Why are you even online ?
Please. This pisses me off. I ask someone for personal request, and they don't respond me. Why are they even online ? Why ? Explain this to me. When I REALLY NEED SUPPORT, WHEN IT'S URGENT, someone doesn't just care, they put themselves as online, and they don't respond.
WELL IF YOU'RE ONLINE, RESPOND THEN, THAT'S YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. Do you understand that ?
I don't think so. Please just put yourself "Busy" or "Offline" if you don't pick up requests.
I had an urgent situation connected with self-harm and at the end I harmed myself, but I'm sure that if I talked to someone, it would be different. Idk what to think anymore, I can't think clearly anymore, I'm pissed off.
Please solve this somehow.
Hi Future, I am so very sorry that you had to experience not being heard by a listener or listeners who were marked as online. This is definitely not a behavior that we want listeners here to display. Indeed, if we listeners cannot take requests, we most definitely should set our status to busy of offline. It is possible sometimes that we forget to set our status to busy when indeed we are busy. Yet, in such cases when members request us when our status reads available when we really are not, we as responsible, compassionate listeners should at least respond to you and let you know directly that we cannot meet, that we did forget to set our status to busy. I wish this had been the case for you. Please accept my apology for those who were not there for you today.
Hey there!
I'm sorry this happened. I agree that this is part of Listeners responsibility. To respond to requests if they put themselves out there.
Some of them are new however, and they don't know that putting themselves on the Busy/Offline Status will mean they will not receive requests or that if they will let themselves Online they will continue to receive new ones. I personally always try to put myself in the shoes of others and that's why I'm putting myself Busy whenever I'm in more than 2-3 chats or Offline when I cannot take chats at all.
I would like for you to try to think about what might be the reasons of a Listener not to respond to your request. It's indeed frustrating and horrible to wait and wait and nothing to be happening. You have the option to search for a different Listener.
Not sure if its okay to say that because of that Listener you harmed yourself. You always have a choice and we must try to be more aware of the choice we are making. Please, do remember that. :)
@cristiana33 - is this something that needs to be spelled out more explicitly in listener training?
I think new listeners are automatically online? We've discussed maybe having them start off as offline or busy and showing them how to go online, or perhaps once they take several chats and don't know to make themselves busy, showing how to do that.
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
Maybe so, yeah. I don't really remember how fast it was for me at the beginning to figure things out but I remember that I didn't understand how the Status really helps me out as a Listener.
Setting their Status as Offline by Default might make some feel like why they aren't getting any requests?!
Creating a paragraph about the different Statuses in the training or making some referring to it in the discussions might help more. Also, a difference between GR and PR might help as well.
@cristiana33 - agreed. these are all good suggestions
cc @laura (let's discuss if we can get some of this info into listener training?)
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn I love that idea. The "online status" feature is one of the first things I'm almost bound to talk about with my mentees.
It's not clear enough in the listener training, since I always see the same situation. They get lots and lots of personal requests, and they can't handle them, and don't know how to stop it.
Well, I have had the same issue before. I try to connect to a listener but do not get a response from them. When the same thing happens a lot of times, it must be assumed that there's something wrong with the way all these things work. When I tried to send a personal request to my listener account, i observed that The listener gets notified about the personal request, and he has two options: Either to accept the request, or to reject it by clicking on the cross mark next to the request..
The problem is; when the request is rejected by the listener, the system sends no Notification to the member that the Request has been Rejected. The request stays 'live' for a long time. @KrinkTheMellowUnicorn , can't we have the system notify the member the request has been rejected for some reason? I guess that's what the listener's assume the system would do...
@Aaryav, I'm looking into this. I honestly don't know if this is simply an oversight (by design) or a bug that used to work differently, but I agree that we should not leave people hanging!
one could be told nicely that the listener is not able to take your request...
@Aaryav I have researched this some more and when a personal request is declined the requester is supposed to be routed to a page saying the listener is not available at this time.
i will do some testing myself but if you can give more details of a scenario in which this fails to happen, please do. thanks!
@Aaryav - OK, I just "took one for the team" - declining an anonymous request from myself and hurting my perfect response rate :)
what happened was a bit odd. the guest account requested from was indeed left hanging for approximately 2-5 minutes past when I declined the request, but it did eventually tell me that "no listeners are available" (not quite true) and gave me other options.
It sounds like in some case this was not happening, even after a delay? If so, I'd still like to track down that scenario, and meanwhile I'm investigating what is causing it to take the additional time before notifying the requester that the listener they tried to ask for is unavailable.
better put myself back offline now!
@KrinkTheMellowUnicorn
So you wanted me to research on this and let you know the scenario because you didn't want your personal request response rate to fall? -.-
Lol! Okay, so as you observed, the member gets a message that there are no listeners available at the moment (something like that ), but not that the request has been rejected (In a kind way)
And this happens after about 2 minutes. There should not be such a lag. Its enough time for a member to loose his patience.
And, 😀 Even after rejecting requests, my response rate is still 100pc.
Merry Christmas!!!!
It is highly likely that the person actually wasn't online. 7 Cups has a bit of a problem with this. If I changed my online status to online now, but I logged out and turned my computer off, the site would still say I'm online. Other listeners have brought this up, just nothing has been done to change it so when you log out, it changes it to offline.
Sorry that it caused you so much frustration!
cc: @krinkthemellowunicorn
@SilentSerenityy thanks for understanding
@SilentSerenityy - hmm, that could be it- i'll have to check, but there could be other causes for this as well