Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sun-barr!decwrl!limbo!taylor From: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: HP Customer Support... Message-ID: <205@limbo.Intuitive.Com> Date: 29 Nov 89 17:51:35 GMT References: <203@limbo.Intuitive.Com> <7810017@hpuamsa.UUCP> Reply-To: taylor@limbo.Intuitive.Com (Dave Taylor) Organization: Intuitive Systems, Mountain View, CA: +011 (415) 966-1151 Lines: 136 Frank Slootweg from Dutch HP-UX Customer Support Center of HP replies to my article on HP Customer Support with a number of well-reasoned thouhts and comments. Before I continue our discussion, though, let me state here how delighted I am that someone from HP Customer Support can join us in this forum and help clear the confusion out of the air!! Thanks a LOT, Frank, for participating here! Back to being the foil, however! You comment that "the quality of support is related to the price you pay". I understand the economic reality of this, but can't help pointing out that it implies that companies like General Motors or International Paper or other "major accounts" get better service on a per-computer level than smaller places like the Four Seasons hotel chain. And they get better service and support than HP divisions. Or do they? Similar to almost all other computer companies nowadays, HP has a thriving internal conferencing system where people from just about any area of the firm can post requests, simple, silly, or quite complex, and get speedy responses from some of the best technical people in the company. For the technical confusion issues, this can greatly ease the demands of the customer support organizations (and, of course, HP internal are customers too; they pay for the equipment and more often than not get support contracts too). However, the most active non-official forum that HP customers have is this newsgroup, and, as an unofficial channel, it's not necessarily the best place to get support. So instead customers use the formal and official channels (not unreasonably!) for their problems, questions, suggestions, enhancement requests, and so on. As Frank points out, about 90% of the calls received by the customer support center can be dealt with either while on the telephone with the customer or certainly within an hour or two, which is great. The problem is with the other 10%, those calls that require the assistance of a system architect, subject matter expert, or perhaps the original designer or programmer of the particular application. Those problems are really what I was referring to in my original posting, rather than the entire class of problems at once. It seems to me, whether or not the reporting customer is internal, that complex technical problems and difficulties should be fixed ASAP and resolved in a timely fashion. Further, it strikes me that many of the bugs and problems that external, paying customers encounter must have already been encountered by internal people (since HP distributed alpha and beta copies of software months in advance). If we accept this as the case, then there are two questions which arise in this context; 1. Do these problems get reported, and 2. If so, do they get logged and resolved in a timely fashion? I surmise that in fact most of the problems people encounter with new software internally does not get reported (for the reasons cited in my previous message; I know that most of my colleagues gave up reporting OS and application bugs years ago), because of #2. Again, one of the problems that we're circling around here seems to be the timely dissemination of patch and modification information. As Frank himself points out, " If I have a on-line telephone directory then I don't need nor want a phone book" which, to me, seems to indicate correctly that the information would be *more* useful if it were in an on-line format; e.g. through a medium like comp.sys.hp.bugs Of course, there is actually a formal channel within the HP customer support organization for the timely dissemination of SSBs, bug reports, patches, workarounds, etc, called the HP SupportLine. Last I heard, however, it was still just for MPE and MPE/XL customers. In any case, when it does offer assistance to HP-UX customers, will they use it? Do you, as an interested and (probably) technically sophisticated HP-UX customer and/or user, want to find the time to call up, peruse, and extract information from yet another BBS-type system? (actually, I do SupportLine an injustice; it's actually a very well designed dialup information service. It's just that it is something new, and something else to hassle with, alas). I'll step on some thin ice and disagree with Frank in his assertion that customers: > .. do not want to be *informed* about bugs they *don't* run into, they > want *solutions* for bugs they *do* run into. If nothing else, this doesn't agree with his analogy of the on-line telephone directory; one of the reasons that people probably don't want to be informed about bugs is because being informed implies having to read through the printed SSB document that comes out ?quarterly? If, instead, it were easily accessible and "grep"able, say, we might well find that site sysadmin folk might by default check that database before they even call customer support! That'd be cool, wouldn't it? The problem is how to disseminate this information. Using SupportLine is a nice idea, but I don't believe reflects the reality of the HP-UX customer base: most just aren't going to be interested in calling up to muck with a new system. Having it on their own computer system where they can have locally written browsers (say), or even just the relatively primitive search facilities of Notes, RN, or other of the netnews browsers, seems like a big win to me... and with the appropriate juggling, I can forsee a situation where, say, there's a group "comp.os.hp-ux.bugs" where articles expire as soon as the same SSB shows up on the CD-ROM SSB database coming to a computer near you (HP has already announced it, actually, scooping all the other vendors in the biz!) This is already getting too long as netnews articles go (curse this journalistic background! Getting paid by the word does some really horrible things to your writing style! :-) so I'll wrap up by again stating that: o While 90%+ of the people who contact HP Customer Support with problems have them resolved within an hour or two, the other 10% might find delays of a day to ?? in even getting a response to their problem, let along a fix or workaround. o Dissemination of patches, bug fixes, &c is an area that HP could put further effort into, perhaps bringing us HP customers to a point where we can know within hours of any bug report, and then later have the fixes/patches automatically associated with the problem reports. o If YOU, as a paying (or non-paying) customer of HP find that your problem reports go unresolved, ESCALATE! Call up some people in management and start raising a fuss. John Young has mentioned before that he's gotten calls directly from irate HP-UX customers, so you wouldn't be the first... Finally, I would like to reiterate that however critical I seem, I really am quite a fan of Hewlett-Packard, their people, and their products. It's a great lineup with some "room for improvement" in certain areas... Thanks again for your response, Frank! -- Dave Taylor Intuitive Systems Mountain View, California taylor@limbo.intuitive.com or {uunet!}{decwrl,apple}!limbo!taylor