There’s a New Sheriff in Town!

For those of you who don’t yet know me, my name is Lauren and I’m FixYa.com’s new community manager. I’m going to be working to make FixYa the best place it possibly can be, kicking out the riffraff, and fostering more interaction among our great group of Experts. I’ve been hanging out in the Expert Lounge the last couple of days, familiarizing myself with the issues that are most troublesome to you guys. I’m seeing the same general categories of complaints over and over again:

• The number of “BS Experts” on the site.
• The difficulty in understanding how FixYa deals with payments and refunds.
• The confusing Expert ranking system.
• The seemingly arbitrary “best solution” designation.

Eliminating the “BS Experts” is at the top of my list. We have already banned a few and I have a list of many more that will be receiving warnings. The other issues are going to take us a little longer to deal with. FixYa is a growing company that doesn’t have the manpower to immediately implement change, but we want you to know that your issues aren’t falling upon deaf ears. In the meantime, I think that it will help both you and us if I make our policies a little bit clearer.

• Do not answer questions outside of your area of expertise. I know you are all eager to help and to make a little money, but when a good Expert overreaches his abilities and knowledge he ends up looking like a BS Expert and is in danger of receiving a warning or being banned.
• Do not simply tell customers to go to a technician or other professional. The reason they’re at FixYa in the first place is because they don’t want to go that route. I understand that in some cases your superior knowledge may mean that you truly know that no one short of a professional can fix the customer’s problem. In that case explain the reason clearly, don’t just tell them to “take it to the shop”.
• Be judicious when referring customers off site. It’s one thing if you are directing them towards a product or manual that they have specifically requested, but in other cases it is a violation of our TOS.
• Make sure that you don’t post what should be a request for clarification as a solution.
• Do not engage in “placeholding” by answering the question immediately with an unhelpful or partial response to secure your place in line, then using the comment function to finish your answer.
• Do not self-rate with secondary accounts. This behavior is very apparent to us and will get you banned.
• Do not copy or repeat information given in other Expert’s solutions to the same question. It’s okay if you and another Expert happen to give the same answer at the same time; we will be able to tell from the timestamp that it is an honest mistake. If you just want to confirm that another Expert’s solution is the right one, rate it with a “FixYa”.
• Do not oversimplify your answers. Customers using FixYa.com often come with little or no knowledge and experience. Be careful in your solutions to be detailed enough that even someone who isn’t familiar with the product in question can easily follow your advice. In premium questions in particular, customers expect more than a one or two line response.
• Do not give “inappropriate” ratings to experts in retaliation for anything that happens on or off FixYa.com. That sort of behavior is very apparent to us and if we begin to see a pattern of you giving undeserved “inappropriates”, you will be banned.
• Do not be rude to the customer and do not harass the customer to rate your response. It’s okay to include a friendly reminder, but begging makes you and us look bad.
• Do not spam. Ever. Any account that we suspect of spamming will be immediately banned.

I hope these guidelines help you guys. We really appreciate our Experts and don’t enjoy banning people, especially Experts who honestly didn’t know they were doing anything wrong. We hope that by clarifying exactly what we do and don’t want you to be doing we can make using and contributing to FixYa.com the most rewarding experience possible.

You can reach me at [email protected]. I’d love to hear any suggestions you how as to how we can increase the sense of community at FixYa and improve the customer and Expert experience.