MyHeritage Receives Failing Grades for Website User Experience and Customer Service.

I’ve been with MyHeritage since nearly the beginning. In one form or another, I have had a paid subscription and supported MyHeritage. Through my deep connections in the professional genealogy community, I witnessed the company grow, innovate, and become the platform it once was. Sadly, I must report I saw the company peak some years ago with a steady downward trend as of late.

We all knew back then that MyHeritage would never replace the Big Dog from Provo. And it never even came close. Perhaps that was never the design, but this fact speaks to what we have seen for several years. MyHeritage is no longer value added to the serious researcher. When was the last time someone said it was because of MyHeritage that some research finding took place? Not in the cards.

Personally, I now find the hints offered back from MyHeritage to be distracting. Nearly every hint points to a family tree, many times my own. And when a record or collection does appear in MyHeritage, it is abbreviated (truncated), thus useless in legitimate research – save for pointing to the full citation on FamilySearch or elsewhere.

So, we start with the value of MyHeritage in the first place. The odd split in subscription tiers for full access to trees and records and just records add unnecessary complexity. Some years back, I downgraded to just the records subscription for this very reason.

But here is the pinch. The less-than-intuitive website interface for records spills over into the administrative side of things. For example, recently, I wished to change my preferred credit card. The web-based user interface does not allow this. Nor does it allow you to see the subscription amount before billing. MyHeritage users are billed before they know exactly what they owe. Each are industry standards.

In the past, I’ve had moderate luck with MyHeritage’s customer service. I have met some fantastic MyHeritage people at RootsTech a few times. Recently, I rolled the dice again, and to my dismay, MyHeritage failed miserably.

Following up on the credit card update, I employed the MyHeritage chatbot, email, and telephone support. Each failed me! (Note: I had to Google around for the United States based customer support number. The MyHeritage website does not have it.)

The chatbot is not intelligent. It only points to some FAQ table working behind the scenes. Jefry, on the other end of the email support, has never responded to my follow-up request after the first canned email I received about my request being sent to the MyHeritage VIP support area. No such VIP support ever contacted me. And Rachel, bless her heart, whom I spoke with on the phone, confirmed what I already knew about not being able to know how much I will be billed upon renewal and the inability for me to update my credit card on the website.

So, what are we left with? Against MyHerigage’s lack of actual research value, the failing grades for website user experience and poor customer service lead to only one outcome. All I see is an outlet for those interested in photo colorization or obsessed with having their DNA in every data pool – even the small ones.