Customer service is always an interesting field to work in.  You never know quite what will happen on any given day.  Some days it may be a warzone, and others it may be quiet on that western front.  And giving customer service online is no exception to that.

An accurate depiction of Matt’s inbox sometimes.

I honestly can never know what to expect when that page first loads; sometimes it may just be notifications of the transactions that didn’t go through for one reason or another, and other times we may have a server down, causing people to be unable to access their music.  Once in a while you may finish up that last email just to find five more waiting for you in the inbox. One day I actually had 23 emails which popped up in the course of an hour due to something similar! You honestly can never tell what may happen.

There are, of course, a few questions that are much more common than others.  These are often different from customer to customer, so it is important to make sure that you read and understand the customer’s problem completely; this ensures that the problem is solved with as little hassle as possible.

Today, I’m going to go over a few of the more common questions we receive:

“I didn’t receive the email with the link to my music, how do I find it?”
To those new to the site, navigation may sometimes be tricky.  So to make sure the customer can find their music as easily as possible, we send an email with the link to their music.  Sometimes this email may be lost in transit.  If that happens, you can always find your music by logging in to your NewMusicalTheatre account, and clicking on “My Account” followed by “Download My Sheet Music.”

“When is the newest music from a certain composer coming out?”
At NewMusicalTheatre we get a lot of these, especially when a hot new musical is about to be released.  One of note from this summer was Dogfight by Pasek and Paul.  In these cases, we often will add you to a mailing list.  When the music is released, we will then go through the mailing list and send out emails notifying you of its availability.

“My download links are expired, but I haven’t used them all yet.”
This one is a bit more tricky, requiring troubleshooting on a case-by-case basis.  Rarely, the system may have a hiccup during a transaction.  This can occasionally cause a problem with the downloads on your music.  In these cases, we will work closely with you to fix it and ensure that you have no difficulties in accessing your music.

“My PDF has these strange boxes / a page is missing / the words aren’t showing up correctly.”
This is a problem that I myself have encountered many times as well.  It is often caused by your PDF software.  Usually, checking to make sure you have downloaded all available updates will solve it.  If not, trying a different software than the one you are currently using may also solve it.  There are many options available if you are having this problem.  There is of course Adobe and/or Preview, but there are others as well; Foxit is pretty reliable. The one I myself advocate, as for many they already have the software, is opening the file via Google Chrome. It has PDF viewing software built in, and has fixed many of my problems in the past.  If none of these work, send us a quick message and we’ll help you to troubleshoot your difficulties.

As you can see, we often encounter a wide variety of questions here at NewMusicalTheatre.com, so you can never know what to expect.  But then that’s half of the fun.  It’s what makes the job exciting.  It always feels great to help out our customers and to know that at the end of the day, you made someone’s day a little easier (or at least less stressful)!

So the next time you run in to a problem, don’t hesitate to shoot us a message.  We are more than happy to help you guys out!  After all, where would we be without you?

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