Now, working in both a development and support function, I can appreciate that everyone is busy and that trying to debug faults in my application isn't the job of support. However, I do get a little tired of the support process going like this:
But it's the next request that often follows - "Please supply example project" that is sometimes irksome. It's going to take me several hours to try and and build a sample standalone project and at the end of that, it's not guaranteed I'll be able to reproduce the fault. It could be that it only happens in a very specific situation that a sample project can never reproduce. I once had to resort to sending you a complete VM so you could see the fault as when stripped down to basics, it didn't happen. It turned out in that case to be a localisation bug.
In situations like this, it would be preferable to discuss the problem conceptually with the developer. Wearing my development hat, the support people here often go "Can you think of any reason why XYZ should happen?". As I know the code and they don't, it's often very easy for me to glance down the code and go "Ahh, yes - that could happen if XYZ".
So the plea is to not always bounce the support call straight back at me. I'm not in the habit of making up issues just for the hell of it :-)
Cheers, Rob,
PS. The DELETE key doesn't work in this editor. Backspace is fine.
I am so in agreement with Rob!! As a priority spport customer, I hate to get the run around when trying to solve a problem. Tell you the truth, I hate using the support all together. The reason we call tech support is cause we have an issue implementing your tool with our existing app, not a skeleton app. To date, I think tech spt has helped me resolve just one of my issues (it was really a hack, hard coded the spell checker id). I would never recommend this suite just becasue of the support. I currently have an issue, lets see how this gets resolved...I swear I want a refund sometimes!!!!
ustesgreenridge said: I hate to get the run around when trying to solve a problem. Tell you the truth, I hate using the support all together.
I hate to get the run around when trying to solve a problem. Tell you the truth, I hate using the support all together.
Things like this annoy as well:
Hello,
Hope you are doing well. (what?? you want to know about the pain in my neck?) I was wondering if you need further assistance on this case. We have not heard back from your side for the last three days.
So how come we have to wait months for a resolution but you expect us to respond to your messages within 3 days? Another sign of an out-sourced support function where one of the metrics is getting jobs signed off ASAP.
Cheers, Rob.
I should mention that I'm a priority support customer too - but I wouldn't recommend it as it doesn't make the slightest bit of difference for reporting bugs (which is all I use support for). It does provide access to "live chat" but all they do here is file a request with the contents of the chat, and it gets dealt with in the usual way! There's also telephone support but I find technical issues are best written down.
> Another sign of an out-sourced support function where one of the metrics is getting jobs signed off ASAP.
I've had the same thought before. I had a request which had an associated development issue, and I prefer to keep these open until the development issue has been fixed so that the request doesn't get lost among my collection of closed ones. However, the support engineer insisted that the request should be closed since their job was done (even though from my point of view the request was far from complete). Eventually they had the cheek tell me they would be closing it, and promptly did so! I wondered if this engineer had a target to meet.
There's a noticable lack of recent replies from Infragistics on this thread. Where are you?
I have been following this thread for quite some time and restraining myself from posting an answer. Whatever I say probably will not change your attitude towards our support (support engineers). I cannot speak for all of them, but I as one sometimes experience great difficulties in reproducing the customer's issue. Most of the time the difference in the environments has a great effect on that. A quick example - a user opens a request that states that he/she cannot set the Background of the grid. This is pretty straightforward,right? Simply setting the Background property should work and no update like "cannot reproduce the problem" from our side should be sent. However, I was not using XP, ServicePack 4, Theme - Tiger and VS 2008 Express as apparently the customer did and were not mentioned in the description. Sometimes the cases are hard to reproduce even with a provided sample. For example:
Steps to reproduce:1) Click on the first field 14 times, 2) Scroll horizontally 1/3 of the length 3) Click again on the first field 4) Scroll back to beginning 5) Select 4th record 6) Scroll 5 times rapidly.
Regarding issue reporting. You are developers and know that simply "Record Filtering is not working with me" is not an appropriate issue to be logged and fixed. I believe I have not taken your cases, but I have come across some that literally give no specific information on the issue. The problem has to be isolated and contained within minimum steps to reproduce and additional settings.
Regarding cases in development. They are not being closed. The case is linked to a development issue number and then they are marked as "In Development". When the issue is resolved from the Development Teams, a message is sent to the customer that the Service Release is out and the case is back "In Progress" for confirmation from the customer.
I am sorry for the inconveniences you had and the way you feel towards the Support Group. This thread keeps growing with negativism. I wonder where the happy users are :)
Alex Fidanov"]I am sorry for the inconveniences you had and the way you feel towards the Support Group. This thread keeps growing with negativism. I wonder where the happy users are :)
I appreciate you jumping in on this thread and completely understand the points you raise about some support requests. However, this seems to be affecting some engineers' handling of requests where all the necessary information is provided - as if their immediate reaction is to assume that the initial request is not detailed enough without really reading it or investigating.
Alex Fidanov"]Regarding cases in development. They are not being closed.
Well one of mine was closed: CAS-08635-9LY8EA. This was not so much a bug report but a request for Firefox support for the online documentation (the obvious problem being that there is no vertical scrollbar in the left hand pane so it's almost impossible to navigate). I mean, really, non-IE support is a massive oversight for documentation targeted at technical people who are most likely to be using less common browsers. Certainly none of the developers I work with use IE.
This request went around in circles with one inappropriate standard response after another:
Support: I was wondering if you need further assistance on this case. We have not heard back from your side for the last three days. (We'd just had two public holidays in the UK.)
Me: There's nothing else, thanks, but since the issue is not yet resolved I will keep this case open. I'll close it when your developers fix the problem.
Support: Due to the nature of competition in the technology industry, we cannot provide information on our development plans for this product. Any official information on the future of our products, if available, will be posted on our website. Please note that we highly value customer feedback and have a proven track record for delivering feature requests with every major release of our NetAdvantage toolset. (No idea why this standard reply was made.)
Support: I was wondering if you need further assistance on this case. We have not heard back from your side for the last three days.
Me: No, I think this request is going around in circles. As I keep saying, I'm just waiting for you to fix it.
... until ...
Support: I am closing this case.
Looking back at this, the associated development issue was also closed at the same time as the request. And the documentation still doesn't work properly with Firefox. Looks like it was all a waste of time.
informed_direct said:I do not know the background or technical skills required for your 1st line support team but it appears to be outsourced
I get the impression that some of it is outsourced - and this is nearly always the support I have issues with. There are certainly some very good support engineers, but these tend to be the people who answer escalated issues and seem not to be from the outsourced team.
Yes, I'd concur with this. When a particularly thorny issue is made, the response is often in a different style to the previous converstations which suggests it came from somebody else and the information was just been passed on.
BTW - why can't you edit posts on here? One of the big advantages of forums over email/mailing lists is you can edit it when you spot a typo or mistake.