I agree completely with what you've written, and I've had to deal with
pretty much everything you wrote here within the past few months. I've
got a high priority ticket open right now that I haven't heard from BMC
support in a few days now, despite updating the ticket asking for a
call.
On the other hand, other companies are much worse. Microsoft's support
is a joke, and Adobe is abysmal. I was working on an Adobe product that
was having issues and their average response time for a server down is
about a month, based on my experiences. They also randomly close out
their tickets and ask you to open a new one if you still have the
problem. On my recent server down with Adobe, I had to complain to my
sales rep, who then pawned it off on someone else, and eventually it was
dropped again until I told my sales rep that we were starting to
evaluate what other software we could use since support for their
products were non-existent. That worked, my issue got escalated up to
the VP over Adobe's support staff. The issue was eventually resolved.
So while I do feel that on average customer support is getting worse and
worse, I really wish that a company whose flagship product is used for
helpdesks around the world wouldn't follow that trend.
-----Original Message-----
From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Shawn Rosenberry
Sent: Tuesday, June 12, 2007 2:11 PM
To: arslist@ARSLIST.ORG
Subject: OT: BMC Rant
**
Does anyone else get the feeling that upper management at BMC
doesn't know what they are doing? Recent experiences I've had with the
organization have not been good and it seems to be a continuing pattern.
I don't want to discredit some of the good individuals that I've had the
privilege of working with; however as an organization I've been
disappointed with BMC. Cases in point:
* Remedy Support Page Makeover: What a disaster. I
can't believe all of the problems they experienced during the switch. I
personally couldn't access support via the web for several days and they
lost several of my open tickets in the process. I expect more from a
major corporation with business tools that specialize in ITIL base ITSM.
Grade F
* Support: Dealing with Remedy support used to be a
pleasant experience. I can't say that anymore. There are so many area
of concerns that I will break it down:.
1. Foreign Support - It doesn't help when you can't
understand the person on the other end of the line. Even more
frustrating, is having to restate to them over and over the problem that
I am experiencing because they can't understand me. I have had 1 or 2
good experiences here but that is about all. Grade D
2. Availability - Several times I have attempted to
call Remedy and received a message on the voicemail that the team was
unavailable due to a business meeting. Who in their right mind would
take an entire team offline for an entire day for a meeting? No one
else I have ever dealt with other than BMC. Split your meeting into
two sections so that you always have someone on the phones to handle
issues. This should never happen, let alone three times in two years.
Grade C
3. Responsiveness - Support used to be very good at
getting back to you and keeping you up to date on what is happening with
your tickets. This is no longer the case. More often than not I am
calling them to get an update on a ticket, usually finding out that
little or no progress has been made. More often than not I wind up
resolving the issue on my own even when debugging their out of the box
applications. Grade D
* Sales: How many times do your sales reps changes?
While I was working at one location our sales rep changed multiple times
during a six month period. I understand people leave or get promoted,
but don't they transfer information to their successor? Why is it a
blank slate every time? Recently I had an experience where I tried to
get a quick pricing quote from our rep and then she went to a business
meeting for a week without getting back to me. I had to work with two
other Reps in order to finally get something. If this was the only
problem I could live with it. but combine that with everything else it
is frustrating. Grade C-
* Licensing: How many times have you come into a site and
looked at their licensing and wondered what do they really have? I had
a very recent experience with this. We all know Remedy licensing can be
confusing and that their process needs to be updated. Honestly, how
difficult should it be to be able to tell a development license from a
production license from a hot backup license? Also, shouldn't it be
fairly easy to pull up all the licenses purchased by a company even if
they have multiple support contract IDs? These issues aside, and here
is the whammy, when undergoing a reorganization, why would you fire the
only two people that you had within the organization that really knew
how to perform licensing audits? I've been working with their
licensing team for over two months now to complete an audit that I
requested. My main contact has tried her best to assist me only to be
frustrated by her upper management. I even discussed the issue with
one of her managers and I got the feeling that they didn't understand
the pain that they were causing. All I receive from him was that they
were looking into the problem and would fix it as soon as they could.
The only reason I don't give a failing grade was the one person who
tried her best to assist me on this issue. Grade D
I don't want to sound all negative about BMC and Remedy. I
personally love the Remedy development platform and I've worked with it
for over seven years now. It is my bread and butter. What I'm
disappointed in is BMC's apparent lack of organization in dealing with
changes and their apparent attempts to de-emphasize support. I hope
someone from BMC reads this post and it makes them think about what they
are doing to their company. Historically one of Remedy's greatest
strengths has been its developers who are on the front lines telling
everyone what a great product Remedy is and what it can do for their
company. While it is still possible to tell customers that Remedy is a
great product I find myself more and more reluctant to tell them that
they can expect first class support once they have it.
Regards,
Shawn Rosenberry
RSP and former RAC
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