I *still* don't easily understand most of the content in the DIY guide. I know how to do various things, now (reasonably well) but at the outset there was 'no way in', no instant understanding.
Maybe 50% of PN's customers are like that, non-techies. I'd like to see the portal guides (all) written at the basic level that a non-techie can follow, with lead-offs to more complex stuff, certainly, but the latter not the primary resource.
And I believe it would be beneficial to have 'more phone contact' - because that was a large part of what inspired the extraordinary level of loyalty to Force 9 across its customer base. I wouldn't have been able to achieve what I have, with the site, without the patience of people to 'guide me through the difficult bits' - not everyone needs to build a website, but if they're having a major problem with spam and can't find a way to get it sorted (and most non-techie people will currently be in that situation, even if they never come to a forum and say so) a quick, unprompted phonecall from PN might make all the difference to whether they stay or not.
Regards,
Penny.
Now this is where I ask for your co-operation.
Could you please, all of you, add your views on this subject. I would appreciate everyone to help in this matter, for you are all lovely people. I am trying this method because it may be a better way of bringing this problem to all of you.
Thank you.
Calling all PlusNet staff.