Anything to improve on?

[Magicklug]

First and foremost, I love WHMCS and I love their service, and the way they solve problems. However, I would like to suggest to improve the time they respond to normal opened tickets, as not all of us can afford to pay everytime 30£ with i think it's exagerated price, probably 5£ would have been better. So personally I ask whmcs to improve your response as its taking ages, and some of errors may be fatal if you continue this.

[WHMCS John]

Hi @Magicklug,

Thanks for taking the time to provide your feedback on the support response time you have experienced.

All licenses include access to our 24/7 support team via support ticket, with a best effort response time.

Our average first response time is typically around 8 hours, varying on the department involved and the nature of the inquiry. In the weeks following a new release - particularly a major new version such as v8.0 - responses will take slightly longer.

 

We understand that for business critical issues, a faster response time may be required, so offer a number of solutions - including the Fast Track per-incident 1 hour SLA - and a range of tailor made enterprise support packages to meet your needs. Enterprise Support Packages could include things like; live chat support, an account manager available via phone and enhanced support ticket response time  SLAs.

Our sales team will be pleased to start putting together a quotation for you, please don't hesitate to get in touch https://www.whmcs.com/contact

[Damo]

I'd like to see owned license users that have an active support subscription  be able to access chat support. 

We invested early and continue to pay a subscription. There's currently no way to get live chat support unless we abandon our investment and pay a monthly premium. 

[bear]

22 minutes ago, Damo said:

There's currently no way to get live chat support unless we abandon our investment and pay a monthly premium. 

Owned license holder here, and I wasn't aware there was even a live chat support option. 

[pRieStaKos]

15 minutes ago, bear said:

Owned license holder here, and I wasn't aware there was even a live chat support option. 

When you try to open a ticket there is a notification box above that says about live chat support. They respond immediately.

[Damo]

14 hours ago, bear said:

Owned license holder here, and I wasn't aware there was even a live chat support option. 

https://blog.whmcs.com/133600/announcing-new-improvements-to-your-customer-experience

[bear]

Thanks for that, both of you. I haven't been in the support area much (just logged in to check), and never noticed any indication of a chat icon. Perhaps that won't show to me as an owned license holder who's support period isn't current. 

Quote

To see the chat option, you will need to hold a Business or Enterprise level license.

I guess people who spent to own it are less important. 😉

[brian!]

2 hours ago, bear said:

I guess people who spent to own it are less important.

especially when the new t&c means that these owned licenses can no longer be resold.... you can't even renew a support period for a year now (even though the ordering page says you can choose 6 or 12 months) - you can only renew for six months (kerching!) 💰

time the renewal wrong, and there might not be any new updates before the support package expires!

[bear]

14 minutes ago, brian! said:

you can't even renew a support period for a year now (even though the ordering page says you can choose 6 or 12 months) - you can only renew for six months (kerching!)

I'm just waiting to see what happens when I finally go to renew support, and find out if they will allow it after having been expired for several versions. My gut tells me I'll be in for a shock of "you have to purchase all the ones you missed to get the update" or a "fine" or something like that.
Odds are good that will be that final straw, to be honest.

[Damo]

It's a reasonable business decision to not exclude 'legacy' (non recurring income) access by default.

But to deny it a reasonable cost is the insulting part. 

16 hours ago, bear said:

Odds are good that will be that final straw, to be honest

That's bloody frustrating and annoying but their business is focused on improved revenue. And as license holders we are realistically liabilities. WHMCS has moved on from its original user base, and if it's no longer fit for purpose then they're ok with that. 
 

 

[brian!]

18 hours ago, bear said:

I'm just waiting to see what happens when I finally go to renew support, and find out if they will allow it after having been expired for several versions. My gut tells me I'll be in for a shock of "you have to purchase all the ones you missed to get the update" or a "fine" or something like that.

I doubt they would do that.

[yggdrasil]

On 10/24/2020 at 11:13 AM, bear said:

Owned license holder here, and I wasn't aware there was even a live chat support option. 

Me neither.

[yggdrasil]

On 10/7/2020 at 8:14 AM, Magicklug said:

First and foremost, I love WHMCS and I love their service, and the way they solve problems. However, I would like to suggest to improve the time they respond to normal opened tickets, as not all of us can afford to pay everytime 30£ with i think it's exagerated price, probably 5£ would have been better. So personally I ask whmcs to improve your response as its taking ages, and some of errors may be fatal if you continue this.

