Live customer support (Asana deleted my account)

Hi,

It’s been two days since my profile disappeared from Asana. Some kind of bug kicked me out from the system. I have tried to contact the customer support for two days. I’ve got contact (with 24 hours between each email answer) but even as I have tried to describe what happen as clear as possible, I haven’t got the problem solved.

Ok, let’s start from the beginning. I’m the manager and billing owner of our organization. We work with festival planning for different festivals and all of our data is in Asana. I have employees, customers, partners etc. that I work with daily in Asana.

Some of our info-mails we forward to projects in Asana. To take off some load from me an employee said we should deregister the info-address connected to a festival from my account and register it to her account. Then I would not get notified all the time about what happen afterwards.

When I deregistered the address and she added it to her account she noticed something funny. Suddenly she had a lot of new tasks she did not recognize. The tasks where my tasks. She checked her associated emails and saw that all my email addresses including private now was associated with her account.

I was logged out at that moment and could not log in again. I got an email from Asana that my account was deleted. As I am the billing owner and admin, I could not believe my eyes. For all of you working daily in Asana and putting trust in that your data is safe, I guess you can imagine the feeling of panic.

I wrote to the support and described the situation. I got an answer a couple of hours later that I needed to include the billing owner in the CC of the mail. The support team needed a confirmation from that address.

It’s just that I am the billing owner. But now my employee had inherited all my rights including all hidden teams and projects with confidential information. Well, I called her up during the night and said it was an emergency and that she just needed to open her mail and confirm that I have the right to get my account recovered. So, she did.

Then 24 hours went without any contact. In desperation I tried to find a chat. I got contact with the sales team. That is apparently the only persons you can chat with at Asana. They could not help me but should forward the request to the support team that was “working as fast as they can”.

Guess if I was happy when I got a mail the day after. I tried to explain as detailed as possible what had led up to the incident. I said maybe they needed to recover my account from the time before the incident with detailed information of the steps leading up to me getting kick-out. The help I got was that my private e-mail address got associated with my employees account. When I logged in it was to hers. I also got some semi-automated answers with links to online guides.

I did send a mail straight away to the support person I was “talking” to, saying that it was the wrong solution. I could see my tasks, but they were not “mine” anymore. They had been transferred to my employees account who now had both all her and my tasks, private teams and projects and my owner/admin rights merged into her account. No answer from the support person.

Now it’s been 24 hours more. The feeling of not being sure if my account and data can be restored/recovered is really affecting my work and our whole organization. I guess most of you can imagine. My employees are afraid to work in Asana if the solution demands that there is backup/recovery for our whole organization from a time before the account got deleted.

For me this has been a really chocking experience. If we could have done a backup of Asana ourselves, I would have felt safer. We are paying customers but not in the Enterprise plan so we cannot do a backup ourselves.

I would really like you guys at Asana to take this question seriously. One of the messages on your website is “Trusted by great teams”. We are a great team. And we would feel trust if I could get live support during an emergency like this. That is a matter of quality. I understand that you maybe cannot respond live or even quickly to all users with free accounts. But we are using Asana for our living and we are paying for it.

My support ticket is #140749 if @Alexis @Marie or someone else wants to pass this forward.

Furthermore, I would like to know for how long time it’s reasonable that I should have patience and wait until my account is restored? And of course, the most crucial question, can my account be restored?

Hi @Erik_Ruth and sincere apologies for the trouble here.

I have liaised with our support team and can confirm they will be in touch shortly to help you resolve this issue. Unfortunately this is not something we can solve via the Forum as it involves some private information that can’t be shared publicly (ex: email addresses) and some steps that only our support team can perform.

We’ve moved your post to the #tipsandtricks section as #productfeedback is exclusively reserved to product feedback and feature request not support. Again, our sincere apologies for the negative experience here, rest ensured that we are closely following up on your case on our end too, and will make sure that this gets resolved in a timely manner.

Please let me know if there is anything else I can help you with Erik!

Hi @Natalia!

Sorry if I was unclear. I did not really feel right for me to publish my post in Tips and Tricks. Maybe it would be better in Bugs as my admin account got hi-jacked from another user without my permission?

To frame it in the Product Feedback section I gave it the title Live Support… as that is actually a “feature” I’m requesting that came out of the frustration of not getting qualified answers from your support in time.

I never really cared so much about support before as I like to solve things for myself. Since the incident I have been comparing Asana with other services in that matter and I’m afraid to say that it is not to your advantage. Basecamp for example showed their response time on their website. At the moment I checked it was 13 minutes.

I’ve been without access to my account for over 8 days. I reported this to your colleagues for over a week ago. Every answer from me have taken like 30 minutes, but then I get sent to a new person. I have been waiting over 48 hours from my last respons from you… And the question I’m repeating is: Can you restore our organization from a backup after a bug on your side? When? No answer…

The last mail I received felt that it was from a person with more technical knowledge. That made me glad but that was also because I was disappointed at the quality of the answers I got before. The suggestion he gave me to create a new profile would mean that we would loose data and history. And that’s not good for us. We would like a restore from backup.

I have been a strong promoter of Asana for years and really dug in to the platform and learnt everything. I have both my private and all my business information in there for the company and the festivals I’m running.

I’ve used Asana for years. Customers like me are lead users. We recruiting new customers and even train them. We promote Asana by the way we talk about the upsides of the platform. So from my perspective a good customer relation philosophy would be to give fast (or at least not slow) high quality support for questions regarding the credibility of the service. As the protection of your own data.

If you want to give me a reply, please include in the answer if it is possible to do a backup of our organization (or any organization at all) to a point in time before 3 March 15:57 CET (GMT +1).

If the answer to that question is yes, please let me know when it can happen.

Hi @Erik_Ruth and thanks for the follow-up.

Marie here, jumping in while @Natalia is offline. I’m really sorry for all the back and forth with different support agents, as well as the delays you’ve experienced with our support over the last week. I have just liaised with our support team to help speed up the process and can confirm my colleague Erwan will be in touch soon, but considering the nature of the issue you’re experiencing, there is very little we can do to help you directly via the Forum. You can learn how we handle data in the following guide article: Privacy and security settings in Asana | Product guide • Asana Product Guide but I’m unfortunately not equipped to give you a tailored answer regarding your specific situation as I do not have access to your account or information. Please bear with until our team gets back to you via email, we hope this gets resolved soon.

Hi @Marie!

Thank you for your fast reply. I appreciate it.

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Hi again @Marie!

Still no answer from Erwan or anyone else at the support team. Can we talk in a private thread? It seams as I can’t start a private message to you, so maybe you can send the first one to me?