Why not Support?

[gavink]

Why not offer support over the forums? When users register they could supply a SlickEdit serial number. If this serial number is validated for support that user could have access to a non-public support forum.

The advantage to me as a SlickEdit customer is that I would be easily able to answer questions like "SlickEdit v11 seems to have problems with search functionality, is it possible they regressed a critical feature in the latest version?" without having to wait for the time zone difference between here and the USA. Other customers may be able to answer my question before the sun rolls around to North America. I could search other people's posts and so I may not even have to submit a support request.

The advantage to SlickEdit is that they would not have to write a million e-mails saying "Thank-you for contacting customer support. Yes, we stuffed up search in V11. Here's the patch". Also, every support request not submitted (because I found the answer on the forum) is work they do not have to do.

So it seems to me to be a win-win.

Another possible useful forum would be a read-only SlickEdit Announce for all the new versions and other official announcements from SlickEdit.

[mark0978]

Possibly because then the slow support times would be documented.  I file a support request on 9/14 and have to ask them what is up on 9/19 because apparently my support request isn't important enough to have anything done on it by a human.  I think its time for them to back up from new features long enough to make the current features really rock solid.

20% of the features working 100% of the time beats 100% of the features working 80% of the time.

[drisner]

Possibly because then the slow support times would be documented.  I file a support request on 9/14 and have to ask them what is up on 9/19 because apparently my support request isn't important enough to have anything done on it by a human.  I think its time for them to back up from new features long enough to make the current features really rock solid.

I've never had it take longer than 24 hours to respond to a support request I've made during the week.  It has usually been about 4 working hours for me to get a response.  Maybe things have changed a bit since my last support request which was about 8 months ago, but I have made about three a year during the time I have had Slickedit.

[ScottW, VP of Dev]

Sorry I missed this one earlier. We want to keep support and the forums separate for tracking purposes. Our CRM system provides a queue that the support team uses to monitor requests and prioritize responses. The forums don't offer any similar way to track requests, so we would have to copy them into the CRM system--which leads to duplicates and extra time wasted.

So, we decided to use the forums as a way to allow users to help each other. We answer questions that we think will be instructive to the community at large, but do not consider ourselves obligated to answer any particular question.

I can't express how pleased we are with the quality of responses we see from users helping users! I'm impressed with the level of knowledge that is shown, and I often learn things reading customer posts. I thank you all for making our Community Forums a success.

--Scott