memonicOfficial Blog

+++ CONTEST ENDS AUGUST 12TH – MAKE SURE YOU PARTICIPATED! +++

Are you using Memonic on Android, iPhone, iPad, or any other device? If so, we want you to review our app– with a chance to win a brand new Kindle!

Introducing Memonic’s Best Buzz Contest – to coincide with our newley released new apps for Android and iPhone, featuring:

- sharing notes with Twitter and Facebook or via email (iPhone)

- massively improved synchronization (you spoke up, we listened)

If you want to win a Kindle, simply review our app on any of the below links. Then send a link to your review, a screenshot of it, or the nickname you used when posting – to: win@memonic.com.

Tell it like it is: we want this to be an honest assessment, not blank praise. We will draw all the names of reviewers from a hat – and one lucky person will win.

To enter the draw, please review Memonic on any of the below:

iTunes (Please Review on iTunes itself)

Amazon

Android Market

This post has been updated on August 11, 2011, see below.
—-

On this blog we talk about the tools and services we use and love. Yet sometimes a service fails you. Also our service sometimes has a hiccup. We try to correct the mistake asap and communicate with our users – We love to do customer support – and they seem to love it. This post is about how not do customer support.

If you buy a subscription to our service – thanks if you do – you will be asked to provide your payment details. Credit cards of course but also country specific payment methods such as bank collection in Germany (Bankeinzug). It’s one of those things that you don’t want to do yourself for every country. So we had to choose a payment provider last year. We chose Adyen. Big mistake.

The issue I write here about is not the first issue we had with them but the straw that breaks the camel’s back.

Quite over a month ago I noticed that there were suddenly deposit corrections popping up in the settlement statements – Adyen calls the twice weekly reports “Settlement Batch Reports”. Nothing big I thought, so I looked at the batch overview page, the batch detail page and the detailed settlement report, found other inconsistencies and could simply not align the numbers.

For clarity I keep it to the report #113, the same actually holds true for other reports.

As you see in the overview the payout reads CHF 45.99.

Once I click on the batch number and get the detail page it says CHF 48.09.

Okay that’s two bucks to my detriment. Strange… but wait it gets sillier. Once you download the detailed report you are totally lost. It is for somebody outside Adyen completely intransparent how on earth they tabulate these aggregate numbers given what is displayed here.

No problem, I thought, drop support an email and they gladly explain to you how these numbers align. That was in June. The first mail I wrote on June 20th simply asking that someone explains the differences. To this day I have not received an answer.

Well I received lots of email responses by Kevin Lobbezzo and Gavin Stok from their support department explaining to me that I basically need to look elsewhere. As an example an email from Gavin from June 30th

> On 30 Jun 2011, at 3:49 PM, Adyen Support Department wrote:
>> Hi Dorian.
>> As per Kevin’s email this ticket is now very long and we ask that you log one ticket per issue or set of questions. This avoids the chance of confusion and frustration, and allows us to search for tickets in the future easier if required.
>>
>> If I understand correctly, you would like us to explain the correlation between a settlement report and the settlement batch overview tab. If this is true, please provide a batch number and we’ll reply in a new ticket with the explanation.
>>
>> If there are any other questions you’d like answered please let us know in a new ticket, and please feel free to use our knowledgebase at https://support.adyen.com/ as a starting point.
>>
>>
>> Kind Regards,
>> Gavin Stok
>> (Support Manager)

Sure, at this time I already had provided them the batch reports multiple times. And honestly folks, fix your support tool mess (By now the mail they keep sending me back and forth is 2.1MB big… ) Use a tool like Zendesk. That works nicely even with long threaded issues.

A few more meaningless Adyen support emails later I still do not have an answer. Probably everything is correct, let’s suppose this, but if the other party can’t explain its reports the confidence starts to erode.

By now – a full month later – I thought it’s time to escalate the issue.

At the core it’s a simple question: Would you trust your bank if it sends you a monthly statement that it can’t explain properly? I won’t. Exactly this question I asked Pieter van der Does, the CEO of Adyen, a week ago. No prizes for guessing that I haven’t received any response as of yet.

To be fair, payments ain’t easy. Credit card companies, acquirers, issuers, payment providers, and more are required for something seemingly simply as an online payment. And of course each intermediary wants to earn his living (on your costs, as effectively the consumer is paying for all this with a higher retail price).

Yet this is no excuse to provide the worst ever customer support.

—-

Update August 10, 2011

Four days after this post Christine Nitsch, Senior Account Manager, from Adyen contact me. We could resolve some of the issues. The difference to which I point in the post was due to exchange rate adjustments, that have not been properly reflected in the reporting frontend. Adyen has corrected this since. She also told me that Adyen works on a number of other improvements in the reporting and reassured me that the actual transaction accounting is 100% correct.

That’s right:  By popular demand and following your requests, we have just released a great and easy way to import all your Evernote notes into Memonic – so you can turn those into a collaborative living digital collection. As with the Delicious importer, we hope this too will serve you well.

Now, you can use your Evernote notes on Memonic, and use them on your favorite note taking platform. Share them with friends, collect them with friends, and see what’s trending via the dashboard by connecting to friends and colleagues on our platform. We hope you like it.

How It Works

Evernote allows you to export all your bookmarks into a file. Please select all notes into the file before exporting, and then export. Upload that file on this page, and we’ll do the rest. Important disclaimer: if your Evernote collection is huge, contact us first.

• All your links, tags and descriptions will be imported.
• Private bookmarks and items will stay private, and public links will stay public.
• You will be notified by mail as soon as the import is done.

For more, go to: http://www.memonic.com/tools/import/evernote

We look forward to your comments!

From time to time vendors from afar and close pitch us their testing services. I can tell you we’re covered.

Today Chris and Felix spent an afternoon testing a major upgrade soon to be released for all our devices. They seized the meeting room and were off testing.

Quite an impressive array of notebooks, tablets and mobile devices, ranging from notebooks running Windows, Mac OS, Linux, to tablets (both Android, and iPad) plus a number of smartphones.

They told me just a few moments ago, that the tests very successful, so stay tuned for the upcoming release.

I’ve always been interested in Interior Design. As such, I forcefully believe in changing one’s interiors as often as possible. I know, I know – heavy things like a sofa – which are costly and intense – are not so much change-able every two – three years. But wallpaper is; accessories are; new art can always be introduced into a household –  and so on, and so forth.

For example, my apartment used to look like this – all black and white:

Now, in my new apartment – one wall is orange, the art has changed, and I had the sofa re-upholstered to look like this (don’t mind the cats):

To do all this end, I use Memonic – among many other things, to keep an updated “inspiration board” for interiors. Check out my current items on: http://mem.to/t/g/27lrkf946. They include favorite designers – like Kelly Wearstler, for her blog which always has clever ideas, and images that are currently inspire me as I attempt to overhaul my bedroom AND my living room.

How do YOU use Memonic? Have you used it for re-decorating projects, to keep such information, etc? Let us know. We would love to hear from you and to check out YOUR lists!