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Support Suggestions

Donald_Francis

Support is indeed getting better slowly over time but it still is lacking, especially when it comes to urgent issues. I am posting this not to complain but to try to make it better.

Here are some suggestions I personally have.

-Allow engineers to be called directly. They do not always have to answer the phone but if you are working on a hot case the option of it makes things MUCH easier. Cisco does this it works great.

-Tier one support is sometimes very bad, to the point where they make things worse by going off in a wrong direction or harming your system by not understanding the consequences of their actions or just dragging the ticket out. The knowledge and performace gap between teir 1 and 2/3 is H U G E. I have had urgent issues go on for days that gets fixed in an hour as soon as I get to the next level.

-I should not have to send dirty emails to my account rep to get my tickets escalated or to get call backs from engineers. Someone or something should be managing tickets and forcing periodic updates or call backs, again take Cisco as an example.

-There needs to be FULL 24/7/365 support that can handle everything just like the guys can during the day. IE all the tiers need to be availible.

-There needs to be a Priority one process. If you have a system down not functioning issue you should be able to get someone on the phone within some respectible span of time. Not for all cases mid you just P1's. Again I will reference Cisco.

Please do not take this as a rant, I love SolarWinds and I want to see it get better. I think the company and its market share can be made much stronger just by putting support on a true enterprise level.

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byrona

I am going to have to agree with Donald on all points.

I personally find that the support I get in the forums is the best; unfortunately that doesn't work well for urgent issues.

jeff.stewart

Off subject, kind of, but I find Cisco support to be atrocious! I'd rather spend weeks troubleshooting (probably a bug) than to call them.

Donald_Francis

I agree. Their Teir 1 is horrid but their process is sound.

However if you can get past teir 1 especially to backbone TAC you are golden.

Mindy

Thanks for your suggestions regarding our support processes. I appreciate the specific feedback of what you would like to see improved. Here are a couple of comments:

· Knowledge and experience of Tier 1 engineers – We are working on improving the skill levels of our support engineers at all levels and if you feel like a case is being handled poorly (not understanding consequences or a case getting dragged out) please request that the case be escalated to someone else and include your reason for the request. After we get the case moved to someone else we do investigate what happened so that we can work to improve the situation.

· Escalation process – I agree you should be able to more easily escalate a case without having to go to Sales to make that happen and I’m working on making that easier for you to contact a support manager for any issues related to a specific case or support in general.

· Managing tickets - We do monitor the case workload across the entire team to identify cases that are not being handled in a responsive manner, but I will tell you that we are unlikely to be able to do this at an hourly level which is what you seem to be wanting. If you’ve got an urgent issue that is this critical, please let the support rep know of the impact and what you need. We do manage cases based on the priority set by you, but the extra information you provide would be helpful. We also have support reps working multiple shifts and if your case bridges the shift change, you may see a delay until the next day if you reply after they’re shift is over. If you can’t afford this delay, then either tell the support rep and they can have the case transferred to someone on the next shift or call in for support and ask that someone work it now since you can’t wait.

Thanks,
Mindy Kerber

Questionario

-Allow engineers to be called directly. They do not always have to answer the phone but if you are working on a hot case the option of it makes things MUCH easier. Cisco does this it works great.

Usually if the engineer working on your case signs with his name you can call support and ask for that person, if he is not on the phone you can usually talk to that person right away.

-Tier one support is sometimes very bad, to the point where they make things worse by going off in a wrong direction or harming your system by not understanding the consequences of their actions or just dragging the ticket out. The knowledge and performace gap between teir 1 and 2/3 is H U G E. I have had urgent issues go on for days that gets fixed in an hour as soon as I get to the next level.

I have to strongly agree on this one... Some support team members just start messing around with your system without even asking... with some I have even asked them to have a chat on the phone while he is messing on the system to ask if he can change things and explain what they are doing. Things are being changed without notifying the customer what they are doing, to make things worse, even if it didnt solve the problem, it does not get changed back!

Of course tier1 does not have in depth knowledge and experience, more communication is a must during support. I definitely think some kind of ticket management where someone checks the tickets ~twice a day would be good. a way to manually "flag" the ticket for escalation would be nice as well, that way someone can decide if it really should be escalated.

-I should not have to send dirty emails to my account rep to get my tickets escalated or to get call backs from engineers. Someone or something should be managing tickets and forcing periodic updates or call backs, again take Cisco as an example.

I agree somewhat, I dont see the support as critical as cisco support... but someone should be managing the tickets and making sure the customer was satisfied with the results...

I dont think any automated email asking to respond if you weren't satisfied is a solution to this though.

-There needs to be FULL 24/7/365 support that can handle everything just like the guys can during the day. IE all the tiers need to be availible.

definitely dont agree, full 24/7/365 support would make the product much more expensive... current support times are sufficient for me for a monitoring software

-There needs to be a Priority one process. If you have a system down not functioning issue you should be able to get someone on the phone within some respectible span of time. Not for all cases mid you just P1's. Again I will reference Cisco.

difficult... who decides what is P1?

The customer? Well then from now on all my cases are P1... there would have to be a process involved...