it is a great honour for Svetlana that she has so many fans among you. We all like her and appreciate her talent.
However, the public area of the forum should not be mistaken as DxO support, but is primarily a platform where users can exchange themselves about DxO software and help each other. Our team mainly limits itself to moderation of the publich area, i.e. when a post violates the forum rules.
When it comes to technical questions and problems, please always open a support ticket. Everyone is invited.
This way, we can prioritize questions and topics from all our users, bundle them and follow them up more effectively in our internal processes
Hello Barbara,
I think that is exactly the problem. The positive difference that the active involvement of DXO made to this forum was huge. With the behavior stated above DXO becomes just like any other company.
You miss out on a significant USP and differentiation.
I agree many times DXO staff intervened on the forum to press support to deal with issues that were not being dealt with well or in some cases where support decided there was no problem. When customers get nowhere with support there is nowhere really for them to turn to now other than publicizing the problem of poor support here and on other forums.Many of the long posts since 6 have shown there is a need for better communication from DXO as well.
Hy thanks for the reply.
Is a support ticket not always personal ticket and thus hidden for all other users of dxo feedback forum?
So you can get alot of unclearity of things because the answer of a support ticket can be scrambled by the reciever when he of she replies on a question on the open forum.
Creating noise on the subject. @sgospodarenko was alway’s very good in jumping in to clearify or ask for clearifying by an other dxo staffmember and keeping the thread on track.
just an opinion and observation of me.
I understand her time is limited and lots of her work on the forum was in her own personal time, i know because she told us, because she liked it.
So i just assume she has less free time around her usual work and it’s not “layed up from above” that she is less active on this part of the forum.
Development of programs can be time consuming.
Anyway take care and i hope the interaction in the open forum of stafmembers are continued in the future.
I’m afraid that you have thanked me for my understanding prematurely.
I agree with @John-M . It is my opinion that this was an upper management decision and I think that it was a mistake, a very bad one. Please allow me to tell you why.
First: It was a mistake on my part to single out @sgospodarenko and @StevenL . I mentioned them partly because they were the most frequent DxO staff members who posted here. I really was referring to ALL of the DxO staff, who should be able to post on this forum freely and without restriction.
Secondly I think that these posts speak volumes:
Very well said my friends!
I understand that and I think that it should be boldly stated in the forum logo that This is not an official DxO support forum and all posts including posts by staff members solely represent the opinion of the individual poster.
Often support tickets get lost in the ether, I myself have an outstanding support ticket, from about 1 year ago where in the initial response I was told that “…the problem is being looked at by the team and they would inform me when a solution was found.” To date, there has been no further response from support.
The main reason that I singled out @sgospodarenko is because, as I have stated earlier, her replies to posters were always friendly, intuitive and helpful. When she was unable to help she would “ping” another staff member and call their attention to whatever the problem was:
This is exactly how she treated me as an unregistered newbie back in 2015. Very helpful! and after I joined in 2019 I used to wake up in the mornings looking forward to reading her cheerful posts.
So in conclusion I do understand the reasoning behind the decision to not allow staff members to post to the forum but I do not think that this is good reasoning, a simple disclaimer for newbies and Basic users(maybe visible on every page) would do. This decision has fostered the notion that DxO is an unfriendly company that doesn’t care about it’s customers. I know that this is not true. DxO is a very friendly and caring company. Beside my love of DxO software(which IMO is The Best photo processing software in the world), it was the friendliness conveyed by staff members participating in this forum that attracted me to DxO in the first place. I fear that this impression of caring and friendliness is lost without the participation of the staff members.
@Barbara-S, there is one aspect of DxO being active in the forum for support: When I post a bug in support.dxo.com, no-one else knows about it and no-one can profit from a solution, should there be one.
On the other hand, DxO can whisk away support requests more easily, if the request is not posted in a public place. Some comments pointing in this direction have been posted here.
I know that communicating in a forum can bind resources that can otherwise be put to good use for something else. It is my opinion though, that communicating more closely can a) improve customer relations and b) provide a more inclusive view of things for DxO…which can have a different opinion no questions asked.
