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Technical Support Through Official Company Public Web Forums..........

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Smokey:
I've been doing a few projects recently, where I needed some manufacturer technical support.  Gone are the days of FAEs and individual technical contacts.  Many of the big name companies have seemed to migrate to providing official technical support primarily via public web forums.


I'm not talking about random arduino user forums with questions about what a pullup resistor is.  I'm talking about the place professional engineers are directed to ask real technical questions and replies by paid support engineer employees of the company.

For example:
https://community.renesas.com/ (Formerly renesasRULZ.com!)
https://e2e.ti.com/
https://forum.microchip.com/
etc.

I have found dealing with support in this way at a minimum frustrating, and often times totally infuriating. 

Some of the basic problems are the huge lag (at most one official response per day), and the generic replies to very specific questions ("here is a link to the data sheet").  It often takes multiple days to just get someone to acknowledge the specific question you have and get to work on a solution, no matter how clearly you word your initial question with background information and links to all the stuff you have already tried and read.

In theory, having a public forum allows the community to answer a lot of questions without needing a company employee to jump in, but in practice that rarely seems to be the case.

And it's not just me.  Since these are public forums I can see other people going through the same process (and frustration) when they post questions.

One of my hats used to be user tech support, so I get why that job is hard.  But this public forum format apparently forces fewer, less qualified, support engineers to publicly respond to more real technical questions.  While I'm sure it saves the companies money over individual support contacts, this system universally sucks at doing the job it's intended to do which is quickly provide support to the engineers that are trying to use the company's parts in real products. 

//rant over.... for now, until I need to ask another support question on an official public support forum....

Smokey:
One more note....

The idea:
Yes, the public nature of the forum is, in theory, a good record of problems and solutions.  So, again in theory, once someone asks a question and gets a solution, that answer is on the forum for everyone to search for and just read so the company doesn't need to answer the same question over and over with each user privately.

The reality:
1) If your users are asking the same question over and over, that means your documentation sucks.  Take the user feedback and questions, and revise your documentation.
2) Many public forum questions never get adequate resolution.  Either the user figured it out and just never posted their solution... Or the user gave up and changed the design to use a part that has adequate documentation... or, and this is my favorite, for really hard problems the paid support engineers actually pull the conversation offline into a personal support channel AND never update the public forum with what the actual solution was. 

So support forums are littered with real questions with no clear resolution. 

ataradov:
At least Microchip has a way to submit regular support tickets. I'm not sure if the experience is a whole lot better until you manage to get to L2, but at least there is probably more accountability and if the request is reasonable enough and you are persistent, you can often get it to L2.

I'm not even sure how "official" that forum is as a support channel. I think it is just people post as normal, but if you are registered with microchip email you get identified as an employee, which created perception that it is their direct job to respond to those forum posts.

This is one of the reasons I don't want to participate on that forum. It happened many times on AVRFreaks too - people assume that if you work for a company, it must be your job to respond to their every request.

Smokey:

--- Quote from: ataradov on April 14, 2023, 11:14:19 pm ---At least Microchip has a way to submit regular support tickets
...

--- End quote ---

So does renesas.  But, from what I can tell, it's the same guys doing double duty on the forums and tickets. 

ataradov:

--- Quote from: Smokey on April 14, 2023, 11:18:06 pm ---So does renesas.  But, from what I can tell, it's the same guys doing double duty on the forums and tickets. 

--- End quote ---
I don't think it is a policy or a requirement, but I may be wrong. At least from some requests that I get forwarded from the forum, it is mostly local FAEs that participate in the forms. And I always ask to create a real ticket for this because handing 100s of tickets without a support system is a nightmare.

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