A LinkedIn Suggestion: Please Fix Sales Navigator Support!

Back in mid-December, I (and many others!) received an email from LinkedIn:

 We are retiring the Notes and Tags features

 Dear John,

At LinkedIn, we're always looking for ways to simplify and improve your experience helping you be more productive and successful. This sometimes means removing features that aren't heavily used by most of our members to invest in others that members tell us offer greater value.

As such, we're removing the Notes and Tags features on the LinkedIn profile, which allowed you to add notes and tags to your connections, to help manage your professional relationships. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause you, so please know that you can download this information through March 31, 2017. You'll find instructions below.

As an active user of Notes and Tags, you will find similar functionality in LinkedIn's Sales Navigator. To see if Sales Navigator is right for you, we are offering you a free three-month trial*, which will allow you to transfer and view your existing notes and tags. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a product we launched a couple of years ago and is targeted at sales professionals - it lets you keep track of your existing relationships, research your network, and find new leads faster with tailored recommendations.

Below you'll find instructions on how to download and transfer your data as well as information regarding your free Sales Navigator trial.

Please feel free to contact us with any questions.

The LinkedIn Premium Team

This was followed by instructions on how to save Notes and Tags from LinkedIn and restore them into Sales Navigator.

I was pretty busy at the time so ignored it. A reminder arrived in mid-January, just as business was ramping up after the holidays. I set aside some time at the end of February to start the trial and take a close look at Sales Navigator.

I had done a trial of Sales Navigator a while ago and decided that the extra cost over Business Plus didn’t make any sense for how I used LinkedIn. So I chose Business Plus instead of Sales Navigator.

I have to say that I was very unhappy about this situation as I was going to have to pay nearly $30 more per month over what I currently pay for Business Plus in order to get the features I really used in LinkedIn: Notes, Tags, Saved Searches, and searching in Groups that I am a member of!

I started my Sale Navigator last Monday and sent in a message to Sales Navigator Support that very same day:

I started my trial of Sales Navigator this afternoon.

While saving searches, Sales Navigator has crashed 3 times with the following error:

Sorry... We were unable to retrieve results for your search request at this time.

I am running FireFox on Windows 8, patched as of December.

Any ideas as to cause?

Thanks very much,

John

I received an email back:

That was the last I heard from LinkedIn Enterprise Services!

On Thursday, I sent in a couple more messages to Sales Navigator Support: the Sales Navigator intro video runs every time I open up Sales Navigator so I asked how to turn it off. I also asked why Sales Navigator was available for my Android phone but not for my Android tablet. I received the same type of confirmation email.

No response as of yesterday and the emails came from a no-reply email address so I looked in My Cases. I was surprised to see that my Sales Navigator cases were not available in Sales Navigator nor in LinkedIn. All of my old closed cases were listed however???

As My Cases in Sales Navigator opened up in LinkedIn, I sent a message to LinkedIn Support:

I have just started a trial of Sales Navigator. I sent in three cases to Sales Navigator Support this week, the first one on Monday afternoon. I received emailed confirmations of all three ... and no emails since!

I just tried to check the status of those cases ... and they don't appear in my Open Cases list!

How do I see the status of these cases?

Thanks,

John

I received the usual confirmation email back from LinkedIn. Strangely enough, the LinkedIn support emails come from an email address you can reply to (LinkedIn Customer Support <[email protected]>) while Sales Navigator support emails don’t (LinkedIn Enterprise Services <[email protected]>).

Then I received an email saying that my case had been transferred to Sales Navigator Support! I have no idea how long it will take to get an answer back from them!

I find this extremely frustrating. Not only is LinkedIn asking me to pay nearly $30 more per month for Sales Navigator, the support we get is much inferior! This level of support is certainly not conducive to getting me to pay $30 more per month in order to get the functionality that I had before!

So I have three questions for LinkedIn:

1. Why don’t we have access to Sales Navigator cases in My Cases?
2. Why does it take so long for LinkedIn Enterprise Services to respond to cases from members?
3. Why do LinkedIn Enterprise Services emails come from an email address we cannot reply back to?

#LinkedIn #SalesNavigator #LinkedInCustomerSupport #LinkedInEnterpriseServices

? John Marrett 2017

About me

I’ve been in sales, marketing and CRM consulting for over 20 years. I write occasional articles and suggestions about issues I have found in LinkedIn.

Thanks very much for reading this article. I welcome your comments. If you find this article very useful, please share it with other members of your LinkedIn network.

You may be interested in reading some of my other articles on LinkedIn:

A LinkedIn Suggestion: Implement Google Search in LinkedIn!

Is the new LinkedIn interface a joke?

Who has shared my articles and updates? A suggestion for LinkedIn!

Why I Refuse to Use Free Public Wi-Fi

8 Suggestion to Improve LinkedIn 

A LinkedIn Suggestion: User Feedback (aka Using User Suggestions to Improve LinkedIn!) 

A LinkedIn Suggestion: Fake Profiles on LinkedIn 

How to turn off LinkedIn Video Autorun 

Do you need to manage and configure thousands of network devices? 

A LinkedIn Suggestion: Notifications 

Great Post! 

The great work our son’s team did was mentioned in Forbes! 

A LION in the house? Say it ain’t so John! 

LinkedIn Spam? How do You Handle It? 

And here's a link to my LinkedIn Author Page 

All articles ? John Marrett 2015 to 2017

Suggestions photo attribution

Photo from Flickr, by John Pavelka, used under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0) license.