What is the role of Community Managers in achieving improvements in OptikTV

[msblayney]

Are the Team Members responding to customer queries and complaints about the shortcomings of Optik TV in fact employees of Telus?  I have read "We're also taking notes to inform the business on what your pain-points are". If Telus is  getting reports from you about customer complaints, why have so many fundamental problems not been addressed by corporate management to radically improve the customer experience? I made the mistake of switching to Telus from Shaw at the beginning of April 2023, and the sheer volume of complaints and failure in many cases to make improvements to the software seem to have fallen on deaf ears. I do not wish to seem to be abusive, and I appreciate the efforts of what seem to be volunteers to bring about change, but there seems to be "all talk and no action"! How much, if at all, are Telus executives paying attention to what you are trying to do?

Michael Blayney

[buckycat]

Just going by what I read here but it seems like the cloud pvr was released without proper testing. I notice that Telus doesn’t even advertise it on tv anymore. Telus should give customers the option of using the legacy Optik 4K box that works flawlessly.

[A-B]

Hello. If you see the words 'TELUS Employee' or 'Community Manager' directly underneath our handles in our replies (like you'll see with this one) then yes, the person replying is a TELUS employee. In terms of passing feedback to our team that we hear from clients here on our community, we're doing just that. Advising the appropriate team (i.e. our Optik development team) of issues we see here, be they new one-offs or well known issues. Rest assured, both are handled with the same amount of priority/urgency, and our team is working every day to resolve said issues.

The always amazing @Optik-Kate has created a bulletin board thread here that may address your concerns. It's also a great place to leave specific feedback about features, errors, etc.

[Optik-Kate]

Hi @msblayney , to echo @A-B , we're taking the feedback seriously and all concerns are passed to our development team. That said, all concerns need to be first validated, ensuring the issues can be replicated before they are prioritized in the development team's backlog while also balancing other business initiatives that are constantly competing against the development team's resources.

Sometimes, issues can be easily replicated,  while others seem to be one off experiences that are difficult to replicate, and therefore difficult to fix. Some issues may be interlinked with other dependencies and requires certain updates to be made before we can even tackle the real issue. 

Using the request of "removing home screen" as an example - It is widely requested here on Neighbourhood, as well as Call Center, but we never see such request through other social media platforms such as Reddit, FB, or Twitter. Intuitively, we think majority of the customer doesn't mind the home screen (we also have data to support this). We also think experiencing something different from what people are used to brings negative emotions, and there is a learning curve to a different product. So it isn't as simple as removing the home screen. We need to run design surveys to figure out what customers actually want, to validate or invalidate intuitions, and find designs that suits the majority of the customer base. I am not trying to make excuses about why things take so long, I merely want to shed some light on the lengthy process that we are working with.

This is not an exhaustive list, but since the new TV service launched in March, our development team has been hard at work and they've made the following updates and improvements: 

• Auto extend sport recordings
• Allowing profile specific recordings
• Ability to favourite channels
• Ability to restart a live stream that ended up to 18h ago
• The ability to pause a live stream of up to 15 mins 
• Content search improvements
• Playback troubleshooting toggle for Android to avoid playback errors
• Sports Zone & Game zone
• Trending & Upcoming lane to help discover content
• Continue Watching lane for streaming apps

In fact, we have another release that is rolling out by the end of this month to address guide responsiveness and reduce overall lag during navigation. Again, I can't promise any timelines for all the concerns, but we're definitely sharing the feedback to the team, and the development team is working very hard to improve the service. 

[msblayney]

Hello Optik-Kate,

Thank you for your very prompt and comprehensive reply to my query! I understand that it is difficult to satisfy some customers (like me!) who are anxious to see rapid improvement in the present Optik software. If I may say so, your development team could learn much from examining the rival Shaw system to see what it is that former Shaw customers miss so much after switching to your platform.

Again I thank you for taking the time to respond to my email.

Michael Blayney

[buckycat]

@msblayney 

On the Shaw forum there are plenty of complaints about the box they use. In what ways do you think it’s superior to the current Telus offering? Just curious as my contract is coming to an end soon and I want to keep my options open.

[msblayney]

On Jul. 19, 2023, at 3:31 p.m., Michael Blayney <[email protected]> wrote:

When you refer to “the box they use”, I assume that you mean the PVR used for recording programmes. With the Shaw PVR which I used previously it was possible to save recorded items almost indefinitely, and they were recorded in date order. There was none of the 45 -day limit imposed by Telus. A big drawback of the Telus recording system is that while there is an option to list items either by oldest first or newest first, whenever I try to set Öldest”first, the setting reverts to newest first.

Please clarify- you refer to the Shaw forum and complaints about “the box they use”. Again the use of this word “box”. Do you mean the PVR unit, or the whole Telus software system?

[buckycat · Accepted solution]

https://www.telus.com/en/tv/4k-pvr-and-wireless-digital-box

note the word box in the above link.
Box = pvr. Sounds like the differences are minor between the two systems. Mostly personal preferences. Thanks for your help, guess I will stick with Telus.