I wrote quite a bit about bad tech support, but is there any good one? While rare, good support does occur. Can't say if the whole company is good because of the cases that I had, but still want to share some examples.
Better tracking
I think in terms of handling a lot of tickets from me I need to shout out Proton. I've raised probably 50 tickets by now. Most of them were simple ones, of course, related to Pass not auto-filling or some website not being available with specific VPN servers (while being available through others). There were some more complex bugs, though, and there were one case where the agent completely misunderstood me and assumed I was using some 3rd-party tool that was syncing with Proton's cloud, and it took like five emails and me asking him to explain what exactly he thinks is the problem, that I am having, before the misunderstanding was cleared.
I think the main "problem" I have with them is inability to track the status of my tickets outside of emails. There is no user cabinet or anything like that, where I can see all my tickets. Which would be a good idea, because the friction of raising the tickets is relatively low, and once you realize that - you may start producing those as soon as you get an issue (which what you need to do for issues to be solved). This is also useful in case of issues, that take a lot of time to fix.
Although, no, that's not the only "problem": the other one is coordinating with community. Don't get me wrong, they have Reddit, they have social media, they have a site to submit ideas, but often times it's hard to track stuff there and find duplicates before you create a new one. Let alone that they do not cover known issues, so, again, you do not know if they are already aware of an issue or not. Which would be a boon both for user and for them, especially if they used something like JetBrains' YouTrack (which would cover both of my "problems". YouTrack does make me feel good about JetBrains' support, too, but I do not have much to say about them, so will not be focusing in this post aside from "keep up the good work".
More transparency
Fozzy has been a good sport for me as well. I had quite a varying set of problem since I started using them as both host (for shared hosting and VPS) and domain registrar. Those included even some emergency cases which might have been caused by me being unfamiliar with Unix (still am, just more cautious). Like, I had installed some update on VPS and it randomly got unavailable for remote access. Apparently, something in the process reset some network settings and blocked ports or something. They were able to fix that and did that relatively quickly, too.
My main issue with them (aside from need to separately go to messages' page so that they are marked as read, even though I already followed link from mail to respond to them) is that for issues that took a long time to resolve there was complete silence after some point and before respective problem was resolved. For example, there was some weird issue related to IPv6, where DNS resolution was failing because one of the nameservers was connecting to a another nameserver through IPv4, and that one did not have an IPv6 or something like that. Resolving that took a long time, because it needed involvement of 3rd party (or parties, not sure), but I think I did not get any updates in the ticket for a month if not more. Or maybe it was some other issue, not sure and I am too lazy to go through old ticket for this.
I have a similar complaint about Corsair, too. I bought K100 Air Wireless from them, which I like (even though space bar can squeak on right side sometimes). It was working fine for awhile, but then at some point it started double-pressing some keys randomly. Sometimes in such a way that I was able to get another key in-between. There is also a factor of me mistyping, of course, but through some testing later we figured out that one of the factors was update from iCue 3 to iCue 4, and another one was that this was not happening when I was using Bluetooth or dongle at 1000Hrz polling rate. It was happening on lower polling rates, and with cable (which I use most of the time, because it takes a long time to wake up).
But that was for context. The real "problem" is that after I RMAed the original keyboard (with advanced option, everything went smoothly there), they... Did not even test the keyboard and just recycled it. Meaning that there was no validation if there was a hardware issue, and if it would be possible to fix it (and thus re-sell the keyboard) or, at least, find a way to prevent it in future models. Even learning about this was a bit of a chore, too. This is a loss of opportunity to become better, IMHO.
Good apple among the bad ones
Speaking of RMAs, ASUS... Yes, they are in my bad list, and they are there for a reason, but I had good experiences with them, and that's why it hurt to add them to the list. In fact, my recent experience is overall quite good, although not perfect one. I made a New Year gift for myself last year and got PG32UCDM, and it got some vertical lines issue. It may partially be an QD-OLED limitation, but in some scenarios (low brightness of the monitor, darker colors and lower refresh-rate, all at the same time) you may get this kind of artifact. Others have complained about this for various panels, actually, but not everyone seems to be getting those, so it's still a bit unclear, what's the cause.
