It has been nearly 5 months since Fiona, Constance, and Gwilym left ChinesePod, and as of me writing this there have been no new lessons (spaced out, prerecorded episodes withstanding) or even news of replacement hosts being hired. The point of this post is to directly ask a variety of questions I have, and that I have seen, that have been left unanswered by ChinesePod.
1.) Will users that have subscribed during this time period have their subscriptions during the period of no content be refunded or frozen?
2.) Have any new hosts been hired?
3.) What time frame should we expect the new hosts to be hired?
4.) What time frame should we expect new content to start being created?
5.) What is an effective way that the community can ask questions or request changes and get straight forward answers? I understand that we have a “change can be exciting” and “improving learning” forums, but there’s no clear structure to these. The purpose seems to have been to create a pressure valve rather than an actual program to let the community work with ChinesePod to make improvements in a systematic way.
6.) What ideas are being tossed about related to future content? Due to the lack of communication between ChinesePod and the community we don’t know what, if anything, is being considered for the future of the website. If we have no idea what is going on then there’s little that we can do to actually help the website improve.
7.) Why was New Zealand chosen over a country that has a majority Mandarin speaking population?
8.) Are subscribers still able to sign up for free tutoring during the current period of no hosts as stated in this post? (Chinesepod should extend for no charge the subscriptions of all members until services are resumed) If so, can this option be formally sent as a message to all subscribers as I would assume most subscribers don’t look at the forums, and even more have not seen this post.
These are just some questions, if anyone has anything else they wish to ask please feel free to.
I and certainly community as a whole would appreciate direct responses to these questions. Too many times questions have been asked to only be replied with formulaic and vague customer support answers. You need to frequently respond to questions and make clear and direct responses. Vague answers, particularly over such a long stretch of time, leave people feeling more uncertain about the future. Also, as I have stated above it’s incredibly difficult to give us vague answers about what is going on and to truly expect the community to work with you in making changes that we would like to see. This entire situation has been poorly managed up until this point, and I would like to see ChinesePod take some initiative to improve its handling of it or else it will continue to lose consumer confidence and subscribers.