Suggestion to the aquarium coop team!

[Karen B.]

Greetings 

As its widely known, fishkeepers are a bit left to themselves when it comes to fish problems/health issues or questions in general.

I think that is why Cory’s Q&A are so popular - an experienced fishkeeper that shares his knowledge.

I used to email a lot of questions to Candy/the teams concerning my fish. But lately, while they do diligently answer, they point me more and more toward the forum.

I see the point of doing that - a whole community of fishkeepers sharing their knowledge. But its also its downside - so many people with so many different opinions or advices… I often end up more confused then when I first asked the questions. And I do not mean to offend anyone saying so. It’s just like searching the web. You can get pretty much any answer and its opposite. Cory himself once told me, when I asked him how come he was one of the only person out there suggesting that putting only 1 or 2 otocinclus in an aquarium could be ok, that it was because people didn’t know what they were talking about.

I think it would be such an amazing feature for members if we had access to someone by email to ask all our questions. It would be his/her dedicated job.  At the same time, I remember not too long ago Cory was saying he was a bit fed up of answering the same old questions in his live Q&A. Well that person could be the perfect solution : we presend all our questions to him/her,  s/he answers most of them, and could filter the most interesting one for Cory to answer either in a live if he feels like doing so or just a video.

That’s the feature I would most appreciated with my monthly membership. I’d even be willing to pay more just to have access to a professional answering my questions.

@Cory

@Zenzo

@Candi

 

[Cory]

This is not something we are interested in doing or really can do.. That is essentially a fish information hotline and we aren't setup to do that and won't setup to do that.  It's not scalable and has a high chance for disappointment. The reality is our customer service should be utilized for product questions and a question here and there. 

At $100 an hour, people would book more hours than there was in a day of my time. Unfortunately a service like this isn't scalable or profitable. A brief example is, lets say you asked 1 question a week. and it took 5 minutes to answer. 3300 members currently.  That would be 275 hours a week. at 40 hours a week, it would take 4.3 employees full time to answer this every week. At $20 an hour, the cost would be $5,500 per week, which would be 4x the revenue from memberships. This is why things like this can't scale.

[Karen B.]

On 12/11/2021 at 2:33 AM, Cory said:

This is not something we are interested in doing or really can do.. That is essentially a fish information hotline and we aren't setup to do that and won't setup to do that.  It's not scalable and has a high chance for disappointment. The reality is our customer service should be utilized for product questions and a question here and there. 

At $100 an hour, people would book more hours than there was in a day of my time. Unfortunately a service like this isn't scalable or profitable. A brief example is, lets say you asked 1 question a week. and it took 5 minutes to answer. 3300 members currently.  That would be 275 hours a week. at 40 hours a week, it would take 4.3 employees full time to answer this every week. At $20 an hour, the cost would be $5,500 per week, which would be 4x the revenue from memberships. This is why things like this can't scale.

Oh, I understand then. ☹️ But thank you for taking the time to answer.

[gardenman]

The reality is there's seldom just one "right" answer to any question or problem. And what works for one person may fail miserably for another. There's no book or online resource you can find that will be right every time for every issue. No employee the Coop could hire would know the "right" answer to every question. Largely because there is no one "right" answer to every question.