Customer feedback and support model request

I want to add my 2 pence worth in year as I have been a customer of webassist for a number of years.

I would give the support a 5/10.
Anna you should take note of this please.
The quality of your products is only as good is its support.
I have a number of small issues with your products but I won't go into these as I can raise individual support tickets on these.
Generally the bugs are few and howto's are many.

I want to start by saying the support is sometimes great and sometimes poor and sometimes your experts don't explain themselves well enough to close the ticket and satisfy the customer. However I do appreciate the degree of effort is high to resolve issues and bespoke queries.

As a business owner your support model doesn't work for me. Basically if I receive a new client brief or an existing client brief, I need to be able to develop that with the best tools and knowledge to follow the brief in as quick a time as possible.
We need to quote based on price, quality and time competition.

However dealing with your support in this fashion - i.e. no chat, skype or telephone support is not able to adequately support my business with a stedfast timeline, especially a tight deadline. I have data assist tickets that go back months that would blow a project deadline apart if I just relied on your support to help me.
As such I hire in external resources globally to code up from the basics like dataassist can provide.

You actually dont offer a complete product. Reason: users have goals and if they can only reach 20-90% of that goal - it is nevertheless incomplete.

Satisfy your business clients by coaching them from 0 to 100% of their goals and because such 'in person' tutorials are remembered it will mean that you won't have to repeat yourselves on so many similar queries.

You need a continual conversation to get things solved and sorted there and then, for example within an entire week resolve all the useage and how to questions on a subject area, rather than fragmented forum postings over a longer period.

Your components offer relatively good value for money but without good support to push the boundaries of your products they aren't worth anything to companies like ours.

However have you missed a trick...I think so.
Allow customers to get the basics out of the products with video tutorials...great. But when clients ask businesses to push boundaries dedicated support is required. Why don't you charge for this because I am spending this elsewhere.

In almost 3 years you could have earnt around £X,000 from us alone if you had offered this and I would be writing an email of great satisfaction and thanks.

Instead you have earnt £300 on components together with a disgruntled email on largely how unhappy I am with your approach which is one step removed from the customer and their needs and one step removed from tangible interaction with the customer, like the old telephone. We just don't have time to wait for a forum response to find we need another 20 messages to resolve the issue.

I have had telephone support from Jason before which is excellent but I would need that multiple a project to feel happy about your service overall. Again there are comanies like mine willing to pay for it.

Therefore charge as much as you feel the market will respond to, but make an offer of telephone support/dedicated support OR own up to not adequately support some of your users.

All in all I looking forward to seeing more advanced features for data assist and perhaps a data reporting module, but again I won't elaborate unless a member of your team would find it useful to discuss it with me over the phone.

So my conclusion is this - make REAL customer service king through REAL means not forums.
1. you will find you earn a significant amount to fund your support teams.
2. respond to customers - ALWAYS.
3. you will sell more components and 'support packages' than you could imagine.

Many thanks,
Neil