Phase One Product Support Dissatisfaction
I'm a customer and user of Media One (for now), but I have to express my complete dissatisfaction with the way Phase One provides product support.
Preface this by saying that I'm a big fan of forum based support as it provides an open source of information for all interested parties to take part in.
Unfortunately PO doesn't share that viewpoint. The only PO interaction I see here is Drew (whoever he is) spouting off the standard "please file a support case" verbiage.
How often does PO have to resolve the same problem for users because it's done on a 1 to 1 basis? This is absurd. If there is a known problem brought to bear in the forums work within the forum to resolve it so ALL your customers will gain by that. That way your engineers won't have to continuously solve the SAME issue. Seriously.
Additionally, not all of us have the time (or patience) to go through the sometimes multi-day process of getting an answer from support. Yes multi-day. I've only files a couple of support requests and none of them was resolved (or sometimes even answered) within 48 hours.
I'm an amateur user. I interact with Media Pro a couple of times a month. If I stumble across an issue that I cannot resolve with the resources at hand, I go on to do something else. Unfortunately the resources at had (specifically this forum) are only fair to middling in their usefulness. PO is providing a lot of product support on the backs of unpaid users via this forum.
Sorry. That's not acceptable.
We were all very hopeful when PO acquired EM from Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft had let EM languish far longer than it should have. But the fact of the matter is Microsoft's product people actively monitored the EM forum and provided useful help. All this was predominantly done by one person (Anita) and when she was having health problems things took a little longer, but there were folks monitoring the forum. I've had several direct interactions with the engineers to prove the case.
I know there is probably no one at PO monitoring these forums so my comments are likely wasted, but I had to say them.
I welcome other users opinions.
chris
Preface this by saying that I'm a big fan of forum based support as it provides an open source of information for all interested parties to take part in.
Unfortunately PO doesn't share that viewpoint. The only PO interaction I see here is Drew (whoever he is) spouting off the standard "please file a support case" verbiage.
How often does PO have to resolve the same problem for users because it's done on a 1 to 1 basis? This is absurd. If there is a known problem brought to bear in the forums work within the forum to resolve it so ALL your customers will gain by that. That way your engineers won't have to continuously solve the SAME issue. Seriously.
Additionally, not all of us have the time (or patience) to go through the sometimes multi-day process of getting an answer from support. Yes multi-day. I've only files a couple of support requests and none of them was resolved (or sometimes even answered) within 48 hours.
I'm an amateur user. I interact with Media Pro a couple of times a month. If I stumble across an issue that I cannot resolve with the resources at hand, I go on to do something else. Unfortunately the resources at had (specifically this forum) are only fair to middling in their usefulness. PO is providing a lot of product support on the backs of unpaid users via this forum.
Sorry. That's not acceptable.
We were all very hopeful when PO acquired EM from Microsoft. Unfortunately Microsoft had let EM languish far longer than it should have. But the fact of the matter is Microsoft's product people actively monitored the EM forum and provided useful help. All this was predominantly done by one person (Anita) and when she was having health problems things took a little longer, but there were folks monitoring the forum. I've had several direct interactions with the engineers to prove the case.
I know there is probably no one at PO monitoring these forums so my comments are likely wasted, but I had to say them.
I welcome other users opinions.
chris
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Chris,
Sorry if you haven't been pleased with the support system.
I looked into both of your cases and it would seem the only delay experienced in getting a response was due to our support team being out of the office for the weekend (we have about 36 hours of downtime). It would seem that in your specific case there was issues with using the Windows Rendering Engine on your system and the lack of available codecs to support your NEF files. I hope that we were able to explain how that Render Engine works within the software and from what I can see you requested a refund which we forwarded to the sales department for consideration, and in the meantime you purchased 3rd party codecs to solve the issue at hand.
In regard to support on the Forums, this is a USER TO USER forum but we do our best to chime in and provide support when and where we can. What we try to refrain from doing is filling up the Forum with unnecessary posts back and forth to collect information and troubleshoot ideas, this is better kept in the support system for two main reason, it is better to keep some of the users personal information personal and it allows us to document the complete issue and forward that information in an organized fashion to our programmers.
If you look through the forum you'll see that we often post "Known Issues" and discuss standard problems with software/hardware at length. However, when it comes to a specific workflow hangup we always request the customers contact us via a Support Case as the conflict is likely unique or caused by a unique workflow. There is nothing done on our part to stop users from sharing their findings from a support case on the support forum.0
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