Well my 2 cents here as well, I know that none of us likes to pay for things we do not feel are fair or will use but it is like paying for car insurance, you may need it someday and it will be worth it believe me. Besides I never see anything about others charging for support but I have news just about all do. We use Cisco equipment and it is the same deal you have to buy a support contract or pay by the support call after the warranty period is up. I know there are some that do not charge but I can tell you that it will not last forever no matter what they tell you, it is an avenue for these equipment manufacturers to make extra income and they will all succumb to it eventually as it is easy money for them. Sometimes you just have to play the game even if you do not like it and believe me I do not like paying for support contracts but my number one goal is keeping my customers happy and I will pay for the contract to do so. Besides I have much worse problems with phone companies than equipment manufacturers, telcos are the real root of all ISP's problems. Thank you, Clint R. Sparks ComQuest Internet Services support@cqc.com ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jeff Mcadams" <jeffm@iglou.com> To: <usr-tc@lists.xmission.com> Cc: <bruce_claflin@mw.3com.com>; <karl_swanson@mw.3com.com>; <thomas_goodman@mw.3com.com>; <george_ebert@mw.3com.com>; <glenn_gibney@mw.3com.com>; <irfan_ali@mw.3com.com> Sent: Wednesday, February 02, 2000 10:15 AM Subject: (usr-tc) Support Contract survey
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
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