Background:

In April 2024, a Work Hero customer named C. (out of respect for his privacy, we won't expose his personal or business identities) gave us a 1-star review on Trustpilot and wrote a warning message on a popular online forum.

In this blog post, we intend to clarify what happened, where we went wrong, what we did to solve these problems, and what misunderstandings probably led him to write these reviews.

Who is C.?

Unlike 90%+ of our customers, C. is not an agency owner, but a solopreneur who has a high-traffic gadget review website in Southeast Asia that generates revenue through AdSense.

He joined Work Hero on Oct 7, 2020, primarily looking for website maintenance and updates.
He never used our support and development service much, requesting for only 2 tasks in 2020, 5 in 2021, 1 in 2022, 2 in 2023, and 3 in 2024.

It is important to note this, as we believe that even having offered C. a great experience, it would hardly be a 5-star experience. Our focus and our service of diverse features have been satisfying digital agencies for the past 3 years. He would have no use for most of our service, so much so that the number of tasks he asked us to do in 4 years is less than what most agencies ask us to do in a month.

We are consistently giving agencies a great experience, as can be seen with the other testimonials on Trust Pilot, and on our website. Nevertheless, we recognize that we made mistakes as we will discuss below.

‍

Where did we go wrong with C.?

‍

#1 issue: In 2022, after running our first Black Friday promotion at the end of November, we had a huge influx of new customers, this created pressure on our development team, and we had to hire new developers quickly. One of these new developers took on task from C. to do a performance update on his website and didn't follow the SOP we had. The result was that he deactivated the WP Rocket plugin on his live site and activated Nitropack, crashing his high-traffic site.

‍

How did we resolve this?

The developer who did this never touched any of our orders again, and we put one of our best developers just to work on website maintenance and optimization, following all protocols correctly. This problem has not happened to any of our customers since 2022 and we are saddened that C. is bringing this issue to the public now in 2024. Furthermore, at that time, we reimbursed C., and he continued to stay on as our customer.

‍

#2 Issue: On Thursday, March 28th, C. asked us for an urgent task, saying that he suspected his site was suffering from a bot attack because Cloudflare was pointing it out on his other sites, but on this site, C. mentioned Cloudflare was not connected. However, he saw abnormalities in traffic and Google AdSense indicators. He mentioned the details of his ad indicators and said that he warned Google AdSense that he was under attack, and told us that he was afraid of losing his AdSense account. We only responded to him on the following Monday, April 1.

‍

What happened on our side to let this happen?

The Thursday that C. requested the urgent order coincided with 'Maundy Thursday', a holiday during the Christian 'Holy Week'. Our development team, which is located in Latin America and the Philippines, countries where people usually take time off at this time. Our main maintenance developer has requested time off for two days. Despite this, we always have developers available. The problem was that a new team lead, who was in training during this period, assigned the order to the absent developer without noticing his absence, causing the issue. We then offered C. a full refund for everything he lost in those days with no response. It's worth noting that he didn't contact us on the order after Thursday, nor use the support live chat, the support tickets, or the support email to talk about the delay issue. He instead left the 1-star review on Monday.

‍

What action did we take to prevent this from happening again?

Before, we only had one notification on Slack for an urgent task that we were getting immediately when getting an urgent task; now, we have four notifications: one that we receive immediately, another 6 hours later if the order was not answered, another 12 hours later if the order was still not answered, and a final one 18 hours later if the order was still not answered. Even if this event were very rare, we believe that with four notifications instead of only one, we will not let any urgent task pass without notice. Secondarily, we are increasing the training time for new team leads so they are well aware of these potential issues.

‍

What are the misunderstandings?

1. The day we noticed our delay, Kevin, our founder, went to C.'s Stripe profile and made a refund for his last month's payment. Additionally, our Account Manager, Ella, noted that he had an active $0/mo subscription, likely due to a past free trial, and she canceled that subscription. C. received an email notification saying that his subscription had been canceled (the $0/mo one), and he thought we had canceled his original subscription.

We believe that this was the trigger that made him write the testimonial and warning about us on the forum, as this was a point he mentioned multiple times. We showed him that this was a misunderstanding, and his subscription has remained active since then. He did not acknowledge his mistake publicly and maintained the same initial statement that he was 'kicked off' our service.

2. C. mentions that there was a disconnect between Cloudflare and WPRocket and seems to point out that this disconnect was our fault. However, since the end of 2022 when the first issue mentioned event took place, we have not made any changes to his website, as we do not even have access to his website. The only connection we had with his site was through ManageWP, the website management app we use to make plugins, themes, and WP core updates. However, we did not have access to his WP Admin even with this plugin, as his WP Admin page redirects to the homepage of his website. Since 2023 we have asked for a login for his live website or staging site, and have never received it.

These are the dates that we asked for his website credentials and didn't receive a response:

December 26 2023
January 1 2024
January 4 2024
February 2 2024
April 8 2024.

We believe that since the first issue of 2022, C. has lost confidence in our work, and that's why he was only asking for 'consultative' tasks, that is, questions about what we think we could do to improve his website.

‍

Conclusion:

We believe that due to a misunderstanding (C.'s belief that we canceled his subscription and kicked him out of Work Hero) this customer C. was prompted to give us a 1-star review. He brought us a problem from 2022 that had been resolved for future customers, and we compensated him at the time, so much so that he continued to be our customer. Finally, there is a delay problem that occurred this year, and we recognized our error and created solutions to solve it for future events.

C. has not yet responded to the amount he lost in these 4.5 days so that we can fully reimburse him. He did not give us access to either the live website or his staging website that we have requested. He did not recognize the misunderstandings in his first statements and maintained in his posts that we 'kicked him off' from Work Hero. Now, he has stopped responding to our proposals for reparations. Therefore, at the time of the writing of this post, he has not been cooperative with our attempts to help him or to resolve this.

His subscription remains on hold until we hear back from him.

‍