You could try offering timely support

Your move to the forum method of supporting your products has been a GIANT LEAP BACKWARDS.

Getting an answer once every 24 hours does nothing but frustrate your users into spending hour upon hour trying to find what went wrong with your extensions.

Actually, your support was only marginally better before your forum. What you really need to do is to answer the phone.

Actually, maybe a little more time fixing what you have and a little less reinventing would be appropriate as well.

WebAssist product quality has nose-dived since you dropped ASP support and moved to a subscription model.

I completely agree that the forums is tremendously inefficient to get timely help AND resolution compared to the way it used to be done. Nothing worse really than having to spend hours and usually days involving several back and forth messages. I'm under deadline and today trying to get some answers to questions on multiple WA products and I keep checking back and nothing. All the while knowing it's Friday and if I don't get some help today I'll have to wait until Monday at the earliest. I realize others have issues needing resolution too, but that doesn't make mine any less urgent. My impression is that WA doesn't have the support staff to capably handle the volume of support needs for us customers. In the meantime, the WA 'solutions' are giving me fits that I'm spending inordinate amounts of time trying to figure out on my own while I wait and wait and wait...

Originally Said By: conmolbry

  My impression is that WA doesn't have the support staff to capably handle the volume of support needs for us customers.  

The thing is, if they employed more to deal with everything maybe they would lose money and just not bother, so you wouldnt have the tools at all.

That's a great point and no doubt does factor into WA's decisions about where they prioritize resources. From a customer perspective (and talking to my personal situation only), my reality is I need timely technical support on WA products. It used to be faster or seemed so before we started getting funneled through the forums for help. Merely expressing that frustration. There are some areas of business and the commercial world where you don't cut corners, don't bite the hand that feeds you.

I can understand your frustration when you need help but I have found that due to WA being in a different timezone the forums can at most times be better than the previous supprt system.

As with any support system you have to wait for a reply often within 24 hours but due to timezones this coul be longer. The forums often lead to someone other than a support person from WA solving or trying to solve your support question.

The answer then can help more people over time. Therefore offering a far better system.

We all get frustrated when something doesn't go quite right and need support fast. So put as much details as possible in your post and I am pretty sure someone will pick it up pretty quickly and help.

The other solution is to pay far more for the extensions and get faster help or even WA restrict help to problems with their tools only rather than helping with other issues and how to accomplish tasks. They often help with custom code etc on thee forums where I am pretty sure most would answer with "beyond the scope of...".


Mike

Thanks Mike. I agree with all of what you said except getting help from others. I have not posted a lot of messages to the forums, but the ones I have rarely get responded to by anyone besides WA reps. And the wait while under deadline yes of course can be frustrating. Whether my questions were answered quicker or not with the one-on-one, the perception was that I was getting more focused and timely attention. As a customer, that's important to me. The other option of course is to get more self-reliant than depending on companies like WA to streamline my workflow. If I'm spending money and the streamlining isn't happening because I'm going through days of resolution on one issue via the forums, might as well just learn this stuff myself. Which I am also working into my time these days too. I do think WA marketing does a heck of a job selling these products as working out of the box. My experience is I spend a lot of time trying to get them up and running. Yes mostly because of my inexperience, but isn't that supposed to be the point of WA extensions. To simplify that for the various user levels out there. That's the marketing spiel anyway.