OK...here are initial results of the support contract informal survey.
I only heard from 13 people (including myself :)...a mere fraction of
the number of people on the list in total. Keep sending the
information...I'll continue to tabulate and have more updates as I hear
from more people.
The current count is 9 people don't have support contracts, and 4 do.
Some notes:
- One "yes" only had software coverage even though they would have liked
to have greater coverage. They had to settle for software-only
because of the cost
- One "no" actually has coverage on a chassis, but only because that
chassis was bought new and came with coverage...apparently you can't
buy a chassis anymore without coverage...interesting loophole in the
contract rules here. This person indicated that they would rather
have *not* gotten the coverage on the contract as they thought it
was a waste of money.
Many of the people that emailed me as a "no" mentioned it was the cost
and/or the rules that prevented them from getting a contract.
I will re-iterate that I believe that the root of the problem stems from
3Com considering Customer Service as a "Business Unit". In other words,
they want Customer Service to be a revenue positive part of 3Com. While
my previous posting that discussed this was somewhat inaccurate (the
Customer Service Organization, CSO, apparently doens't get the revenues
from the support contracts, the business unit that sells the equipment -
in the case of TC, its the Network Systems Business Unit - gets the
revenues...the whole thought of trying to make Customer Service revenue
positive ends up with an attitude that ends up screwing the customer.
I just recently went through the process of trying to obtain a service
contract again...partially to try to determine if any improvements had
been made to the process...partially to find out if the "Unbundled
Service Options" on 3Com's web site would be useful here...and partially
because we really would like to have some coverage on some of our
equipment. The current status is that the support coverage rules are
still in place (contracts purchased per-chassis rather than per-card,
and all chassis at a site have to have the same coverage...of course
last time we tried to have different coverage at different sites 3Com
didn't honor it), the support options listed as sold items (ie, not
special deals that are made for specific instances) were largely the
same as they've been for the past 3 years. The best I got from the
discussion was that service options could be discussed (ie, a special
deal is how I understand this) if its "a sound business case that makes
sense for the customer and for 3Com." Let me suggest that a sound
business case for 3Com would be to not lose their customers which is
what is happening...3Com is verging towards losing us as a customer
even...and we've been a USRobotics/3Com customer for at least 5 years
(35 Amp power supplied and dual analog 14.4 modems)
--
Jeff McAdams Email: jeffm(a)iglou.com
Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848
IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
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