I don't use or even require their support; I open one ticket a year and if I do is either to report a bug or something that is indeed a problem with the software. I understand some people might require support constantly, but the model is fair. Support is still free for all customers, but you can pay for priority. If you are indeed having a critical issue, I think most business will just pay to get a quick solution. If the issue is not that important, you can just wait or most likely find the solution is already here in the community. I personally think this community to be of more value in terms of help, support, and customization than WHMCS official support.

If you use the community and documentation you will find over time you don't even need their support anymore unless you are messing around with your server config or other software that interferes with WHMCS.

Just my two cents.

[yggdrasil]

On 10/26/2020 at 10:21 AM, brian! said:

I doubt they would do that.

If they do, then it's not a really an owned license anymore but a hidden lease. Either way, most people with owned licenses still must upgrade anyway or they are not able to keep updating the software. So even if you don't use their support, you are still paying for the updates.

[yggdrasil]

On 10/26/2020 at 6:18 AM, Damo said:

It's a reasonable business decision to not exclude 'legacy' (non recurring income) access by default.

But to deny it a reasonable cost is the insulting part. 

That's bloody frustrating and annoying but their business is focused on improved revenue. And as license holders we are realistically liabilities. WHMCS has moved on from its original user base, and if it's no longer fit for purpose then they're ok with that. 
 

 

 

 

 

Why? We still need to pay for updates. It's not as they are not making money from owned licenses anymore. I'm not interested in their marketplace and services, but only their software which I host on my servers, but if WHMCS decided again to offer some modules non encoded like they did in the past with a DNA signature, I would certainly buy more from them, which I also did in the past. Its their problem if they don't want more money from existing license owners. I certainly had no problem with paying their fees for that and suddenly they even stopped that practice. I also purchased all their additional modules that don't come with WHMCS. They surely did made money from and keep doing it.

Owned licenses also never request support which means their costs is none as opposed to a monthly lease. With a monthly lease you are now a service and customer support company, and this is overly expensive as people expect to receive help and assistance every time, they require it as they are now paying a subscription. Selling software is far easier than selling software + services with support.

This why I found it surprising when they decided to sell services with their marketplace. That is a support nightmare. Now they need to increase their support team or risk losing customers because of bad customer support. With software, they can code once and sell it as much as they want and if the software works, those people rarely need help as opposed to a service. See Modules Gardens how they grew in no time just by selling modules and now they are making other software as well. They also have different pricing options, like owned, or lease with support and even non encoded version for companies and developers. If WHMCS wanted more money they could do it, by creating more and better software, the owned licenses is what made them what they are today. I'm not even sure they have the same success they had in the past now with their leasing model because most people that use WHMCS do it casually.

With a onetime purchase at least, they got the full amount with one payment, I suspect most people just pay one or three months until they get bored or out of business which means their leasing model is giving them even less money than the owned licenses in the past. And if you are a big company or are in for the long run with proper investment, you are not going to go with such a lease model but build your own billing solution. Even more now in a world on which everyone is using open source and WHMCS is the opposite, they encode everything which means it's very inflexible to build custom solution or integrate into more robust enterprise solutions.

Long old WHMCS users, would not have picked WHMCS today. They decided to use WHMCS in the past because it was far more open, and it was a no brainer investment with a onetime payment. And those users can't or don't want to migrate to something else at this point. But most bigger companies did, popular hosting companies that used WHMCS, like HostDime and many others moved out to their own solutions. And it was not because WHMCS was bad or pricing, it worked for them, but because they did not had access to the locked code and modules. Not being able to modify the software to fit your business environment is critical in a world on which everyone is using open source now and tries to be different from the competition.

Owned users are also the ones that participate the most here in the community and are the most vocals recommending WHMCS online to others that want to start selling services online.

Edited November 9, 2020 by yggdrasil

[bear]

5 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

Owned users are also the ones that participate the most here in the community and are the most vocals recommending WHMCS online to others that want to start selling services online.

I'm an owned user and I used to participate more, but the newer versions are more and more complicated, so I offer less and less help. For the same reason, along with current practices and pricing from WHMCS, I no longer recommend it to others. I was loyal from back when it was just Matt and he was pretty much just starting out. Very different company these days. 

[yggdrasil]

9 hours ago, bear said:

I'm an owned user and I used to participate more, but the newer versions are more and more complicated, so I offer less and less help. For the same reason, along with current practices and pricing from WHMCS, I no longer recommend it to others. I was loyal from back when it was just Matt and he was pretty much just starting out. Very different company these days. 

When I said we still recommended I mean based on the features and third-party compatibility. Would I recommend WHMCS as the best solution in the planet? No. Would I recommend it for a new company that has proper investment? No. Would I recommend to a developer or someone that needs to extend it? No.

But in the end its still the best option for the price. If no, I would be curious what you are suggesting to people instead.

