sullivan@aqdata.uucp (Michael T. Sullivan) (11/14/89)
From article <1208@unify.UUCP>, by rja@unify.UUCP (Rick Anderson): > > My question is this: knowing in advance of purchasing a software product > that the possibility of problems exist, what motivates an organization to > NOT use the Customer Support facilities the vendor offers? How do you know that a person posting a question hasn't gone through the customer support route? Maybe the customer support route was useless. It happens. > no guarantees of the information you receive. Furthermore, by not contacting > the vendor's Customer Support organization, you are depriving the vendor of > valuable information that could increase the stability and reliability of > the product for everyone. Maybe because when on reports a bug to a company, the conversation goes like: "Yup. That's a bug." "What can I do about it." "Wait until the next release. Maybe it will get fixed then." Not very encouraging. I am not expecting all bugs to be fixed over the phone but a little reassurance by the vendor that my problem is their problem would be more encouraging. > The vendors spend a lot of money to maintain knowledgeable Customer Support > staffs. I cannot think of a better source of information about any issue > that might arise concerning use of a software product. Often times, even This may be the case at Unify (or it could just be propaganda) but it is NOT the case everywhere. True, a vendor should be given the benefit of the doubt at the start but when the vendor channels have been exhausted, what better avenue for an unanswered question the the net. > For those people that complain that Customer Support contracts cost too much, > I ask the question: how much will it cost you to wait for a response from > the network, and how much will it cost you to implement and test the response? > It seems to me this is the job of the product's vendor not the customer??? If it is the vendor's job, then why do we have to pay for software twice (once for the software, once for the support)? This is really a flame that needs to be brought up in another forum. -- Michael Sullivan uunet!jarthur.uucp!aqdata!sullivan aQdata, Inc. San Dimas, CA