Seagate Website and Community Feedback

[freevito]

One way Seagate can make the Community Forums better would be to include a forum dedicated specifically to website issues. Here are some items the website issues forum could cover:

• • A sticky thread that reports the current status of all website error conditions, access problems, and other technical issues. For example, at the time of this writing, there is something wrong with the Product Registration system. I get all the way through the Product Registration page and click on "Register" only to receive the following message:
  
  

  "We are currently experiencing technical problems. Please try again later."
  

  ...er, OK — but when? Is Seagate even aware of the problem, or is the error message just a robot that pops up whenever something goes wrong? There's no way to know without either a sticky thread in the forums that reports website problems, or else a website status page somewhere on the site itself.
  
  

• • Seagate's website desperately needs a "Website Feedback" feature in the support section. The logical place to put it would be on the Contact Us page, as an additional category. The obvious purpose of such a feature would be to report problems with the website—problems like the following:

1. The aforementioned problem with the Product Registration system
2. The content of the Product Registration page itself. Just click on the link and scroll down through the questions and you'll see what a joke it is. Some questions appear THREE times. Other questions are unanswerable. Another question asks what my "D.A.V.E." will be used for. Really, folks...Seagate makes great products; why trash the company's image with such an idiotic product registration form?
3. The list of products on the Product Registration – Model Selection Page is hopelessly outdated. It includes only one Series 7200.11 drive. All the rest are 7200.9 and 7200.10 series.

If there's no feedback section on the website, there should at least be one here in the forums.

I hope that's of some help in improving the Community Forums in particular, and the Seagate customers' user experience in general.

Vito

Message Edited by freevito on 10-14-2008 01:59 PM

[AlanM]

Hi freevito,

Thanks for the suggestions.

Unfortunately a sticky thread like that is probably beyond our means at this time, but I'll take it under advisement to our forum team. 

There are no problems with the Product Registration page that I'm aware of, so I'd probably encourage you to try it again.  Sorry that happened to you - I know the site isn't perfect, but it was probably an isolated incident.

There is a feedback feature in the Support section. Check down at the bottom right-hand corner and look for a little + sign with FEEDBACK.  It will bring up a survey.

The redundancies on certain Product Registration forms just came to my attention yesterday, and I thank you for mentioning it.  I have a ticket in to get that fixed.  That messed-up page only comes up for certain drives, but still, you're right, it's terrible.

And I'll get on the limited selection of drives that you mentioned too. 

Again, thanks so much for all this - you obviously put a lot of time into it and I appreciate that.

[freevito]

Thanks for your prompt reply. In fact, let me just say , "Wow!" That's the second time in two days I've gotten I've gotten high-quality responsiveness from Seagate on this matter. The first was when I phoned support about it (yesterday) and talked to Kimberly, which I presume is how it came to your attention. That woman is SHARP! As I told her at the end of our conversation, it was a real treat to phone a tech support number and immediately get through to someone who:

1. Actually speaks English as a first language
2. Knows what she's doing
3. Is pleasant into the bargain

Evidently, she didn't sit on the information. The fact that you heard about it the same day is pretty impressive. In fact, it speaks volumes about Seagate that two separate individuals in support jumped on this issue so quickly. That's definitely a confidence builder, and it confirms my decision to use Seagate drives exclusively everywhere on my LAN, where Barracuda drives currently operate in a RAID-1 mirror on a server, in workstations and notebook computers, and in fast, reliable eSATA storage and backup for digital audio...lots of it.

Since I wrote my original post yesterday, I've smoked a couple of additional problems with the website, and think I've figured out the cause of the problem I reported with the Product Registration page. It was NOT a temporary problem, and I think I know why you couldn't replicate it. Here's what I've found.

It struck me a pretty weird that I could register the first drive, but all subsequent attempts to register another drive failed (and I have 9 more to register). Then it occurred to me that maybe the problem had something to do with the fact that I was logged in to my customer account. I was NOT logged in when I registered the first drive. Fine...so I'll just log out and try to register the next drive.

Oops...where's the "Log Out" button? Aaaccckkk!!! If there's one there, I couldn't find it. I tried closing my browser and then coming back in; nope—I was still logged in. OK...so I flushed the browser cache. That did it; when I went back to the Seagate site I was no longer logged in.

OK...so I went back into Product Registration, and...BINGO! —the registration succeeded! So far so good. Then I clicked on the handy "Register another Seagate product now?" link, then selected the Desktop Serial ATA (SATA) category, and then clicked on the Other Model link all the way at the bottom of the list, which I MUST do because none of the recent-model drives I have purchased are on the list. Then I got the following error message:

Error 404--Not Found
From RFC 2068 Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1:
10.4.5 404 Not Found

The server has not found anything matching the Request-URI. No indication is given of whether the condition is temporary or permanent.

If the server does not wish to make this information available to the client, the status code 403 (Forbidden) can be used instead. The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.

Aaarrrggghhh!!!...the only way I can get back to the Product Registration–Other Model data entry page is to go back to the home page and come back to it from the support menu.

Well, obviously that's a bit of a nuisance but it's not a huge inconvenience. At least now I've figured out how NOT to register my drives—namely:

• I can't register them while I'm logged into my customer account.
• I can't use the Register another Seagate product? link after I've successfully registered a drive.

By the way, everything I've reported here happens on two different browsers—SeaMonkey Navigator, version 1.1.12, and Safari, version 1.3.2 (312.6), so I'm pretty confident that none of these are browser-specific issues.

I hope this information is helpful in resolving some of the bugs I've encountered in trying to register my products.

Oh...and thanks for directing my attention to the little "Feedback" button in the bottom right corner of the web page. I'll use it whenever possible. Alas, it wouldn't have done much good in this particular case. There is no way I could have provided such thorough and explicit information in that tiny little "Comments" section with a 1000-character limit. However, it does provide a link back to the "Contact Us" page...which is where I ended up yesterday, at which time I decided to phone support. I guess I could've used e-mail, but I figured it might be useful to have this stuff here on the forums where it might help someone else.