[bear]

There are only a few competing products at this price point, and my experience is with only two of the three main ones (which I won't mention by name). It's been years since I used either, so I've simply stopped recommending altogether. While WHMCS is still what we use, we've grown apart in thinking over the past few years, and it gets harder with each new iteration to get behind it. 

I've defended and recommended WHMCS, but no longer. Now I say nothing. 😉

[yggdrasil]

2 hours ago, bear said:

There are only a few competing products at this price point, and my experience is with only two of the three main ones (which I won't mention by name). It's been years since I used either, so I've simply stopped recommending altogether. While WHMCS is still what we use, we've grown apart in thinking over the past few years, and it gets harder with each new iteration to get behind it. 

I've defended and recommended WHMCS, but no longer. Now I say nothing. 😉

I had every billing solution that existed except one. I can say with confidence that all of them had their fair issues. I even was tempted to use some expensive one but did not liked their racketeering model based on profit or number of users because who needs another tax.... 😎

Jokes aside, this is not possible with certain types of products or services I offer. Some are free services, or evaluation or some people have pennies margin which means a license like that is just not usable and you end up losing money per account, those models also penalize growth. While WHMCS strangely did moved as well to a per customer license model at least they still have the unlimited option for those type of businesses.

I think WHMCS still offers a fair value for what it costs. But only because nobody else is doing a better job. Not yet at least but competition is catching up in some areas while WHMCS is focusing on more gimmicks like the marketplace which should had been completely separated from the rest of the software from day one (just my opinion...).

In the end we stick with WHMCS because we have nothing better and migrations are painful. If I had access to some parts of the code, I would absolutely recommend WHMCS as the best possible solution for everyone, regardless if you are starting a tiny venture in your apartment or are a huge company with investors. It would be the perfect solution that fits every size because I would just remove all the parts I don't want or need completely and add or modify everything else that I require. Instead, I tend to find roadblocks when it comes to changes and this is sadly getting worst with every new release.

 

[Magicklug]

Thank you for response @WHMCS John

[bear]

7 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

WHMCS is focusing on more gimmicks like the marketplace which should had been completely separated from the rest of the software from day one (just my opinion

^^ This, most of all, especially when it involves something like forced SSL checks (and not only that one). Things outside of the core operations like that need to be optional, not baked in.

[yggdrasil]

3 hours ago, bear said:

^^ This, most of all, especially when it involves something like forced SSL checks (and not only that one). Things outside of the core operations like that need to be optional, not baked in.

I don't disagree but I suspect this was done on purpose as they wanted to push sales towards their way by linking that check to the marketplace without letting users change it. In the past WHMCS was all about options. Every feature had an on/off checkbox. Somewhere along the way they decided to add things without options, not as a choice but a decision on what they consider is best for everyone. Their way or the highway. A feature like that should had been optional from day one, those that wanted it would enable it on the admin side, those that don't (because many products don't have or require an SSL) could disable it. This was very badly implemented because WHMCS assumed all products are related to a domain that requires an SSL which is not the case.

Adding to the injury this causes unnecessary server load without a clean path to deactivate. If you ask me that option should had been a checkbox per product, not even globally. That way someone could activate it per product. Instead WHMCS just coded it directly on template files for all products because it was the fastest approach. I don't even remember when they added a new option on the products configuration, or the affiliate system, or tickets, or customer groups/settings, the stuff that would see a benefit. I'm baffled why WHMCS invest so much time on developing things for external services (which will die eventually as those companies are sold, shut down or change their business model or API) instead of building functions that work right in the software. By external things I mean if you add a mailing function that relies on MailChimp, your function only works as long as they don't change anything on their side. If you instead code a direct way for users to configure their own SMTP server, this will work for decades with any mailing service.

My point is that WHMCS just tries to bundle external brands and services into WHMCS. In the past they never took attention to that, those things correctly so where coded in modules, not right in the software. I would remove all that stuff it was possible. I don't need it and I will never use some of those things and they just increase the security risk if not updated. That is the beauty about the module system and why every other server software in the world uses that. You can enable or disable the things you want. Core features build right into the software should only be very stable, mature and will not change for decades to come as they are part of the whole functionality.

Sometimes I feel WHMCS is trying to attract a new market now that is just teenagers launching their next hosting website online. Nothing wrong with that, but you don't build a sustainable business around temporary group of users, you need long term customers that will keep paying for years to come.

Edited November 10, 2020 by yggdrasil

[brian!]

23 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

I'm baffled why WHMCS invest so much time on developing things for external services

i'm baffled why years later, the store template pages are still bugged....