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Who you gonna call? Not the sales team!

Permalink Comments (10)3 October 2007 at 15:47 by James Allsworth
Posted under Boring but necessary announcements

A still from the Ghostbusters II movie - Image A1317P © Photos 12
© Photos 12It has come to our attention that an increasing amount of photographers have been calling our sales focused Customer Service line rather than Member Services, something that should be avoided to prevent the blocking of incoming sales calls from clients.

With over 30,000 registered photographers its inevitable that there will be times when you pick up the phone to call us, and we are unable to speak to you. For this reason we have a voicemail service where you can leave a message. If you do leave a message someone will call you back as soon as possible, usually that day providing your contact details are clear!

With various projects recently going live there has been an increased demand to talk to us via the phone so at this moment in time we are very busy. If you are forwarded to voicemail please leave a message and wait for us to call you back. A number of contributors have been repeatedly calling our Customer Service sales team to talk about contributor issues or to complain that the Member Services phone is diverting to voicemail. Can we please ask that you don't do this as the CS team are not trained to handle contributor enquiries and calling CS blocks incoming sales related calls.

We understand it can be frustrating not being able to get through to us right away and for that we apologise. With the majority of calls we receive, the information is already available on the website so be sure to check the (very useful) contributor section of the site before calling. Alternatively you could also put your question to fellow photographers on our lively contributor forum. You will probably find that your question has already been answered or your point already being discussed! You can also email our member services team who will be more than happy to help.

If you need to call us though the line is there, and if it's busy someone will be in touch soon. Our office hours are 9am to 5pm (GMT) Monday to Friday and the number is +44 (0)1235 844640.

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Add your own commentComments (10)

  1. 03 October 2007 at 19:35 IanMurray

    A few clear answers on the blog or forum would remove the need for many of these phone calls?

  2. 03 October 2007 at 20:33 Bob croxford

    Dear James

    Alamy are losing goodwill among many of their contributors like a leaky sieve. I suggest you would have less people phoning you if you addressed some of the issues raised in the past 2 weeks on your blog and forum.

  3. 03 October 2007 at 21:48 Kevin

    Hmmm... crikey.

    Imagine just a just a handful, say 10% of disgruntled contributors calling Alamy customers services on the same day. Would be enough to bring the system down.!

  4. 04 October 2007 at 12:22 fstop

    I couldn't agree with IanMurray more.

    Just a little more involvement in the forums will do the trick. Alamy can literally avoid 100's of phone calls and emails to the member service by just one clear message answering questions in the forum.

    PLEASE ALAMY. GET INVOLVED IN THE FORUMS.

  5. 05 October 2007 at 10:40 Peter Barritt

    Try answering emails within a couple of weeks (or at all) and your phone lines might be less busy. The silence from Alamy with thousands of contributing photographers seriously pissed off with ZT, novel use, poorly thought through new keyworing etc is deafening.
    Get your act together Alamy if you wish to salvage any goodwill.

  6. 05 October 2007 at 11:28 Nic Cleave

    Agree with all the above. Alamy, please sdtart listening and RESPONDING to your contributor questions and concerns during this period of un-precedented change and upheaval to your contributors, either through replies in these blog pages or direct by email, then perhaps you would have less photographers taking the direct phone call approach?

    Regards,

    Nic

  7. 05 October 2007 at 19:44 Fabian gonzales

    I can understand why this happens, as dealing with member services via e-mail can be very frustrating. One of my pet peeves is that member services does not track communication with case numbers. So if there is a need to do follow-up, the staff at Alamy have no access to any case history, and I have to start explaining the issue all over again.

    I recently spent a month trying to have a pseudonym renamed. After a month, I was finally told that this was not possible, after 6-7 letters to member services trying to have this done, with many replies promising that this would be taken care of.

    Having first-line support reply with irrelevant form letters is also frustrating.

    Some suggestions:
    - Improved communication. A series of FAQs compiled by support staff would be very helpful to answer the most common questions.
    - Get better support staff. The first reply from Alamy support staff too often is complete nonsense, which then requires a second or third follow-up e-mail to get the question answered, even though it should have been clear from the beginning.
    - Introduce case numbers and a case history to better track issues that require followup.

  8. 09 October 2007 at 07:12 Martin hughes-jones

    Alamy have just lost the goodwill of this contributor too. An email response concerning the new information we are now required to add to images produce produced a copy and paste unhelpful reply and zero response to the follow-up. Working together must work both ways.

  9. 11 October 2007 at 08:35 Mike Kipling

    I echo all the comments at the current dissatisfaction with Alamy.

    I have being having terrible trouble getting images through QC. My last submissions of 500+ images were rejected because QC found one with “interpolation artifacts”. When I inspected the image there were no such artifacts, the image had been taken in raw on a high megapixel camera so there was only minimal upsizing but it had been taken at 1600iso. So there was some noise, it was a candid and in my eyes more than acceptable.

    My complaint to Members Services with a hi res copy of the image attached resulted in an anonymous standard reply which unhelpfully suggested I submit images in smaller batches. My comments were not addressed and I am still awaiting a response to my reply made well over a week ago.

    A dust spot has become more important than a brilliant saleable image thanks to the offensive zero tolerance policy.

    Alamy is requiring more and more work for diminishing returns, seems to be less helpful to the photographer, and as a pro who once saw this as a nice side line I really now wonder if it is worth the effort. How many feel the same.

  10. 19 October 2007 at 17:31 peter davey

    Interesting reading - so with all this bad feeling is anyone going to stop uploading?

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