Capture One Cases Summarily Closed

Rick Stufflebean

February 28, 2017 02:42

My cases are always marked as Closed after getting an email saying "Sorry that is not supported, thanks for inquiring"... most usually involving Fuji files and functionality with Capture One Pro.

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SFA

February 28, 2017 04:55

[quote="Eric Nepean" wrote:
I had one case open since beginning December, and two in January. All of them have been recently closed without any comment or resolution.

Has this happened to anyone else?

Eric,

I suppose it depends on where the Case had got to and whether there was likely to be any further information exchanges - or had it just gone dead from both sides?

From a Service Delivery perspective there is absolutely no point in keeping a case open for ever it activity is dead or likely to be non-existent. Apart from anything else with many software support system it just means that, as a manager, you cannot effectively measure the results of your service offering unless you have criteria in place for closing calls AND use them.

On the other hand some form of communication would be nice ... but very likely for many people that just kicks off another round of time consuming exchanges so not always a beneficial action fpr anyone even though one might see it as being the polite thing to do.

Historically a closed case, certainly for an acknowledged problem or an Enhancement Request, means that First Level Support have finished what they can do with the Case and the next steps are with the Development team or, in the case of an enhancement, the Product Management team monitoring the suggestions and deciding on the priority of the order of feature development.

What that may (or may not) imply about the timing of seeing something change in the application is another matter. But then I would guess that you already know that part of what may (or may not) happen.

Years ago, when, inter alia, my duties for a software developer involved managing the support process we faced exactly this problem. Being a Business to Business operation there were several ways we could manage the requirement and expectations on time scales were somewhat different but the management and performance measurement challenges seem still to be much the same. We use out own software and so it was easy to relate out need and client needs and derive a designed solution to manage a support request of any type as a (potentially) multi-stage task with each stage being managed separately but as part of a continuing "case".

Enhancement requests were somewhat easier to deal with in a B2B situation. The "important" needs would result in a quotation for development work sent to the company that raised the request. That usually defined whether or not anything happened. It worked quite well for sorting the important from the "it might be nice to have" ideas. However if a similar idea was coming up frequently we might undertake the change anyway or offer the requesting client that option to jointly fund (and therefore influence) the development.

Today most development, certainly in the consumer market, follows a different pattern to how it was then. In the case of the photo editing market external influences - from the manufacturers and their product development schedules for example - present different challenges to those in the B2B market back then and the B2C market is heavily influenced by the wider aspects of what the Internet has made available to the massed ranks of users.

I would suggest that those changes make things more difficult to manage support successfully - in part because we now all expect something like an instant response and persistent communication but at low or no cost.

In the B2B model we could design in to our package the maintenance fee that delivered the level of support each client chose to work with. Now, in a consumer market world, we tend to expect those costs to be 0 and ignore any consideration of economy of scale (or lack of it).

It seems that it is not so easy, in a B2C market, to attain a balance between good management of support functions and balanced, appropriate levels of feedback. Most systems seem to offer either very little feedback or an overload of messages to any and every possible contact method one has made known to the service supplier. Finding the middle ground seems to be a challenge. It might also be something that is not at the top of the priority list at the current time for many support operations simply because they are under operational pressure from so many other directions.

Enhancing a support system to massage the customer relationship usually sounds like a positive approach, at least in the short to medium term.

However whether it results in an improved total product (and so achieves longer term objectives) cannot be certain. The investment in time, resources and money to make such things happen could be a distraction from the primary purpose of the business division involved.

Realistically only the businesses managers can know by what criteria support decisions are made and implemented.

In my view we have to accept that or make polite suggestions for change. The other option is to move on and seek satisfaction elsewhere.

We all have to make our own decisions about that based on our personal preferences and experiences.

Just my opinion of course, for what it is worth.

Grant

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Eric Nepean

February 28, 2017 07:31

Hi Grant
In my case I reported one problem that unexpectedly crashes the product, one problem that unexpectedly hangs the product repeatedly and a suggestion for improving the user forum.
My supporter originally gave a a positive repsonses, and said he would forward the information.

I was expecting a response like "The engineering team is working on it" or "This will be considered in a future release" or "We can't reproduce this problem" or "We can't staff this right now" but I have never heard anything back. And then last week I checked, and found that the cases had been closed without providing any comments on resolution or sending any notification.

I could be pleasantly surprised when 10.1 arrives, but I have a sinking feeling that all three items have been rejected.

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SFA

February 28, 2017 11:24

[quote="Eric Nepean" wrote:
Hi Grant
In my case I reported one problem that unexpectedly crashes the product, one problem that unexpectedly hangs the product repeatedly and a suggestion for improving the user forum.
My supporter originally gave a a positive repsonses, and said he would forward the information.

I was expecting a response like "The engineering team is working on it" or "This will be considered in a future release" or "We can't reproduce this problem" or "We can't staff this right now" but I have never heard anything back. And then last week I checked, and found that the cases had been closed without providing any comments on resolution or sending any notification.

I could be pleasantly surprised when 10.1 arrives, but I have a sinking feeling that all three items have been rejected.

Hi Eric,

It would probably be acceptable if one could be quite certain that closure and no further comment implied that a "correction", via positive action, was imminent. Not only imminent but also delivered and satisfactory.

My personal opinion would be that, if the above was certain, I would trade a personalised case update for a greater number of cases being addressed and resolved. However to be comfortable with that (i.e. feeling better about it that mere acceptance of the process) would only come about following the establishment of a track record of proven delivery.

In a B2B environment one almost certainly has a process that enables communication - for one reason or another.

In a B2C environment many more parties are involved each with own often highly specific personal perception of their requirements. It's a different support and management challenge, especially when covering a worldwide user base where things like localisations can have an unexpected influence on events.

We will have to see what turns up in the next release and take a view from there.

Personally I will admit to being luckier than many in that my photography kit is traditional (i.e. relatively old) main stream (Canon) and so broadly supported. My computer is Windows 7 based with reasonable power (bought because of that 4 years ago when C1 went 64bit only and a business software testing activity required a machine with some significant throughput) so I do not feel the pain that some have and that appears to be worse for Mac users based on threads in the forum.

That and my preference for Sessions over Catalogues perhaps makes for a less angst filled relationship with C1 on a day to day basis!

Let's look forward to 10.1 with hope and expectation.

Grant

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