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It is with great satisfaction that we announce
a permanent price change and other improvements
that will positively impact your projects.
Prices:
Due to the recent
upgrade of our state-of-the-art laboratory,
coupled with research and development into
increasing lab efficiency, we are able to
permanently offer the basic Y-DNA12 test for $49
beginning April 1, 2013. The current sale of Y12
at $39 will end at 11:59PM CST, March 31,2013. We
are also working on bringing down the price of the
basic mtDNA test as well; we hope to have that
accomplished during the first half of this
year.
We understand that several projects have a
minimum requirement of 37 markers for the Y-DNA
test, but we’ve learned through the promotion with
the lower price point on the Y-DNA12 last month,
that it did not reduce the number of orders at the
37-marker level. Therefore, there was a net gain
for the database, not only by increasing the
number of members, but also increasing the number
of potential upgrades to higher levels.
We hope that you can encourage family and
friends who saw the price as a barrier to now come
on board. It is our goal to ensure every single
person is able to have the "DNA experience," at
least at the basic level. We are working on a
letter that you can send to family and friends to
invite them to take advantage of the new pricing.
Customer Service:
Family Tree DNA is the only company exclusively
dedicated to genetic genealogy and anthropology.
We offer the widest range of tests, from the basic
ones mentioned above to specific SNPs and all to
way to the "Walk Through the Y" and the Full
Mitochondrial Sequence.
Every month our lab in Houston processes tens
of thousands of discrete tests.
Given the increase in the volume of orders and
tests, we are adding additional people in our
Customer Service department. These are all
qualified personnel that receive very specific
training and who give an individual answer to each
email and phone call that they receive under
almost every circumstance. Our policy always been
to answer email between 24 to 48 hours (excluding
on weekends), and we are working towards coming
back to this norm. We apologize for the
inconvenience that delays beyond this norm have
caused and we appreciate your patience and support
while this situation is being corrected.
IT: Our IT Department has a
number of responsibilities. The main ones are:
- Making sure that our Laboratory Information
Management System (LIMS) works flawlessly so
that there are no mix-ups in the lab
or errors during processing.
- Making sure that results coming out of the
lab are seamlessly integrated with the personal
records from our customers.
- Writing the code for new features to be
implemented, whether those features are
conceived in-house or at the suggestion of our
customers.
Obviously, they also have to fix bugs, because
as we know - unfortunately - bugs happen. Any of
you that have iPhones, iPads or Android apps know
that we receive almost daily notifications for
updates which most of the time relate to bug
fixes. That doesn’t mean we accept all bugs as
inevitable—beyond a certain point they’re not
acceptable, so we are also taking the necessary
steps to improve this situation by hiring
additional qualified people. We believe that the
results will be noticed soon. Again, we apologize
and appreciate your patience and support.
* * *
As we grow and remain the leading company in
the field of genetic genealogy and anthropology,
we want to recognize the vital contribution that
you - the project administrators - have played in
this field since we pioneered it in 2000. The
recent groundbreaking paper "An African
American Paternal Lineage Adds an Extremely
Ancient Root to the Human Y Chromosome
Phylogenetic Tree," published in the
most prestigious journal in the field, The
American Journal of Human Genetics, and widely
mentioned in the press, was generated from a
sample analyzed at our lab. The paper was authored
by a group that included Family Tree DNA group
administrators, our lab people and a member of our
Scientific Advisory Board among others. This is a
testament not just to the quality of FTDNA's
science, but also to your contribution as citizen
scientists over the years. For that we sincerely
THANK YOU!
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