Hello again.....Let me try from the beginning. In fact, as so many of you have rightfully pointed out, we (that is me) should have run all this past you earlier. What we are trying to do is to provide more avenues of support for our paid and even eventually free users. Right now users get help in three ways: 1) from the forum via all of you; 2) from our trouble ticketing system; and 3) from family and friends. And then of course, our resellers also help customers but primarily small business customers.
The forum is an excellent way getting help but it tends to be used by more knowledgeable users (for example, my mother could probably not figure out how to post a question on the forum). Questions asked on the forum also tend to be a lot more difficult than the normal question. Second, we do have a trouble ticketing system. Unfortunately though even in the best of times, the turnaround can be a day or more and it is not possible to "hold the user's hand". Third, many (if not most) users do get support from someone they personally know and trust.
So, if we assume that not everyone has a trusted expert personally available, our users can get help from the forum and from the trouble ticketing system. Unfortunately, neither of these are comfortable for a novice user to use. Neither provide instantaneous help and neither allows remote control of a user computer to fix a problem immediately.
As Ondrej has pointed out, the problems you see here on the forum are actually quite a bit more complex than what most of our users see. When we look at the top-10 problems that we get into our tech support via the trouble ticketing system, maybe only two are actually technical problems.
This has also been borne out by the first 12 hours of calls to iYogi. They received 128 calls. Out of the 128 calls, I count less than 10 that are actual technical issues. Half the calls were just on how to install the product. In most of these cases the user just wanted iYogi to install the product for them--they did not even try to install it themselves. Most of the rest of the calls were just questions on how to configure the product, turn off the firewall, etc. 20% the callers took the post-service survey and just over 90% were satisfied or very satisfied with the service.
I realize that the people here on the forum do not need this kind of help. But lots of our users do want this type of help. 80% of our users are computer novices or average users. Those of us here on the forum tend to be the other 20%. We have to try creative ways of supporting these other 80%.
Now I do absolutely agree that the banner in the program was terrible. It has been fixed. Ondrej showed the new wireframe. The actual new screen is now complete and it will be rolled out Friday morning. Until then we have turned off the in-program banner.
This is still just a short term trial--we want to make sure that the users like the service and that they are not abused by the service. It is also only available in English and thus should only even be seen by users in UK, USA, Canada, and Australia.
And of course, further comments are more than welcome.