Service Provider Redemption?
Things are progressing. I will say that in response to my last post, nearly five days after starting my support request I finally got someone on the phone that would talk to me. I have to say, that it's hard when you are evaluating a service provider because their customer support people could be really nice and helpful, but their product is not very good. Or more likely, the opposite is true where the company offers a great product but their customer support is nearly non-existent.
Once the customer service rep had determined that there actually was a problem, we were off and running. The developers got involved to do some debugging, and I received a call later in the day yesterday thanking me for my help in finding the problem. After hearing what it was, I can partially understand how it slipped through the cracks, and was a bit hard to find. We have some custom settings applied to our account, as did a select few other users, that were causing problems. Seems reasonable enough.
At least it did until this morning. I got some notifications that the system was now fixed, and it should be working properly. So I excitedly logged into our account to find that it appeared to be working. The new functionality was showing up, and working the way it was... Oh wait. It turns out that I cannot edit some things (the main functionality without which the system is useless again) in the system, which will not work for me. Then I find out that although the formatting functions seem to work, there are some loose ends in the programming that leave gaps in the things you can format. Aack. I suppose that it could be possible that the custom settings on our account are causing this, although it seems more likely to me that they are just oversights.
The bottom line is that I am still dealing with the same support request nearly a week later. The customer service folks have been fantastic, when I can actually get them on the phone. I have submitted the bugs and am back to waiting for a response. We'll see how this all turns out, but I have a feeling that I will be left wanting to take the customer support people out to lunch while also wanting a few minutes alone in a room with the person in charge of testing the new functionality.
This post is filed under Developers' Corner and has the following keyword tags: customer service.
