Money-Back guarantee for frustrated Firefox users

dawoife

Hey Agilebits folks,



you have published a money back guarantee on your homepage for your customers that have bought 1Password.

The reason for that is, that you want to ensure absolutely satisfied customers.



This is the original statement from your homepage:



[quote]



"We are so confident you will love our products that we offer a [b]30 day Money Back Guarantee[/b]! This is no joke or gimmick; [u]we truly want you be fully satisfied with your purchase, even if that means we need to refund your order[/u].

Why do we offer this guarantee when it costs us money? Because we know that [u][b]word of mouth is the best way to spread the word[/b] about any product, and we want you to be so satisfied that you tell your friends and family about us.[/u]"

https://agilebits.com/home/money_back_guarantee

[/quote]



The caveat of this is of course, that you offer this only for 30 days so far.



If you are so confident about your new framework, if you are really listening to your customers (not just "hearing"), if you mean what's been published on your web-site, you could offer the money-back guarantee to any frustrated firefox user/customer even beyond the 30day period.



You then could trust that these customers would come back after all issues are solved with the new framework.



The offer could take some heat out of the current discussions and would be s.th. new...



How do you guys out there think about this?



Best regards

poof

No company will give you a money-back guarantee for as long as you live. They always put a limit on that (I personally don't think it is in anyones interest to have software companies offer a lifetime money-back guarantee). Currently this is 30 days after purchase which is very nice since you also get to trial it for a while. I believe quite a lot of companies offer something like this. The problem with software is that quite a lot of people upgrade completely blindly and then complain as if they are going to die within a week. In this case Firefox adds to that mix with its auto-update function (which you can disable in the prefs btw!). So my question to you is: have you thought about these things? What timeframe would you pick for the money-back period or would you go for a different arrangement (which)?



Btw, thinking people will come back after a bad experience is very naive. It is highly unlikely that unsatisfied customers will ever come back. In the researches many people have done it becomes very clear that in reality this is indeed the case. No matter what you do (fix the issues, give them their money back, etc.).

Ben

While I appreciate the concept, it really isn't feasible. We offer a trial that is fully functional and is not time limited and in addition we offer a 30 day money back guarantee. Really having any sort of a refund policy is a rather new concept in the software industry. It used to be once you bought it, it was yours. No trials, no refunds. I feel 30 days is pretty generous, on top of an unlimited trial.



Also thanks poof, I think you made some excellent points.



As I explained in the last thread, we're working very hard on both the Safari 5.1 and Firefox 6 extensions. We have already published a number of updates addressing a number of issues that users reported. We want to get the rest resolved as well and are working towards that.

teamnoir

Companies do offer money back guarantees when the product they provide is a service.



I purchased 1password with a particular set of features, which included support. It no long provides that set of features. I can't even use it to track or enter my login information to this forum. That's a problem.



If you can't provide those features in the new code, then the old code should continue to be supported until the new code can replace it.

Ben

[quote name='teamnoir' timestamp='1314983435' post='44025']

Companies do offer money back guarantees when the product they provide is a service.



I purchased 1password with a particular set of features, which included support. It no long provides that set of features. I can't even use it to track or enter my login information to this forum. That's a problem.



If you can't provide those features in the new code, then the old code should continue to be supported until the new code can replace it.

[/quote]



1Password is not a service. It is a product. This is an important distinction.



It is possible to use the old code, with the old browsers -- how things were when you purchased the product. We don't recommend doing so due to security concerns with old browsers, but that would certainly be your choice.



The problem is that the old code simply doesn't work with the new browsers. We've written new code to work with the new browsers. There are some bugs which we have acknowledged and we are working diligently on.



The alternative would be to have no 1Password at all in Firefox 6 and Safari 5.1. We felt it was much better to have something partially working for folks who chose to upgrade to these new browsers than to leave them with nothing.



In addition, as explained above, we do offer a money back guarantee, as well as a trial.



I understand the frustration some of you are experiencing with the new browser extensions. I promise we are doing our best to resolve that frustration as quickly as humanly possible.

dawoife

[quote name='poof' timestamp='1314982760' post='44018']

...So my question to you is: have you thought about these things? What timeframe would you pick for the money-back period or would you go for a different arrangement (which)?

Btw, thinking people will come back after a bad experience is very naive. It is highly unlikely that unsatisfied customers will ever come back. In the researches many people have done it becomes very clear that in reality this is indeed the case. No matter what you do (fix the issues, give them their money back, etc.).