Latest result from my communication with ASUS is that there may be a chance that this is firmware-related, and that at least it can make thing worse, but that's besides the point. I was sent a new monitor 4 times. One of those times it got to me cracked, and simply did not work. There were some issues with UPS (Finnish residents may understand me), but all 4 times I got advanced RMA, and everything went smoothly. Not sure why they are sending leg for the monitor as well, but, ok. There was one problem though: apparently, it's not allowed for me to know what the monitor team discovered when testing the panel. Even though I reported it, and even though I won't be able to use that information either way. This means that I won't know if there was a hardware issue, a software issue or maybe it was environmental one (which still have some possibility). It is also unclear if there is a firmware fix being investigated, because that's also top secret, but at least last emails mentioned a possibility of new firmware, which was the first time in like 4 months.
Technically this is not the first time with them either. Long-long ago, I had... Some version of GTX970, and I had some intermittent signal losses over DisplayPort when using it (it was fine with integrated GPU), we tested things on my end, I then got replacement of GTX980, because there was an assumption, that it may be because of some power constraints under certain loads. 980 still had same issue, but less frequently, and then they sent GTX1070 as replacement. All the while I did not get any information about them being able to replicate the issue on those GPUs or not. Oh, and speaking of replacement, I did suggest to replace my current monitor with a WOLED variant (PG32UCDP) since those do not have such an issue, but was told that's not possible. Sending multiple replacements of the same panel without solving the issue is, but sending 1 while solving it - no. Weird.
Mind blowing
Not as weird as an issue I had with my network and Zyxel's router. Or what now is called Keenetic. I do not remember what model I got at the time, but I think it was one of the first with "Keentic" in name. Zyxel Keenetic Giga II perhaps? Does not matter, important part is that while it worked, sometimes it would just restart. It's been a long time, so I may misremember things, but I think it was under certain loads (like P2P), but it was not particularly consistent. At least, not at first, because I think we did find a way to replicate this in a more consistent manner.
We tried a lot of things to debug this thing, of course, but nothing seemed to help. You know what happened? A guy from the company came to my house (BTW, the same was suggested to ASUS regarding the monitor). He did not just come to pick-up the router, no, he came with equipment to plug into the router to monitor traffic on it through WireShark or some similar software. I think the agreement was that we will try stuff for up to 2 hours or something, but thankfully the thing happened within 5 minutes after starting the monitoring, and we replicated it multiple times.
After that, they spent a lot of time analyzing stuff, during which I had to return the router to the store and got a different one, but Zyxel did come back to me with an answer. That's the weird stuff: it was some random broadcasting signal sent by ISP, that the router interpreted as a remote command to reboot. This info was shared with ISP, and I think this was fixed at some point, but that's not all. Zyxel gifted me a new router (from the new line-up) as thanks for the help finding the bug. I did not need that router at the time, and I just sold it, but then when I needed a new one - I bought Keenetic.
Good support is good for business
I believe it's important for companies to realize, that good support is good for business, even if it's not perfect. I would prefer Proton over Microsoft. I will would prefer Corsair over Razer. I would prefer Zyxel/Keenetic over other brands (including ASUS). I would prefer Fozzy over other providers, as well. And I am still more likely to prefer ASUS over some other brands in certain scenarios despite some negative experience with them as well. Why? Because I did have good experiences.
What companies seem to not understand is that good experiences when solving issues create brand stickiness. Which means, that people with prefer your brand, when they have the choice, and they will recommend it to other, as well. This will bring you more profit. Good support is also an amazing way to understand how your product is used in real life, and for free. Well, "free" in a sense, that you do not need to pay for any extra customer survey, you just need to ensure that there is a flow, which support agents can use to relay the information to product managers and business.
That's why I believe that we need something like DevOps, but for support. SupOps or something. I even have some ideas for it written somewhere. DevOps forced companies to realize how good practices can help drive profit, and thus it became the standard, but SupOps could potentially drive even more, because it is a literal window to the clients. Unfortunately, my ideas are just ideas and are not properly organized even, since I have no idea how to push them forward. I'd guess I need some marketing pro here. But if anyone wants to collaborate on that - feel free to ping me.
Let's normalize high quality support.
