Symantec CEO Says Bad Service Fix Only Temporary

Lucas123 writes "Symantec's CEO John Thompson says the company is still struggling with its consolidated ERP system and that it has only thrown bodies and not technology at the post-Veritas buyout issues that created poor customer service. 'I've kind of lost track where we are timing-wise...but we threw an awful lot of head count at this wait-time problem. Wait times from their peak of well over an hour are down to now under two minutes,' he said."

In defense of call centers....

[Kazrath]

For anyone who has worked in a call center, Fast food, Or even a 7-11 wait times are not really under control of the site offering the service. You have ran into or experianced the instant explosion in customers wanting something all at once. Most people just through simple observation can see this but you really don't understand it until you work one of these types of jobs.

In a call center you can staff appropriately and still have excessive wait times at random. I cannot count the number of times it has been dead all day long maybe 1 call an hour then for no apparent reason over the next two hours there are 1+ hour hold times. If you call in at random times during the day and have consistently 30 min - 1 hr hold times then I agree they need to get more headcount.

Also, if most of you had any idea how many people call in wasting 10-20 minutes of a tech's time asking really stupid questions that can usually be found within the table of contents of the admin guide provided you probably wouldn't complain about hold times so much. Basically if the IT staff do their job and actually research & test before implimentation our hold times would be in half or non-existent.

Re:In defense of call centers....

[mosch]

People who run call centers have very good statistics available on the likelihood of various call volumes, and in an ideal world they staff accordingly, in a manner that's designed to meet minimum services levels X% of the time.

Call center staffing is, quite literally, a textbook problem from operations management.

This problem was the result of either a deliberate decision to provide inadequate service or gross incompetence. Either way, I wouldn't feel too good about Symantec if they were one of my vendors.

Yes, but show me something better.

[LazloToth]

I've been with Backup Exec since the early NT4 days. I can tell you that Veritas support wasn't all that slick back then. The thing is, the software works. It takes some tweaking, but the scope of options is impressive. It's not cheap. Back before people knew that running Norton Antivirus client on MS Exchange would completely hose the database, I had to do bare-metal restores from Backup Exec tapes, and the product never let me down. Now that Symantec has taken over, phone support is phenomenally pathetic, but the product is still very capable. If you're doing backup-to-disk-to-tape using libraries, BE 11d is a peach. The Linux client works quite well. Bottom line: you hope the product doesn't malfunction, requiring you to go beyond the online knowledge base. Symantec has too many products and nowhere near enough trained support. I'm willing to bet the product line will slim down eventually, and the support crew will grow to nearly-appropriate levels.

Re:Symantec = Obsolete

[pete6677]

Please tell me you're lying. We have used this great product for a long time, and I'd really hate to see Symantec run it into the ground.

Re:Sun Servers you say? Can you spell ZFS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I read something about how ZFS is going to fix everything it makes me cringe.

I've been evaluating it on a test system to try and decide whether to put it in production and have found that it has quite a big impact on system performance and is substantially slower than UFS on lower end hardware particularly if the i/o load consists of lots of fairly small writes.

I also think that the level of abstraction with ZFS is too great (a storage pool). Veritas Volume Manager has a lot of quirks but at least you have direct control over what disk devices your filesystems end up on. I'll take VxVM or AIX LVM over ZFS any day in a large environment.