A few hours in now to my attempt to build a WordPress.com site in a day (one element of my cunning two week plan) – all part of my preparation for an application to be an Automattic Happiness Engineer.
I somehow managed to add a Premium plan to my basket, and I kept getting notifications to go checkout. So eventually I went just to get rid of it, which I did, and then I noticed a banner saying I had some credits:
Nice, I thought, particularly as I thought the Premium plan was $48 for a year. Did this mean I could get it free? I got distracted by another thought though, and navigated away from the page to do something else. Five minutes later, I was ready to head back over and read more – but I could not for the life of me find the right place to go.
Aha! Now’s the time to see what a Happiness Engineer can do for me. As you might imagine from the title, it’s good and bad news…
Bad
No-one available on the chat! Limited chat availability is the heading to the popup, followed by this:
We’re anticipating that our availability in chat the next few days may be lower than normal. Our team is working to balance this moving forward so we can continue to support you and your site.
We appreciate your patience during this time. While we may not be available immediately in chat, we will respond to your message by email at your account email address as soon as we can.
Good
There’s a very effective search tool for digging into the support knowledge base. I found what I was looking for straight away, both for this problem and a query I had about how to set up the contact form. (Bit embarrassing how easy it was to find the checkout bit again, actually. Would have felt quite silly if a real person had had to show me how to do it – so maybe for the best there was no-one to talk to.)
If they’re struggling to have enough Happiness Engineers available, then there must be more than a few slots to fill. Better odds for me perhaps?
I almost forgot. To finish the story, I’d got the price wrong on the Premium plan. $84 for the year it is, so the $48 credit – being the amount I had just paid for the Personal plan – would have got me half off. Which makes total sense when you think about – if I paid the extra $48 it would be as if I’d bought the Premium plan in the first place. I really need to think these things through more…
One shot at life 