[/quote]



certainly I have thought about this...



1. How naive is it to continuously praise the gorgeous framework for the developers as a reason for all of us customers to suffer from an untested buggy solution with no continued support for a previously perfectly working environment ??



2. I wasn't talking about a permanently extended timeframe, but about a onetime offer to all frustrated users who are affected by the new model that sucks.

Of course I wanted to test how serious Agilebits is taking their statement "Because we know that [u][b]word of mouth is the best way to spread the word[/b] about any product, and we want you to be so satisfied that you tell your friends and family about us.[/u]"

No comment necessary ...



3. Nobody is perfect, right, everybody may make mistakes - "but only once" as my former boss said ...<img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_wink.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=';-)' />. It looks like there was an ivory tower decision that - no matter what happens - the previously working environment won't be continued. If it now turns out that this may have been a wrong decision at least for the time being because there hasn't been enough time for coding, testing of the new framework etc... then this could be a measure of re-gaining trust (only if desired, of course).



4. I wonder what happens if a new version won't be supported immediately, and if Agilebits told us about it. In our company environment (which is different, but some food for thought...) we've been sticking to the old IE6 without tabbed browsing for quite some time at least till IE9 was already out there. It kinda became annoying slowly, but everything else continued to work, no security issues, applications worked, etc. And I'm not saying to follow this extreme position. But recommending users to stick to the previous browser for a few more weeks seems more appropriate to me than just throwing out s.th. useless but for the new browser version...

Instead we all were/are faced with a non working environment by surprise all of a sudden...

DoNotStaple

This thread belongs in the Agile Lounge. And, posters, please don't use "[u][b]we all[/b][/u]" in your statements as I am quite satisfied with the way 1P is working. Please consider posting only comments on what is not working for you in this forum and the devs can work on the specifics of your problems. Again, the Agile Lounge is the forum for money back conversations.

dawoife

you're right, instead of "we all", the term "all complaining Firefox customers in this forum" is more appropriate...

[Deleted User]

I've moved the thread to the 'Agile Lounge' section as DoNotStaple suggested.



We understand we have a lot of passionate and frustrated Firefox users at the moment, we're working incredibly hard to fix that situation, as you may see from our frequent updates. We're listening to everyone's feedback, however that doesn't mean the right thing to do is to go backwards.



There's practical issues as to why we can't extend a money-back guarantee to frustrated users who've had 1Password longer than 30 days, I won't go into those specifically but it would mean we'd be taking resources away from supporting our users and testing the new updates to the extension.



Maybe you're right that we should have kept our Firefox 6 add-on in Beta and explained the situation, however because Firefox 5 is not being patched we wanted folks to have at least some form of support for Firefox 6 so they could stay up to date with a secure browser. Spending time now to revert to the old add-on is just not a good idea, it's not the direction we're heading in and it means we'll just be diverting resources from fixing the genuine issues in the new extension.



Thanks for everyone's feedback,

poof

[quote name='dawoife' timestamp='1314987145' post='44039']

1. How naive is it to continuously praise the gorgeous framework for the developers as a reason for all of us customers to suffer from an untested buggy solution with no continued support for a previously perfectly working environment ??

[/quote]

The first versions were buggy indeed but they managed to get it to stable very quickly so I disagree with the untested unbuggy part, the final release was stable. The problem is that the new extension lacks in features compared to the old. Nearly all complaints are about that.



[quote]

2. I wasn't talking about a permanently extended timeframe, but about a onetime offer to all frustrated users who are affected by the new model that sucks.

Of course I wanted to test how serious Agilebits is taking their statement "Because we know that [u][b]word of mouth is the best way to spread the word[/b] about any product, and we want you to be so satisfied that you tell your friends and family about us.[/u]"

No comment necessary ...

[/quote]

I was trying to make a point that you need to set limits. Do something like Apple does when it releases a new OS X version and the same thing Parallels is now doing with their new version of Desktop for Mac. People who bought the software in a certain period of time get a free upgrade to the new version. That period is a timeframe and is what I meant. I bought 1Password 3 at the time it was released which is quite some time ago now and I'm definitely not the only one out there. If you would extend the 30 day period to say 60 day those people will start complaining because they have the same problem: what used to work stopped working. What do you do with them?



I have to agree that when things go bad this is the biggest test any company can get. How well are they in containing the damage and keeping customers happy?



