Is it poor customer service, poor trial design or both?
Disclaimer: I understand this post might not be a popular one in this subreddit, but I feel that, in a community largely comprising of long time, established users, the experience of new members is often eclipsed when in my case, several red flags have occurred that I think everyone should know about, not least for the sake of platform sustainability and business support.
I'm prospective migrant to Fastmail here for the sake of degoogling whilst expanding my small business. Really though, 'prospective' should be downgraded to 'unlikely' at this point. Why? Well because the free trial has been nothing short of full of headaches from the first second and FM's Australia-based support team have been more or less useless throughout.
First things first: I appreciate FM has to take some steps to prevent trial abuse when no credit card is required, but honestly, I'd much rather put in CC details (of something like a one-use virtual card) in the sign up stage just to be able to actually access the BASIC features of email, rather than piss about waiting for days for a phone number verification page to be unblocked.
So, it's been three days since my 'trial' started... and I'm yet to be able to give the platform a real try. Still can't send an email. I instantly made a ticket within minutes of encountering the verification error, assuming they had an automated protocol or keyword catch that could remove the block... nope. Close to four (4!) days later and all I have received is a pledge that my ticket has been upgraded to Tier 2?! Wow, tier 2, lucky me. I don't think I'm asking for anything too extravagant here, guys.
It's a real kick in the teeth to have such slow support so early on and it's incredibly disappointing that FastMail, as good as its platform, mission statement, and feedback from a great community may be, can't offer the most basic support necessary. From a business perspective, how could you continue with this? Why offer a free trial, 3 days of which I have effectively lost now, when there is apparent staff bottlenecks making it functionally not-fit-for-purpose? You can't.
From a sales angle it's particularly nonsensical for the system to be broken like this considering I have actively been trying to continue to push myself down the pipeline! Days of research on which email service to move to based on all my concerns and needs, and I can't even force a way to trial the apparent best 'option'? A cynic might think that the trial period is deliberately, or at least knowingly, left opaque and dysfunctional so users jump the gun and commit to the paid service off the bat...but I don't expect this from a company with a seemingly community-first mission over profit.
FastMail team, I didn't sign up for the trial to experience the colour palette of the inbox or the font size of the menus. I signed up to check that the platform works. It doesn't.
Rant over. It would be great to hear if any of the aforementioned long-time users of FM have noticed a drop off in support recently? Or, if you have heard similar stories from anyone they have recommended FM to, who have actually had to start from scratch like me?
TLDR: How can you tell me 'free trial'.... but you can't send any emails or try any other fundamental features until someone on the undersized support team who are operating from the least convenient timezone in the world, apparently not 24/7, bothers to click on your ticket and provide a fix that should be well automated and closed by 2026. And guess what the only self-fix that works is in the meantime... buying the said product upfront, despite its poor support.