Paycircle Ideas Portal
I feel compelled to address a recurring concern regarding communication during service issues. It is crucial for us, as your customers, to receive pro-active, direct, and accurate information when facing any system-related challenges. The recent instances of generic and unclear messages have raised concerns within our bureau, impacting our overall delivery and questioning the reliability of your system and its underlying mechanics.
As a client-facing sector, we value collaborative support and understand that occasional issues may arise. Nevertheless, we believe that transparent and timely communication is key to maintaining a strong partnership. Generic and weak messaging with no clarity or certainty only adds to the frustration and anxiety of our team, making it difficult for us to effectively plan and address the challenges at hand.
We kindly request that you implement more proactive communication strategies during service disruptions. Clear and direct updates regarding the issue, expected resolution times, and any necessary steps on our end would greatly contribute to the smooth functioning of our operations.
We believe that by working together in a collaborative manner, we can overcome challenges more efficiently and strengthen our partnership. We value the services your system provides and hope to see improvements in communication during service issues soon.
| Describe the Challenge | No idea if PC is operational or not |
Hi Everyone
Just a quick update here on the product front. We have been investigating enhancements to improve the communications within Paycircle around service disruptions and maintenance.
We added the Paycircle product to the PeopleHR service status page available at https://status.peoplehr.com which you can subscribe to in order to be informed about current system services.
We are also in the process of introducing in-app messaging (and on the login page) containing information if these subjects arise.
We'll keep you updated with further movements in this space.
Thanks!
Hi All
Thank you for your honest feedback and suggestions here.
We want you to know that your voice matters, and we are actively incorporating your suggestions into our review of the recent service disruption.
As we progress with these improvements within the product, we will keep you updated on the developments and any new features that arise as a result of your feedback.
Completely agree, the response by Paycircle on this downtime has been dreadful. Communication has really been lacking full stop. Even the message supposedly sent through the portal in the morning didn't reach me until gone 5pm, and I'd been one of the few who could log in from the beginning. Proactive communication by email as well as through portal messages are a must as you say Michael. We also still haven't received any kind of communication as to what caused the issue, how it was fixed, or how it is being prevented from happening again in the future.
I could not agree more with Michael and the other comments.
It seems that as users we were receiving individual messages instead of group wide communications. This downtime is being acknowledged by paycircle as an inconvenience which is not acceptable. This week is a critical busy week for many Payroll Bureaux and to have such a long period of downtime at this time is far more than an inconvenient. Our service levels to our clients have been impacted and our teams are now having to pick up extra hours and work to meet deadlines.
The lack of information, acknowledgement and regular updates needs to addressed and without access to paycircle the chat function is not a suitable communication point and either emails or telephone calls should be used as a back up.
Frankly, the recent outage and your communication vacuum during it were unacceptable. Generic updates and radio silence left us scrambling, our team is drowning in overtime, and clients questioning our service. This isn't the first time this has happened, and your communication game needs a serious overhaul. We need clear, direct updates, not riddles. We need a heads-up on what's wrong and when it'll get fixed. And we need a roadmap to prevent future meltdowns. Think emails, phone calls, dedicated hotlines – anything to keep us in the loop before the frustration boils over. We value your services, but trust takes a dive when things go dark without a word.
Completely agree.
At this time of month in particular, the implications of a service outage are huge, and the risk of people not being paid grows by the hour as does the stress upon my payroll team who now need to work lots of overtime to make up for this.
We are a responsible employer and we don’t want to put our team under this sort of pressure, nor do we want to put our clients pay deadlines or our reputation at risk.
A big part of the stress is lack of communication - not knowing what the issue is and not knowing what's been done about it.
Also we would expect Access to have a robust disaster recovery plan to ensure service delivery is uninterrupted or at least interrupted for the shortest time possible. We need to have confidence in PC's risk management measures.
We do recognise that things go wrong sometimes. When they do, we require instant access to meaningful information and regular updates to allow us to make decisions internally about how to deal with the situation.
This isn’t the first major incident so I really hope lessons can finally be learned in terms of an emergency communication protocol and service continuity.
Michael I could not agree more. What is particularly disappointing is that we have given Paycircle the tools to address their communication issues by offering simple solutions such as suggesting an email to all clients when the platform is down or there is intermittent access and yet it has not been implemented. This is basic client management and as bureaux we need to have slick and effective communication with software partners to ensure we can effectively cascade information to our clients.
I couldn't agree with you more Michael. We asked for this last January when the fist major outage hit, then the second outage hit and it was the same. Bad, slow and inconsistent communication.
This is peak processing period for most bureaux and as a software provider to bureaux, the Paycircle team must understand the impact of an outage for an entire day would have on businesses. My team, along with many others, will now be working overtime today to get the work done we could not do yesterday whilst I spend my morning apologising to clients who didn't get their payroll back on time.
We all have account managers, why aren't they contacting each of us briefly to explain what is going on and reassure us?
3 major outages in 12 months and no apparent learnings from it. Disappointing.
Couldn't agree with you more Michael - how people are meant to hear about issues when they can't access the platform and messages are posted in the platform is beyond me.
Then to advises that further updates would be provided later in the day and have some staff (we'd asked other to logoff) wait around until this to get time critical payrolls run and no update be provided at all.
This latest outage has only put us on the back foot with losing a whole days worth of processing time but also now going to be in a position whereby staff are going to have to work outside of core hours to be able to complete payrolls when/if the system allows us, therefore having to pay out overtime to those individuals who are willing to do extra hours.
Something as small as an email or even phone to customers who go along way - it would also be extremely useful to get a full understand of what caused this latest issues, reasons why measures hadn't been put in place to avoid this and what is going to be put in place to stop similar issues happeninh in future.