steveorg

I had a traumatic issue this morning, made much worse by ill conceived Surpass support policies that are inherently anxiety producing and counter-productive. I want to make it clear that this is not a hit on the support department. They are generally responsive and effective.

The issue was that an important MySQL database disappeared. I reported it at 6:51 AM and received a reply at 7:06 AM that a 5 hour old backup was located. That was excellent, but that's when the problems started. I was also told that the ticket was moved to sales for approval of the restore! The restore was accomplished at 9:20 AM. That’s two hours and fifteen minutes of unnecessary down time and several more grey hairs.

The ticket subject was marked as Extremely Urgent and I mentioned that the down time is devastating. That was not an exaggeration. I was left with a conundrum. Do I reply to the ticket saying that the delay was unacceptable and have the ticket moved to the bottom of the queue, do I do nothing or do I open a new ticket with tech support so I don't have to wait for sales to respond? The new ticket was the only acceptable choice even though that was outside of policy and probably annoying to the support desk.

This incident underscores three shortcomings in the support structure and policies.

1. Penalizing new postings to existing tickets by pushing them to the bottom of the queue makes no sense. At a minimum, the oldest non-responded post should determine priority. Sometimes new posts provide useful info that could make the support desk’s job faster. I’m sure that many Surpass users uncover additional useful information by continuing to debug issues after reporting them. Being able to pass on the info without penalty could speed up the closing of a ticket, which helps everyone. Unless you’ve been through the drill or have read any of the distressed threads from unaware users on this forum about unresponsiveness despite all of their repeated support posts, you don’t know about this policy and can unknowingly delay your ticket. Surpass should at least warn these poor soles before letting them post to a ticket twice in a row.

This prioritization also does not account for the age of the incident. I’ve had tickets that required many postings back and forth before final resolution. Even if a problem is 24 hours old, a 10 minute old ticket gets priority because it was started 1 second before the last posting on the older ticket. The times between responses were not individually slow, but if they could have been prioritized by age of incident the issue could have been resolved within an hour or two. Change of shifts sometimes caused additional delays because the new support person took extra posts to get up to speed. That delays everybody.

2. The support system doesn’t prioritize by urgency. All priorities are “default”. Surpass probably has a legitimate concern that since most people consider their issue important, given a choice they would mark it urgent. That doesn’t mean that Surpass can’t have some internal system where the support personnel make a determination about urgency. I can’t be sure that they don’t already do that, but given my experience, I’d be surprised if they do.

3. My ticket was moved to sales so that they could decide if I should be charged for the restore. That’s a fair question and I’ve never been unfairly charged by Surpass for extra services. The problem is that the sales department isn’t 24/7 like the support department and moving a ticket to sales pushes it down the queue. Tech support should be empowered to make this decision, especially since they probably provide sales with guidance anyway. If nothing else, users should be given the choice to pay for the charge with a chance to appeal for a refund to the sales department later.

I’d be interested in hearing other thoughts on these issues and certainly appreciate some insight from someone at Surpass.

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Steve