In principle I agree with the request, but what is important above all is what Svetlana wants.
Perhaps she was simply looking for new challenges?
I would also be happy if she were back with her charm, her wit and her expertise, and if she were to intervene here in an orderly and helpful way as a DXO angel.
But as Bob Dylan already sang…" the times they ar a changing".
Ultimately, however, DXO should recognise our performance and our cooperation here, and establish active support and moderation.
This is the crux of this matter. DxO’s decision feeds the stereotype that because they are a French company their default position on everything is one of gallic arrogance. It is a bizarre decision.
Meanwhile Serif, the makers of Affinity Photo (and Designer and Publisher) and as far as I can make out a company of comparable size to DxO, manage to actively participate in their forum.
Hi Guenter, Yes, of course this is absolutely dependent upon Svetlana’s wishes. We won’t know for sure until she tells us, but I suspect that she does want to come back. I don’t know how she can tell us though, as she can’t post here at the moment.
I use Mylio as my asset manager. Their staff participate constantly in their user forum, providing assistance when the issue is beyond the users’ collective ability to help, insights into what they are trying to achieve and why things work in a particular way, and asking for user input on priorities and shortfalls. Their technical director regularly posts, and even their CEO on occasion. This produces a lot of goodwill, and is a major differentiator for them against their competitors. I really wish DxO would do the same.
They did until about one year ago when some sort of unfortunate upper management decision banned them from doing so. Only the new Support Team, as good and nice as they are, are only allowed to post terse messages and not converse with us, just quickly answer the question.
It’s just not the same friendly, caring atmosphere that it used to be.
m-photo
( Marc (macOS Sonoma on MBP16" Intel))
32
Terse is not necessarily unfriendly or a lack of care, DxO staff will not have the luxury of engaging in the forum to the extent that members do unless it’s a support policy. Management will have given thought to how their teams time is best spent and have concluded that forum engagement is perhaps not the most useful use of it.
I don’t think drawing a conclusion that, to them, customers are unimportant is fair.
But I don’t think any of us are drawing such a conclusion. Rather we are all saying the decision gives the impression, the perception that DxO are not interested in customer feedback.
Hi Marc. No not official but merely deduction: What is the likelihood of all DxO staff-members deciding not to post on the forum(including Svetlana who was nearly a daily poster) at exactly the same time?
Plus this quote certainly is an implication of it.
All due respect but you haven’t been here long enough to remember how it was before 1 year ago. They used to do exactly this and primarily on their own time. The only use of company time was to inform or correct us(when we got off track) on support issues or to help newbies when we couldn’t.
That we can’t see a list of reported bugs and reponses to them, as you often find with other software, is a problem if DxO staff distance themselves from this forum. How do I know if others have reported my problem? Searching this forum for non-existent support content wouldn’t be much use.
Other softwares often have forums split into various sections with “Announcements”, “Windows bugs”, “Mac Bugs” and so on. That could be useful here.
Also, the “minor bug fixes and improvements” that you get with release notes is too vague. Perhaps my issue has been dealt with there?
While I have only had good experinces with DxO support so far (knock on wood), the opaqueness is concerning. DxO must understand that PhotoLab is still underdog software compared to Lightroom and Capture One. Having an involved community with enthusiastic users recommending PhotoLab word of mouth is essential to growth and future revenue.
DxO PhotoLab is really good in many areas, but also has many shortcomings. As long as there is open two-way communication between DxO and the community about shortcomings, there is hope and engagement and the enthusiasm will be kept alive. When DxO stop communicating, that goes away, and the word of mouth recommendations with it.
Upper management may believe that “be silent and opaque like Adobe” is more “professional”, but PhotoLab is still “enthusiast” software by and for photography enthusiasts and enthusiasts don’t work like that. We want to feel involved and see that the software has a long-term roadmap worth investing time and money in, not be locked out behind top-down formal enterprisey stiffness.
That said, I love that you announce which cameras and lenses are planned to be added ahead of time, even if not all of them always make it to the announced released and are pushed to the next. Never stop doing that!
