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After nearly 5 months we need clarification

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.

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Completely agree - I sent an email to the Chinesepod team and got the same response as mentioned by them in the forums i.e. they are working on it, cannot yet talk about when new content will be posted and that there are already so many lessons on the website. It is very frustrating and I am sure that instead of repeated apologies, we really want new content.

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I am trying to cancel my subscription - i have been with chinese pod on and off since 2008 but am not happy. i cannot seem to be able to cancel. can anybody advise

Hi,
this post is for the Company which is in charge of the site!
Normally I don’t say anything, but the situation is kind of critical. For sure I think that the library is a real treasure, but no way that I have to know from other customers what I should know from you: all the staff is gone, really?. It is a question of business ethics: you are worthy of my trust for sure, but now I don’t trust you anymore!
You are a business company and you are lucky for having a big old library of excellent material, especially the older one. But it is a very crowded market and there are plenty of other providers. You are billing me every month and not a word about? Not cool at all.
If there’are no serious and honest answers I think I’m going to unsubscribe.
Alessandro

according to my understanding, the current team can’t do anything (which make sense… Since this kind of decision is coming from the top management). So I guess they don’t have our answer.
It seems the top management is quite shabi傻逼/bullshit/stupid/uncompetant/just care about the money and not the users. And it is this top management that should take the responsability and move their ass to solve this situation, and give us the honor of their wonderful answer.

Again: https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/ChinesePod-Reviews-E1060525.htm
That’s why i don’t think we should blame the staff but blame the top management for their lack of competence and be not care of their customers. I’m expecting at least a letter in order to be forgiven for their incompetence which affect us.
With maybe a picture of them down for our forgiveness .

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Seems to be a long standing problem at CP. I’m currently being billed $30/mo 2 years after canceling my subscription (I’ve taken it up with Visa). I suspect this is SOP for CP, and perhaps time to look at other services.

Hello Chris, I apologize for the inconvenience and our student relations team will take care of this matter. Thank you for your patience!

Rebecca

It would be nice to have an update!

Hello,

Thanks for reaching out to us! We recently restarted our publishing process and we are planning to release new lessons on Wednesdays. In addition, new episodes of Shanghai street style, Mandarin slang, and chengyu series are also going to be published on our Youtube channel starting this week. We are working on getting the production back on track and we still need some time to have regular content every single week. but this is definitely a start! Stay tuned and let me know if you have any other questions!

Rebecca

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