This new help center makes you deal with a “virtual advisor” that does a poor job of making relevant suggestions, thus wasting time. It forces you to go through a whole bunch of irrelevant suggested pages before allowing you to finally contact someone, and even then the only choice is chat. Sometimes I’d rather just leave an email and go on with my day instead of waiting for an advisor to show up. There also doesn’t appear to be an option to request a call back anymore? The old help center was more straightforward and didn’t make you jump through all these hoops to ask a question that is not addressed by the help pages.
And finally, when I do reach someone, they’re not answering the actual question but giving me a canned response. In my most recent experience, they gave me information contradicted by what’s on their own help pages: I had a shipping question and the advisor said I should talk to USPS, when Shopify’s own help center page said I should contact Shopify Support. It also looks like you can’t email the Shipping department directly anymore, so getting information about those policies is filtered through an advisor who doesn’t seem knowledgeable about Shopify Shipping policies.
To be sure, I have had experiences speaking with support where they didn’t answer my actual question or gave me wrong information, but at least I didn’t have to jump through ten hoops to get to that person.
The reading space is sucked by the chat window taking up 1/3 the page as well which is nuts.
The navigation is clunky with breadcrumb navigation is gone, or hidden in a dropdown, making going up and down topics having more clicks needed.
The virtual help center assistant hallucinates like crazy such as giving false instructions on being able to use customer groups as an eligibility factor with automatic discounts which is only a thing for manual discount codes and automatic-discount-customer-groups is a frequently requested feature on the forums.
Or it gets stuck on a topic when trying to move to a new problem, like continuing to discuss shopify-flow when your looking for metafield info.
It also like to make links that don’t link to the thing is says it’s linking to.
The worst type of corner cutting for short term gains tanking the longterm trust-thermocline.
Agreed. It’s a disservice to your users. It will legitimately make up completely false information and send links to help center articles that don’t even exist.
When I tell the bot that it’s incorrect it just disagrees and the suggested page link doesn’t work.
Did Blizzard or Bethesda make this? Shopify, it’s pretty pathetic that you don’t have any sort of direct customer support. Stop wasting millions marketing to Mr. Beast’s 16 year old audience and help out your actual enterprise-level customers. Add live chat support to the back end of every Shopify account that’s on the Advanced plan.
Customer support was the reason I have chosen Shopify, even though it lacks plenty of features in me region. I am now building a custom store, the updated support channel is really, really terrible and I wish someone from the Shopify staff could reach this comment and take it up to management. ‘Better’ is the enemy of ‘good’