[quote]

3. Nobody is perfect, right, everybody may make mistakes - "but only once" as my former boss said ... <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_wink.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':wink:' />. It looks like there was an ivory tower decision that - no matter what happens - the previously working environment won't be continued. If it now turns out that this may have been a wrong decision at least for the time being because there hasn't been enough time for coding, testing of the new framework etc... then this could be a measure of re-gaining trust (only if desired, of course).

[/quote]

Judging by the fact that the forums got flushed with criticism by users I think it is quite safe to say that the decision wasn't a very good one. If you read stu's post AgileBits seems to acknowledge that (they seem to be doing that everywhere, even on their blog in the comments). So now what? They continue to work on getting everything back and in the mean time we users can downgrade to the versions where everything worked or use the new extension. There is some choice there. It's the same with Lion: if you have ppc apps then you'll be unhappy with Lion because it lacks Rosetta. Roll back to Snow Leopard or Leopard and you get it back. Apple does mention the removal of Rosetta in their list of 300 new features in Lion. You could argue that information like that would be better in a place where people will easily notice it.



[quote]

4. I wonder what happens if a new version won't be supported immediately, and if Agilebits told us about it.

[/quote]

I actually do too. Would people still flood the forum because it doesn't work with the new version or simply stay with the older Firefox version where things work or choose a different browser because Mozilla screws things up with their rapid release cycle by not support older version when a new version is released?



[quote]

Instead we all were/are faced with a non working environment by surprise all of a sudden...

[/quote]

And that's what I meant with "blindly upgrading". No testing if things still work, no just upgrade everything in 1 go. I have 2 Macs and I tested it first on 1. When things were working ok for me I upgraded the other machine to the newer Firefox and 1Password versions. I did the same thing with Firefox 7 beta which I'm currently running: tested it on 1 Mac, then when everything seemed ok upgraded the other Mac. The problem is that most people don't do this, not even when they heavily rely on their machine. The same goes for having backups. I know that not everybody has the luxury of 2 or more Macs but if you're talking about "we all" I'm assuming there are several Macs in the company and things could have been tested. I understand the disappointment but you've got to admit that things are partly your own fault.



Users do stupid stuff (like clicking on everything that even remotely looks like a button <img src='http://forum.agilebits.com/public/style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/skype_sweating.png' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='(sweat)' /> ) which is why things like money-back is actually quite difficult in IT. It means trusting others, which in turn can make you a very easy victim for scams. How do you arrange something like that without running the risk of getting scammed?



Just some questions because I'm curious how well people who want a money-back have actually thought about things. Some posts can be very informative.

jgajon

Hey Quicken stopped working when I upgraded to OSX Lion!, yeah I know I could downgrade to Snow Leopard but I'm pissed off and throwing a tantrum, [b]I'll demand that Intuit give me my money back!!![/b]



How they dare charge me for something that another company would make obsolete a few years later?!

Fruitbat

[quote name='jgajon' timestamp='1315373232' post='45070']

Hey Quicken stopped working when I upgraded to OSX Lion!, yeah I know I could downgrade to Snow Leopard but I'm pissed off and throwing a tantrum, [b]I'll demand that Intuit give me my money back!!![/b]



How they dare charge me for something that another company would make obsolete a few years later?!

[/quote]



No other company forced AgileBits to abandon the old frameworks which are still supported by firefox and likely always will be. Rather, Firefox made a new, simple API available to make it even easier for anyone to write trivial add-ons. AgileBits has decided to use this new framework even though it cannot support basic functionality supported by the old frameworks.

jpgoldberg

[quote name='Fruitbat' timestamp='1315451931' post='45257']

No other company forced AgileBits to abandon the old frameworks which are still supported by firefox and likely always will be.[/quote]



There are a lot of reasons for moving to the new framework. One of which is to make future Firefox updates go through painlessly. With the old Firefox framework, we needed to produce a new, distinct, extension for each version. Firefox's ability to detect which one to load has proved unreliable. (Dig back to the reports of Firefox crashes that we had when moving from FF4 to FF5). Other reasons for the choice is that it allows us to take advantage of the sandboxing model introduced in Lion. This is a major design and security enhancement. Other reasons are more obvious (the ability to share code among all of our extensions), but the immediately visible reasons aren't the only ones.



Yes, it is a choice. But it is a choice that looks to the future at the cost of having to abandon what had been a very mature system developed over many years. I'm sorry that you are not happy with the choice.



Cheers,



-j