Symantec CEO Says Bad Service Fix Only Temporary 116
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."
Re:Uhhh... (Score:5, Interesting)
Hang up after an hour and a half that's accomplished absolutely nothing. Call Quantum. On hold less than a minute. Guy picks up, I tell him what's going on, and even though it's not even his friggin software he gives me a few ideas to try. His second guess was right. 5 minutes on the phone and 10 minutes of testing, problem solved.
We've dumped Symantec's virus protection because it was overly expensive, bloated, and slow. We dumped Brightmail, their anti spam service, because of the exact same reasons. Backup Exec will be on the way out in next year's budget.
I worked at a 7-11 (Score:5, Interesting)
So here's me, Mr. 7-11 Guy in my orange smock, standing behind the counter. All of a sudden, at about 5pm, customers start filing into the store. It seems that just about everybody got a call at work at some point during the day, asking if mommy could pleeeeaaaasse go and get some of those 3-D glasses so everybody could watch the fun movie tonight. 33 cents was no big deal, so everybody did.
The problem was, if they were free I could just toss them at people as they walked through the door. That's the way dumb promotions usually worked. But because they were 33 cents, every single customer that came into the store just for 3-D glasses had to wait in line at my register (I was the only employee on duty). Not to mention all the other people who came in for beer etc., just like usual.
Well, I lost track at some point. But the following day my manager told me that, according to the register tapes, I spent the next three hours ringing up roughly one customer every thirty seconds.
The thing is, a few people walked out. At times the line was as much as 12 people long, which is pretty long for a 7-11. But most of them didn't (as testified by the fact that I rang up so many of them). I kept my cool, cracked jokes, and pretty much nobody yelled at me. In fact, one guy even gave me a $5 tip on a 33 cent pair of 3-D glasses. And because people were waiting in line at 7-11, half of them grabbed a candy bar or a bag of chips or beer or something while they were waiting to get their glasses rung up, so it was a huge windfall for the store.
My point? No, you can't control it when you get excessive wait times at random. But that doesn't mean you can't control your customer service.
Re:Symantec = Obsolete (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Uhhh... (Score:2, Interesting)
I called a couple of weeks ago because VxVM decided to break for no particular reason at all and disable the 257 disks on the diskgroup. 20 minutes on the phone with the guy who opened up the case ticket, and then 15 minutes of terribly lame music until I got to a tech.
And that's after saying "Yes, this is a production server and yes, there's a total outage."
Re:In defense of call centers.... (Score:4, Interesting)
* A meaningful message saying 'we're swamped, wait time is [whatever], the big problem right now is [whatever], our email and website are at [these locations]'
* Actually connect customers with people who can address the problem. Wasting 45 minutes rebooting and tweaking the software before admitting that it's a kernel problem caused by your software and the only fix is to entirely uninstall it and wait for the next release is a tremendous waste of everyone's time, but it's happened with both Symantec and McAfee within the past year.
* When a customer gives you the workaround or the fix, publish it to your staff quickly and put it in their flow charts. This has happened repeatedly, with both Symantec and McAfee, and numerous staff have wasted their expensive time for months going through the same problem and the same failures to fix it, then finally getting notified by their colleagues that the correct fix was on our internal web pages.
* That 10-20 minutes of time you mention is usually wasted as the tech tries to shoe-horn the problem into a complex ritual of irrelevant problems before acknowledging the problem, when by listening to what the customer actually says they can leapfrog the flowchart to the actual problem.
I've been that IT staff on various occasions. I do *not* consider Symantec's call center to be helpful, and it hasn't been since long before this recent incident. It's only good by comparison to McAfee.
Anyone else having luck with BackupExec? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, here's the question: am I not giving 10d a break, is it really a good product here, or am I completely right and should be fleeing in horror from it? I hear that version 11 is an even bigger nightmare, more indianized.
But has it actually improved? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the past couple of months, I've had a couple of occasions to deal with them for BackupExec issues and came away none too pleased.
First situation: I spent 4 - 5 hours with support attempting to troubleshoot an issue over the course of an 11.5 hour day. In the end, BE support couldn't solve my problem and the only solution was a full uninstall and reinstall. Of Windows. Still not sure what happened to break the software. We'd performed the same task on this very server several times (rename server, run BE database conversion utility, connect drives and get to work), but this time the software blew up to the point where only a clean format and reinstall of Server 2K3 solved the issue. I gave up with their "support" when their "clean" reinstall of BE didn't solve the problem.
Scenario two: Apparently I didn't get enough punishment before. Call BE support for a new issue on the same server a couple of days (4 or 5) later. (Restoring data from before the format.) Get a new tech who flat REFUSES to help me until I download and install the latest version. I begin the download, but since our bandwidth is approximately equivalent to a pair of shotgunned 56k modems, I immediately deduce that the 500+MB software won't finish downloading anytime before the end of the work day. I call back and explain that the server has been down for 5 days already due to their inability to solve my issue before and now their "solution", which may or may not work, will cause another day of downtime. I ask that we skip that first step and try some other troubleshooting in the meantime. The tech's response: "nope". He wouldn't help me at all so off I went on my own...
Is it too much to ask that a person supporting a piece of software actually be more capable than I?
Re:Uhhh... (Score:3, Interesting)
I found that by using carefully tailored versions of Samba, I could use Samba to replace BE's useless unix/linux clients (and it would be *perfect* even on Solaris and Linux ppc64 if only Samba could vanish symlinks from shares). I found that by using StorageCraft's ShadowProtect, I could do bare metal restores with ease by using their HIR tool to bring a backup exec full restore of windows back to life on radically different hardware. BE's exchange support has always been great - the one thing that works as advertised. It's relatively cheap, the tape management (and removable disk management) are top notch, it's totally painless to search your entire catalog for a file and restore it with a few mouse clicks, and the damn user interface is fantastic for managing backup jobs with templates. I can add a new server with a few mouse clicks. In an environment where not everyone is a computer guru, having things work with just a few mouse clicks is very important.
It loses its mind every once in a while (Fragmentation was horrific but they just patched that, Synthetic is still totally broken, ADAMM tape catalog failures, knocks over a production server with a client crash once in a great while, etc) but those events are manageable and fairly rare if you know how to avoid their trigger conditions. At this point I'd be surprised if it has any bugs left I haven't seen yet and found a fix or workaround for. It's hard to trade that for an unknown package that says it is awesome, but three months in you find the same kind of annoying bugs and have to do that work all over again. The pain you don't know is worse than the pain you know very well. Anyone who tells you their product works is a damn dirty liar - all of them fail, all of them have headaches. Proper disaster recovery is far too complex for any package to do it without problems.
My other favorites were Bacula and BackupPC, both of which have some killer features, but are utterly lacking in the user friendly department. They are simply too hard to use for most support staff. They are also not very good at backing up Windows systems (particularly 2k server since it has no shadow copy). Tivoli Storage Manager Express wasn't half bad either. Tivoli itself, or NetBackup - for that price I'll write my own. Small businesses with ridiculously large networks can't afford it.