From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: FLAME: BORLAND TECHNICAL SUPPORT
Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 20:52:14 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <155m43INNe9q@darkstar.UCSC.EDU> banshee@cats.ucsc.edu (Wailer at the Gates of Dawn) writes:
>
>rjrichar@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca (Bob Richards) writes:
>
>>Personally, I have been VERY flustrated with Borland's "free" support. 
>>The lines have been impossible to get through plus once you do get through
>>you end up waiting roughly 20-30 minutes in long distance waiting to talk to 
>>somebody.   Once you do get to talk to somebody you are given all of the
>>obvious suggestions/answers.
>Fine -- YOU work Tech support and listen to people who can't get the shrink
>wrap off the boxes.  Nothing is *free* and you are a bastion of anti-slack.
>
>>It's pretty said that when you are paying near $900 for a product that
>>you have to pay for "GOOD" support.     BORLAND LETS GET YOUR ACT TOGETHER!!
>And your Microsoft support is better? HAhaHAhaHAAHAHaHaHaHAhaHahaHaHaha

  I must have missed the part where he said Microsoft was better.
  Having used both the only thing better about the latter's tech
  support is the disk jockeys telling you how long the wait will 
  be!

  Tech support for these products is poor.   I agree that they get
  stuck with people who "can't get the shrink wrap off" and they're
  gonna have to find a way to route those calls to nontechnical
  low cost phone support.    But that's not their major problem.

  1.)  They have GOT to improve product quality.  They wouldn't be 
       getting a lot of these calls if their products worked right
       to begin with!  Almost all the calls I've made to various 
       company's tech support (recently: Borland, Microsoft, Lotus,
       and DataStorm) recently have been about actual bugs or problems,
       not RTFM issues.  The majority of them have produced invitations
       to download the latest patch version of some file.  Now I guess
       I should be pleased that they have these patches, but it's 
       ridiculous that they're releasing such buggy software in the 
       first place!


  2.)  And they simply MUST find a better way to disseminate information
       about their products than they do now.   Recent Microsoft adver-
       tisements have been touting their thousands of lines of documen-
       tation versus the (slightly fewer) thousands of lines of Borland
       documentation for their respective C/C++ compilers.  This is a
       bragging point?!    I had to install a new set of shelves in my
       office when I bought the Borland 3.0 product.  

       When you have a problem you first have to wade through several
       books, especially if you're not sure if it's a compiler issue, a
       debugger issue, etc.   And then look in the numerous readme
       and .doc files.   Computers are supposed to be good at information
       management.  Why do they even USE readme files?  ALL the documentation
       including the last minute stuff should be in a single database,
       with hypertext links and fuzzy logic searches.  (I should NOT have
       to search an exact word, because if I don't guess the right word
       I'm sunk <-- this is OLD technology)  And an engine ought to
       exist for the user to add new data to this if he wants.   None
       of this requires futuristic software or technology.  They could
       probably cut way down on their phone volume by making it easier
       to FIND the information that's already included in their package.
       (In Borland's defense I will say that the online help is a lot
       better than it used to be)

 3.)   And when all this fails and you call Tech Support they have
       GOT to do a more competent job fielding problems and questions.
       I generally find it takes multiple calls to resolve a single
       issue.  Each call ties up lines and people and costs me and
       them both money.  In many cases this was simply because it got
       "escalated" to more knowledgable people, not because I did anything
       between the first and second calls to resolve things.   The usual
       cause is that the 2nd or 3rd person knows some FACT that the
       first person doesn't know.  This is inexcusable because they all 
       share a database of information.  But they're either not doing
       proper "brain dumps" into that database, or the search algo-
       rithms are too primitive to provide sufficient assistance to
       the tech's.
            

---peter


         
  
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