Why is it taking so long to speak to a support person?
I tried to speak to someone yesterday and waited an hour without speaking to someone.
I am trying again today.
One can only guess why support takes too long to answer:
(Did you know there's an Advanced Support option? One where you call directly to a Level Two engineer and bypass the first level techs? It costs something like an additional $50K - $80K per year. I was excited to hear about the option until I heard about the jump in support cost.)
To minimize my SW Support Call stress, I follow the this process:
It's the most efficient use of my time--particularly when I know that Support can take a long time to pick up the phone.
WOW, Did you have that locked and loaded ? That was a lengthy reply.
I usually avoid calling the support line. In the past I was able to learn quite a bit from the 1st level support engineers but now it is more the catch and release help desk situation.
Luckily, I am not dealing a down system.
Yes I agree. When I call in now days, there are long pauses when the call taker has to go talk to someone from tier 2 or something. I recently had a call and I was told to call support, because that's what we pay for. We weren't that long into the call, outside of him putting me on hold to go talk to someone when the call technician asked if my system was a VM. I said yes. His response was, simply flatten and rebuild the VM and that should resolve my issue and to call them back if it doesn't. There was no did you run the "configuration wizard" or "run the diagnostics and send it to me". It went straight to flatten and rebuild. I was shocked that after waiting so long to talk to someone and with little to no troubleshooting that was the solution.
I demanded to talk to Tier 2 or Tier 3 and I was told that's not allowed. I then asked to work with a different technician, that too wasn't allowed. We ended the call and I ended up finding the solution on Thwack.
Was the solution flattening and rebuilding the VM
raymondakrawi We apologize for the lengthy hold times. While there are number of things that can contribute to this, I can confirm that earlier this week we had an issue with our phone system routing (fixed). Additionally, we have 18 openings on our Support team at this time. We are hoping to fill these positions quickly which should positively impact wait times.
Were you able to get through and get your issue resolved? If not, please let me know your case # and I will look into it.
Thank you for your patience!
Danielle
In true MVP fashion... thanks for sharing these tips rschroeder.
If I only had a week's vacation in Bora-Bora for every time I've called Support and successfully reduced my frustration and time to resolution by using this process.
;^)
Hi raymondakrawi
The support line would be a good way to move forward any critical incidents.
However for me personally, I found the best way is to open production down ticket (with the appropriate reason) via Customer Portal and available Engineer will reach out to me very fast. Plus you avoid any costs for phone calls
Kind regards,
Marcin Kazmierczak.
That "pat" reply is partly due to fast keyboarding skills that were enhanced by years of piano lessons.
The other part is practicality. I've provided that basic information to others previously, and I talk with Support frequently enough that I have spent time trying to minimize time and maximize efficiency. That process (above) is what works well for me; I think it probably would work pretty well for most folks.
