Re: Quality of Informix Support

OK. So I've been one of the people in the UK and in this thread who've been quite vitriolic, at times, about Informix Support. After several email messages from people in Informix who seem to feel that what they had to say couldn't possibly be repeated in public, for whatever reason, I agreed with the UK to spend some time on Thursday just gone, in the UK office. I went in there with 2 agendas. To look at technical support, see how it is functioning, what is being done to improve it, what they set as targets for response to problems and how they propose to deal with the introduction of New Era. Secondly, to talk about New Era and what is happening with it, what it contains and to organise in my own mind and with editors, where reviews, if any, can be placed. I was on the premises for 8.5 hours arriving at 2pm and leaving at 10:20pm so I think that I can say that the time spent was productive. There follows a long message dealing with Informix Support in the UK and rather than place it with an editor for publication, as I had made my comments up here I agreed to publish my comments up here as well. I have also been given leave by Informix UK to publish their escalation and response times and I should stress that I cannot guarantee that these times are accurate for any other Informix subsidiary. My first concern was the manning levels. It is now just under a year since Richard Keeble took charge of UK support. In that time the number of people in the department has been increased from 13 to 15 with 2 jobs offers being issued in the next 6 weeks. The aim is 18 people by Christmas 1994 and all these staff are to be dedicated post sales support. In addition there are separate training and pre-sales departments to reduce outside pressures on the suport team. Richard has introduced a flat management structure which consists of himself, one team leader, one call despatcher and everyone else is a technical support consultant. This is split into 3 junior TSCs, 4 TSCs and 5 senior TSCs. The current plan is to bolster the junior TSCs with recruitment and the packages outlined I consider to be quite good, particularly for junior TSCs. So as to ensure a low staff turnover there is now a career path which moves people through the support department from JTSC to TSC to STSC and then onto Menlo Park and R&D or to the Resolution Centre. However, rather than the more traditional time employed = promotion deal which I have experienced with other vendors there are some stringent requirements which have been introduced, particularly for promotion to STSC. These include source-code knowledge and literacy in AT LEAST 2 of the main Informix products. This has advantages for the customer because it is the responsibility of the STSCs to produce quality patch ports and then distribute them to customers. So far this year Informix UK has issued 41 patch ports to its customers. This moved me on to talking about training and asking how much time is actually spent on training the support team, how they gain their on going knowledge and whether there is overlap and internal use of the support staff to back up training teams on the more technical courses. My own belief here is that using support staff on training courses teaches them to deal face to face with end-users/customer of the products which often results in a better ability to relate to the person at the other end of the telephone. The support team do not teach any part of the training courses but it has been made a rule that ALL trainers and consultants do stints in technical support particularly during their induction where 1 of their first 4 weeks is spent in the support department on the telephone. For ongoing training for the support team, the latest figures available were for the period 2/93 to 3/94 when 14% of any given individuals time was spent on training courses. This has only been in place for the last couple of years and was introduced when the need for higher quality technical support staff was recognised. One of the reasons for increasing the training of staff and for ensuring that the internal staff spend some time understanding technical support is that the support function is recognised as a cost centre and has revenue targets. The has meant raising quality and profile both internally and in the sales cycle and our meeting had to be broken into two parts as Richard had to leave to make a support presentation to a major client who had come in to the office. One fact that did arise, and which has been mentioned already in this group was the ISO certification. It was refreshing to hear Richard acknowledge that whilst the ISO standard was necessary if major orders were to be clinched (it is now an integral part of most tender documents), it did little more than state that there were procedures in place and these procedures did not provide any proof of quality of service. We then went into response times and categories of fault. There are 5 levels of priority and each priority has a response time and a target resolution time. However, the word resolution needs clarifying and Richard passed me a copy of the following document which I am repeating verbatim. ---------- "Informix Response Commitment" All cases logged with Informix have a priority assigned to them. This is agreed with the customer at the time of reporting the case to Informix. For each priority, we set an appropriate response time, together with a target resolution time. These are defined as follows: Resolution: A resolution could mean any of the following: 1) A permanent solution. 2) A temporary solution. 3) A workaround. Informix will use its best endeavours to meet the target resolution times listed below for workarounds. Priority 1: Production/live system down. The customer is unable to bring the system up. The situation has a serious impact on your business. Response Time: within 30 minutes. Target Resolution Time: within 24 hours. Priority 2: Intermittent problem on the production/live system or all development work has halted. Response Time: 1 hour. Target Resolution Time: 5 days. Priority 3: Intermittent problems on a development system. Problem does not prevent progress from being made in other areas. Response Time: 2 hours. Target Resolution Time: 20 days. Priority 4: Product usage queries or insufficient information in the manuals. Response Time: 4 hours. Target Resolution Time: 20 days. Priority 5: General product information. Not a problem. Response Time: 4 hours. Target Resolution Time: N/A. ------------- Now as a document stating levels that is fine but it has to be backed by proof that the response and resolution targets are being met and there has to be guaranteed levels of escalation which are in place and which@@