Chatting is like chatting with someone from another language and they are sending huge smiling emojis as if hey these is no problem. No solution only post of pages for Divi support when it’s clear you are in Extra and the problem is a load issue. omgosh.. Process is something like: initiate chat, wait 3-4 hours for a response if you can or you miss it. Text a reply and wait another 2-4 hours for reply if you can catch it then then the fact phase starts with a remote access only to get pages for the divi builder tutorials and told you case has to go to another CS department and that’s it poof they are gone and that’s it.

Most pitiful customer service I have ever seen. As a lifetime member I am really disappointed.

Everyone in the biz holds back to make a dime. For elegant themes it is a pitiful way to gain trust and showcase a winning product.

I don’t know how you could even offer a mediocre rating here.

Love Elegant Themes!!

Just as you said, other members can answer your question too, but I have never had that happen & I have never had the time to help anyone else because I am usually too frustrated trying to get my own problems solved.

Had I known before I purchased their themes that their support was like this, I would not have purchased their themes at all. So hopefully this will help someone else not make the same mistake I did, although I don’t fault myself for not knowing, the only way I would have known were to be if I researched it which I didn’t do unfortunately. So I guess I do fault myself a little.

Anyways, if you’re thinking about going with Elegant Themes, DON’T! Or if you have but just recently enough to get your money back, get it back. Trust me, you’ll be MUCH better off paying for for themes elsewhere!

Divi support did respond overnight but with questions about installation procedures. I tried to rebuild the site from backups but with my latest settings export, the site looks miserable now.

Even if I do manage to get this resolved, I don’t feel comfortable turning Divi over to a client. I’m not sure what to do or what to tell the client. I paid $250 for lifetime and I’m past my 30 days.

I chose Divi over Genesis too. That seems to have been a very poor decision. Maybe this will serve as a warning to others.

Everything is pretty…people have good intentions, but support is lacking. See below. No need to rewrite – I am ending the following email to them right now.

What are the alternatives you guys have found??

Hi,
Please pass this up to a manager or owner immediately. Skip tech support, skip normal routes.
While your support team appears to have good intentions, they are using my site for their development.
I’ve spent two weeks and one day waiting for the Monarch plugin to work. I’ve sent 4 tokens, been told twice that it would be passed on to developers (and it was not). The icing on the cake is when I tell the technician that I already deactivated all plugins, cleared WP cache as well as cloudflare and it had no effect on the plugin…
He went in and deactivated my plugins for an hour and ten minutes this morning – having not received permission to do so.
I have given Elegant Themes feedback regarding their communication with customers, or lack thereof, as well as product improvement suggestions.
I see other tickets for the same issues – issues that could be resolved if the updated documentation was put up to begin with. Your website is hosting invalidated info. YouTube API v2 was deprecated on MARCH 14, 2014 – but your website seems to indicate that it is still in place.
The ticket email notifications were broken (I was not receiving them), the site is being worked on, and users also cannot access global settings.
Technicians ask for private info via email but do not state why they need this (because tickets are public)
Monarch is a simple social plugin. Not only does the API for YouTube not work for me, but the manual option does not work also. Two of the follow buttons say “follow” and one says “follows”. Who is doing your quality control? The large number only counts up to the first decimal place apparently by indicating “6” when it should read 6.5k follows, for example.
Instead of passing on to developers, your guys keep toying with it and following basic steps- which, are sometimes necessary – but I had already done.
This gives me absolutely no faith in your ability to support themes.
I have been straight-forward and patient and provided feedback throughout the entire process.
Please let me know how you would like to resolve this. If you feel that is the best your support team can do, then please cancel my account and issue a refund immediately.
They can provide the ticket to you for you to read through, below is the audit log for their work this morning.
I received emails this morning from people in other parts of the world telling me the site was either down or affected. Major portions of my site also run on plugins gravity view and gravity forms.

Thank you,

I recently assessed (as best you can prior to purchase) and then recommended Elegant Themes and the Divi Builder to a client. Mistake. The Divi builder 3.0+ is problematic (per JHERBJR comment above). I’m three days out from posting a ticket for the Divi Builder and no-one has picked it up yet, my client is about to seek a refund.

While the support forum is one mechanism to fix bugs, problems and learning curves, it seems to me the greatest missing link is a lack of documentation. The theme, builder etc Read Me files, or pages, barely represent an introduction and are almost entirely non-specific to the needs of the learning curve however big or small it may be.

The layers of logic it is required to work with between Website building, the communication and information needs of the site sitting there in the background, working with WordPress and then a theme PLUS a builder are substantial and hardly the realm of the totally inexperienced.

It would seem mandatory (and to my mind a reasonable expectation) that some form of user information by way of a realistic guide or manual would rid ET of half their support tickets and therefore the cost of servicing them. Adding some clarification about issues that are WordPress or plug-in issues rather than Divi builder or ET theme issues would go a long way to making life easier for both ET and their clients.

I have images showing as they wish/ or not showing at all, modules that do not respond to command, settings dialogues that flicker and go blank in the middle of a task etc etc. The site work thus far is broken. And I can’t do a thing about it except recommend my client ditch out.

He will likely give a poor reflection on the experience to his friends, clients and other associates in IT and his business area – it’s also a poor reflection on me despite not doing anything wrong.

Endnote: When I started the support ticket there were a few others in the list, in the three days since that as quadrupled…

I agree with previous responders, you have written a very balanced piece and I hope you are right that those one the wrong side of support are in the minority.

Personally my experiences have not been great. And I have experienced some kind of selection over tickets posted, because previously I posted two tickets about separate issues I was having with the Captcha, one got answered and solved within minutes, the other only received a response, more than 18 hours later, once I post a follow up prompt.

Since yesterday I have been having an issue https://www.elegantthemes.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=635162&p=3501717#p3501717 and was amazed when the response came to move away from the front-end Divi 3.0 builder and instead to use the old Divi 2 back-end method.

The biggest pity for me is I have paid for the lifetime subscription. All very frustrating, especially given the lack of information about how tickets are being dealt with. I also found it a pity the search facility for the forum wasn’t better, because then at least I might be able to find the answer myself from the previous issues of others, but as single word specific as the search is I would be there for days going through thousands of unrelated threads.

I guess I’ll have to go check out Genesis and cut my losses.

Thanks for the outlet.

Patrick

IMO adding opengraph meta and other social meta tags to theme is not a good idea. They should always come from plugin. This is because the social sharing system changes too often. Also which tags should be a part of theme? FB opengraph? Twitter Cards? Google+ Rich Snippets? oEmbed? This will make the site too bulky. Its best to delegate non-theme specific functionality to plugins. Even WordPress Theme development guidelines agree with me 😉 So ET has made correct decision here.

Regarding support, I have always got a solution within a few hours. They do recommend plugins sometimes but only when it SOLVES my problem. I would suggest trying them once!