Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!pasteur!hamilton.Berkeley.EDU!nlouie From: nlouie@hamilton.Berkeley.EDU (Nancy Louie) Newsgroups: comp.sys.hp Subject: Re: HP Customer Support... Message-ID: <20395@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU> Date: 7 Dec 89 01:20:47 GMT References: <203@limbo.Intuitive.Com> <7810019@hpuamsa.UUCP> <208@limbo.Intuitive.Com> Sender: news@pasteur.Berkeley.EDU Reply-To: nlouie@hamilton.Berkeley.EDU.UUCP (Nancy Louie) Organization: University of California, Berkeley Lines: 87 As Dave and Frank have discussed in this newsgroup, HP is indeed rated as one of the top companies in the support area. Having once worked in the factory support group at HP, I can see both people raising very good points. HP has some very good people trying very hard to do good work. I think that part of the issue here is not just the dissemination of information, but the manner in which it is disseminated. For instance, Dave brought up the point that customers who run into problems will only get patches from those SE's who know about the patches and who actually *ask* specifically for the patch. He alluded to the fact that the SE's should be more informed of the patches available &c. Well, as a former member of the Hewlett-Packard General Systems Division Series 9000/800 (Spectrum) On-Line Support group, I can only speak for the 800 side, but in the group I was in, we tried very hard to keep the field informed of new patches, known bugs, and other things of a similar nature. Unfortunately, it's not just a matter of informing the field. So many of them are so busy trying to support multiple product lines and getting new information on each, that they often do not have time to keep up with the influx of information. (This is probably true of many support organizations). The question to ask here is how can HP (and other companies) provide information to the field and customers in a timely, yet efficient manner? One suggestion is to make the information available on the net. Personally, I think one of the best solutions is to make the information available on CD-ROM and have the information go out on a set schedule. As Dave pointed out, if the information is readily available and easy to search through, it will most likely lead to reduced numbers of calls to the support group. It would also imply that the majority of the calls that did come in afterward would be more difficult and technically indepth. Even in factory support, our group received calls from the field asking simple "read the manual" questions. One call that I got from the field was someone asking how to use the foreground and background utilities. I directed them to the manual pages for csh and closed the call letting them know that if they still had problems after reading it, we'd be happy to assist. At any level of support, the groups are going to get the "how to" type of question. While novice users may call and ask, "How do I do ____ ?" and expect some reasonable support to answer their question, the response, "Well, on page ___ of manual X, it describes exactly what you need. Why don't you look through that and call us back if you're still confused." should be considered a reasonable answer. There are only a limited number of people trying to answer all the calls that come in, and hand-holding tends to take lower priority because of the nature of the questions and the "easy solution" (i.e., RTM). Any company can expect to see a number of duplicate calls to their support groups when a bug is found and patched. We saw that very often in our group. Once people started to run into the bug, everyone started calling to see if it was a problem and what the fix was. This is where things like CD-ROMs and dial-up lines to bug systems can come in handy. It's actually interesting to see the types of calls that a support organization will receive at any particular time. For instance, right around the time when things are getting finalized as to what the next release will contain, you can bet that a lot of customers will call their support engineers to see if application X is going to be supported, or if option Y is going to be fixed in the next release. It's all human nature though. A customer who has just set out a lot of money to buy a machine wants to be sure that it is going to meet his needs in the future and that new releases of the software contain at least some of the things that he's been jumping up and down about trying to get it supported. In terms of the comment about getting what you pay for, I've seen both sides of the coin. I used to submit bug reports while in the Unix lab at HP, and got very timely responses. When I left the group and joined series 800 on-line support, however, the responses were less timely, even though the submittal method was the same. The other issue that was brought up was letting management know when you are not happy with the support that you are receiving. I think that this is a relevant issue regardless of whether you are an HP employee or a customer. As Dave pointed out, the divisions also pay for the equipment. If they buy a support contract, they are entitled to the same support as all the other customers. There should be some way of ensuring that this happens.