Quality of service

[qwerty]

A short time ago I sent an unregistered bug report. Soon after I got a reply and after a short chit-chat my issue could be resolved. Great!

Now (since I pay license fee for almost 20 years) I sent a registered bug report (on behalf of a customer's issue). This one (judging from the replier's name) went directly to India. No issue with that. But the supporter's first question was about the EA version I was using. So, what kind of support is that? Can't they read? The version is obviously one of the first questions you have to answer when sending a bug report. And it's also in the reply message. I would not guess that I'm the first to send a registerd bug report.

Anyone else with similar experience?

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[AndyJ]

I've sent a couple of Registered Support requests in the past and the response was fast, helpful and correct, so this may be something new.

[Sunshine]

Yeah sent in quite a number of registered bugs. Always received quick responses that were helpful and confirming it was a bug. Although the last two bugs reported with V16 required a bit more effort than usual.

[qwerty]

Well, I hope then it was just a bad day that supporter had. Probably it got me with some other pains which made it hurt more than usual. Let's see what will be the final outcome.

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[qwerty]

Today I got another reply from that very person. It showed no effort in trying to understand my issue and came with a "standard reply". So what am I supposed to do?

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[Geert Bellekens]

Keep trying. They can't all be rockstars, but in general my experience is that they really try to help.

Geert

[qwerty]

Well, I can say that for most of my queries as well. But that person doesn't seem to be paid for helping rather than sweeping away customers. Like "All of our telephone lines are busy at the moment. But...", well, you know what I mean. There does not seem to be a way of escalating things on a regular way :-(

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[Sunshine]

I agree with Geert, most of the time Sparx Systems support is really good and they do really make an effort. Its possible that they are short of staff due to Covid and their developers are really busy with V16 release so in an attempt to keep things going they may have outsourced the support to a 3rd party. Not sure if that's the case just a possible scenario.

[qwerty]

Well, that person was involved in a support case about 2-3 years ago. I can't tell whether it's an Indian in India or at Sparx premises in Australia. I do have some experience with supporters from India. They are very engaged, but often their thinking is completely different from ours (in the far west).  So I had an issue which took several hours to explain in online sessions until they finally got it. So they said. 2 years later I found a release note where my issue was claimed to be solved. It wasn't. Another case was with Tata which made an analysis of legacy software for a big company.  That was just for the bin. Also I had (and have) encounters with Indian developers/analytics being hired for being cheap. In all cases the results were also cheap. So I'm a bit burned when it comes to Indian support...

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[Modesto Vega]

They just proved that they do not forget long standing support cases. They just provided the resolution for a long standing support case, we had it open for months and I am very thankful that they responded with a solution. This has certainly improved my opinion of their customer service.

The only issue I still have is that, although they do not forget and have implemented some improvements we suggested, sometimes they take too long to provide a solution for a problem. This is only a problem when the solution leads to another problem also requiring a resolution.