OmniFocus 3: Tech Support status updates

All in all, the OmniFocus 3 launch is going really well, but folks are (understandably) wondering why it’s taking longer than usual to get a response to tech support emails. My plan is to use this thread as a quick way of posting the kind of status updates we’ve built into our email autoresponders in the past. Email autoresponses aren’t much help to the folks who inquire on Twitter. :-)

To keep the thread as easy as possible for new readers to absorb, I’m going to lock the thread after I post this, but I’ll post updates going forward.

The good news is that our email response rate in the first two weeks of OmniFocus 3 for Mac is on pace to beat our previous best month this year (May, when v3 launched on iOS) by almost 50%; the bad news is that some of our queues still have tickets from launch day in them.

Why is that? Thus far, most of our email responses since the 24th have been to folks that:

  • have tried to upgrade to v3, but have one or more devices that didn’t install the compatibility updates we released for v2 beforehand
  • get a request from MacOS for their keychain/login password but enter their Omni Sync Server account password (or vice versa)
  • are encountering issues the engineering/test teams are actively researching, so we can get relevant info to those team members as quickly as possible.

However, the volume of those types of tickets has started to come down this week; we should be able to start making more progress on the rest of the email starting this weekend. We’ll continue to pull out all the stops: folks that don’t normally work in support have been helping out, we’re working overtime, and we’re making some other workflow changes to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

In the meantime, apologies for the delayed responses, and thanks for understanding. We really appreciate it.

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First weekly update: we closed out more tickets than were created last week, but that includes older tickets that were re-opened by the customer and brought to resolution again.

Oldest unassigned/unanswered emails in our product queues are from September 25th.

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2nd weekly update: closed out 157 more tickets than were created last week. Oldest unassigned tickets in our queues are from September 29th.

(We’re making a pass through all of the tickets trying to get as many responses out as possible, so this date isn’t going to advance as fast as it was when we were following the order of arrival more strictly.)

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3rd weekly update: closed out 260 more tickets than were created. 95% of the emails sent before October 6th have gotten a response. (We’re prioritizing getting responses out to as many people as possible, so a small number of more time-consuming issues are in a secondary queue being worked by a team devoted to it.)

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4th weekly update: Closed out 341 more tickets last week than were created. 98% of the tickets sent before October 13th have been answered.

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11/5 Update: closed out more emails in October than any previous month this year, and closed out 100 more tickets than were created this week. 99+% of the tickets from before October 19th have been answered.

11/12 Update: Had a couple folks out of the office for health reasons last week, but still managed to close out 38 more tickets than were created. 99+% of the tickets from before October 24th have been answered.

11/19 Update: closed out 29 more tickets than were created. Tail of the backlog is currently at 10/28.

I don’t want to jinx anything, but folks may have noticed that our support team is once again caught up! For the past week, we’ve been back to our usual turnaround time of answering every message by the end of the next business day.

Thanks to everyone for your patience over the past six months as we helped customers upgrade to OmniFocus 3!

(And thanks to all our hard-working support humans and others here at Omni who have put in extra time and effort to respond to the surge in support traffic!)

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