Question About Zazzle Customer Service Capabilities

[SORS]

I’m hoping someone might be able to clarify what exactly the Zazzle customer service team is able to help with.

1. Are they available to assist customers with design-related questions before an order is placed (e.g., helping someone with personalization or confirming whether something will print correctly)?

2. Are they also equipped to answer questions or concerns from designers about the Ambassador Program—or is that handled by a different team entirely?

It would be really helpful to understand which types of inquiries are appropriate to direct to customer support and which might require escalation elsewhere.

Thank you in advance for any insights you can share!

[Cat]

I'd also like to know whether customer support will assist customers with design issues. I have one clue that says they will - I was messing around with the new chatbot (the "get help" button) and while the answers it gave me were pretty much useless, it did offer to connect me with someone for design assistance. I took that to mean that customers can get design help from support, but I don't know for sure.

Any way you slice it, I think that design assistance is a huge gaping hole in the Zazzle model at the moment. The marketing fees make it unfeasible for designers to do it, they discontinued the "Live" program where we used to be able to send customers for design help, so if customer support won't do it then I guess people are just on their own. I really think it needs to be addressed one way or the other. At the very least there need to be some simple tutorials that we could point customers toward for help with basic design issues (changing background colors, fonts, adding/deleting a photo, etc.)

[albamarie]

I am very upset that they have removed the customer support. This is going to cause many problems. Has anyone found out where we should send customers?

[Cat]

As far as I know, the only place left to send them is to the chatbot: www.zazzle.com/about/ask. They claim it can walk people through the process of making design changes and/or connect them with a human to help, but I have not tested either of those claims. I did ask it a bunch of customer service type questions at one point (I basically replicated the questions that customers send me via chat on a regular basis) and it did a reasonably good job - better than when if first launched. Hopefully that means it's improved and will continue to do so.

[albamarie]

Customers are the entire business. Without proper customer service, you don't have a business. Sigh. I am going to have to rethink my business now. Thanks for you input @Cat 

[Cat]

@albamarie Yeah, the past year has been a total shift in approach for me at least. I used to spend a LOT of time helping customers, but after the launch of the ambassador program and the huge reduction in royalties that came with it, I just couldn't justify the time anymore, so I started sending a LOT more people to customer support. I'm guessing that I wasn't the only designer who took that step. And it wasn't out of spite, I just couldn't justify hours of work to make only a dollar or two. My bet is that their service team got totally overwhelmed and that they had to do something. I think they probably had no idea how much they were leaning on their designers for customer support after they launched the chat feature, so their staffing probably hadn't kept up with the growth of the company (all guesses on my part.)

But it's not all bad - at least I don't think it's all bad. It just makes my approach more like it was originally - before chat - when we were only responsible for posting designs, and blissfully in the dark about customer service issues. So I don't actually hate the changes, but I do think that it narrows the scope of how you can reasonably approach a Zazzle business. I think there's no other choice but to view it as a turnkey fill-in-the-blank operation rather than a custom graphic design site.