What pieces of information a customer has to provide us when he opens a Support case
Hi,
in this article I'd like to give advice to improve the cooperation between our business customers and the Technical Support for enterprises.
They come from my personal experience in the frontline. Some of these pieces of advice sound obvious but, unfortunately, few customers apply them when they call in and the speed and the efficiency of the troubleshooting could be negatively affected when they are not applied.
Before calling us:
please open the guides provided with the product or search the proper documents in our web site. You will save a lot of time.
During the first call we need:
1) to talk to an IT technician. This is required by the contract. A lot of end-users call us in just because their name is in the contract and they own a (non IT) company. Because the troubleshooting of our products requires a good knowledge of IT, it is impossible to have an efficient conversion with people that are not able to check the IIS, open a registry, etc... This is not only to speed up the troubleshooting, it is to prevent damages as well: if we provide a solution that requires advanced operations, a non skilled person could damage its system and we don't want this.
2) don't push for a remote session. A Symantec technician does not know your system, he could accidentally damage it, he has to lead the troubleshooting and the customer has to evaluate them in accord with the environment. Besides, our solutions usually are already written in a easy step-by-step procedure, it is not worth to hold a technician on line to apply them. If a customer is not able to apply them, come back to the first point. if the provided solution does not work, you can always contact again the same Symantec technician to obtain further instructions.
3) to know the exact name and version of the product you need help for. Norton Antivirus Protection 11 is not a valid product name. Please, don't check the product name and version in the contract, we are not troubleshooting a piece of paper... open the GUI of the product, go to "About" and check there the full name and version of the installed product. A lot of customers call in for the product Symantec Multi-tier Protection but this is not a product but a bundle of Symantec products, each of them has a different name and Support line. If the product is not installed(i.e. you need to troubleshoot an installation or a migration), give us the name of the .zip file downloaded from our FileConnect or open the versions.txt file included in the archive.
4) to know the operating system of the affected machines included the Service Pack installed. Best practices: keep your O.S. and your applications up-to-date. For performance issues, add the hardware configuration. For best practices regarding the deployment of our products, add the size of your company and its sites.
5) to know the exact error message you get from the product. For example "the password is wrong" is not a message that you can read in Symantec Endpoint Protection Manager. Try to copy and paste the errors in a text document, or take some screenshots or export the proper logs. "I remember an error like..." is a good way to reduce the quality of the troubleshooting.
6) to guess if something triggered the issue, for example, the installation of a new 3rd part software, a recent hardware failure, etc.
General behavior:
1) Be cooperative. Most of the times it seems that the Symantec technician is asking you some banal questions but often he is just trying to match your symptoms with the ones described in some internal documents and therefore, select the best document or troubleshooting steps for you. Provide the logs requested by the Symantec technician. If he ask you several logs, try to collect them at once, it means they should record a similar time frame. If you send some not-requested logs, please specify what you are submitting and why.
2) Please, give a feedback to your Symantec technician regarding the suggested solutions.
3) Set up reasonable expectation. Remember that the Symantec technician does not have access to the code of the product. If some bugs are found out or your system is seriously damaged, you cannot expect a prompt resolution. He will do his best to provide you at least a workaround.
4) Remember that we support Symantec products. Several times the issues with our products are due to a wrong configuration of the O.S. or triggered by other software. We provide some possible solutions and best practices in these situations but if you need more help you should also contact the support of the other product.
Case closure:
1) don't push to leave a case open for monitoring. If the troubleshooting was efficient, the provided solution is usually stable. Every open case add an administrative load that reduce the available time to manage the new and unresolved cases. After the case closure, you are entitled to open it again within ten days if the provided solution did not help.
2) Fill the survey out. Carefully. We really take care of your official feedback regarding the quality of our Support Service. If you are not satisfied, it is the right place to point this out. If you are satisfied, it is the best way to say us "thank you".
I hope this article will improve your experience with us.
Best regards,
Giuseppe Di Salvo
Symantec Technical Support Analyst