Yes the whole support contract issue is really a shame. Countless times I have *tried* to get support contracts, but 3com will not take my money, they don't want it. It comes down to the wire, and then at that last minute they change the rules. We have used 3Com Total Control for many years. All we need the contracts for is the software support. We buy a chassis at least every 2 months anyways, so we are always covered under the 90 day support blanket that comes with each chassis..........we could keep this up forever, and 3com won't make a dime. Or they can come out with a decent offer. I have support contracts on everything except the 3com stuff we own. Cisco, Foundry, Ascend......they didn't have problems with support contracts, only 3com. And those of us without contracts, alot of us have been using this stuff for 4 or 5 or more years. We are not the ones calling the support teams and using up 3 hours on a tech call for simple answers. We just want coverage. Brian On Wed, 2 Feb 2000, Jeff Mcadams wrote:
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@iglou.com Head Network Administrator Voice: (502) 966-3848 IgLou Internet Services (800) 436-4456
- To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.
----------------------------------------------------- Brian Feeny (BF304) signal@shreve.net 318-222-2638 x 109 http://www.shreve.net/~signal Network Administrator ShreveNet Inc. (ASN 11881) - To unsubscribe to usr-tc, send an email to "majordomo@xmission.com" with "unsubscribe usr-tc" in the body of the message. For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send "help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.