Supporting our Customers

Today I was listening to an interesting quote from research done by  Pew/Internet . It seems that 50% of the people who purchased a new electronic device (TV, Cell phone, DVD recorder, internet connection ...) needs help to use it properly.  38% of these people approach user-support from the supplier to get assistance....

As employee from a service organization this comes as no surprise.  Many of the problems we face in support are related to configuration and setup problems.  The software stacks are getting bigger, wider and more complex.

And to be honest, it is not simple to manage software of this complexity.  Proper use requires a lot of different competencies. For this reason we chopped our software stack on smaller pieces. In support we have people specialized in these separate blocks. With this segmentation, people can understand and manage (even in multiple versions) their part well and are capable to help you.

On the engineering side we also try to support you.  As I told you, in our support-system we see many requests related to the software setup and configuration. We believe that these type of problems should be reduced.  Therefore support has worked the last years to develop the 'Configuration Support Manager'  (aka My Configurations and Projects).  This tools has now been evolved into the 'collector' and 'System Health' and is a standard part of MetaLink (2 and 3).

By installing a simple agent and uploading your configuration-parameters and log files to a secure environment in support, we are able to provide you with valuable health checking info.  If you are interested, take a look and hopefully we can reduce the amount of 'obvious' configuration and setup errors in your environment. 
More information about this development ... as usual ... on the web.

Looking forward to your experience...
Hans