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Symantec CEO Says Bad Service Fix Only Temporary
Lucas123 writes "Symantec's CEO John Thompson says the company is still struggling with its consolidated ERP system and that it has only thrown bodies and not technology at the post-Veritas buyout issues that created poor customer service. 'I've kind of lost track where we are timing-wise...but we threw an awful lot of head count at this wait-time problem. Wait times from their peak of well over an hour are down to now under two minutes,' he said."
Dear customer, We apologize for the accidental good service. We promise we will make it bad again as soon as possible. Sincerely, Mr. Symantec
My sig is permanently on strike.
Obviously he's not called the support line lately. I just spent 45 minutes on hold today for Veritas support.
Though, nice marketing/support propaganda.
Called yesterday, they said they can allocate an engineer to help me today.
24hours right there.
Was supposed to call at 6pm EST
now its 7:30pmEST
I tell everyone to stay away from Symantec. the products are good, the support is not there.
Now, if they could just get a handle on that "crappy products" problem, they would be doing really well.
For anyone who has worked in a call center, Fast food, Or even a 7-11 wait times are not really under control of the site offering the service. You have ran into or experianced the instant explosion in customers wanting something all at once. Most people just through simple observation can see this but you really don't understand it until you work one of these types of jobs.
In a call center you can staff appropriately and still have excessive wait times at random. I cannot count the number of times it has been dead all day long maybe 1 call an hour then for no apparent reason over the next two hours there are 1+ hour hold times. If you call in at random times during the day and have consistently 30 min - 1 hr hold times then I agree they need to get more headcount.
Also, if most of you had any idea how many people call in wasting 10-20 minutes of a tech's time asking really stupid questions that can usually be found within the table of contents of the admin guide provided you probably wouldn't complain about hold times so much. Basically if the IT staff do their job and actually research & test before implimentation our hold times would be in half or non-existent.
FROM TFA: We contact Symantec Enterprise Technical support(800 number ends in 6542). My co-worker was on hold for more than 1 hour. After dealing with Symantec for 2 hrs 34 minutes they came to the conclusion that there are still problems with SAV causing troubles with Explorer.exe after a successful login to the domain and have yet to provide us with a sound solution!
Your Symantec Anti-Virus is still broken
Your Symantec Veritas Backup Exec is broke
Your customer service wait line is STILL too long.
--
I'm no Anonymous Coward!
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
Its a hell of a lot better than the huge amount of copmpanies out there who have a problem and either ignore it or don't know about it.
"We have no fucking idea what we are doing, how we are doing or why we are doing it".
ERP, the silver bullet with diamond plating.
Symantec, which acquired Veritas in July 2005, is running Oracle's E-Business Suite 11i applications on Sun Solaris servers. Using an Oracle Fusion Middleware portal on the front end, the new system was designed to provide a single point of contact for the combined company's customers and business partners, Thompson said. Source: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?com mand=viewArticleBasic&articleId=281856&intsrc=arti cle_more_bot
at the same time:
1) message to existing customers: Sorry, we know. We are doing our best and we are honest about it.
2) message to new prospects: We are humans, we try. Hard.
Marvelous move. One of the best PR stunts of the decade, actually, I would say...
How about you design an AV/Internet Security that uses less services, less resources, and doesn't attempt to take over every aspect of my system. Then I might consider using that product with my clients. Oh yeah, and stop designing your software to trash systems after the uninstall.
On a lighter note, your uninstall tool is amazing A+++
It's too bad the Symantec CEO didn't comment on what he plans to do with a suite of decade-old Veritas products that are harder to use, less capable, and more expensive than most hardware-based storage solutions available to the enterprise today.
If you think any of symantec's products are "good", you're right where you belong in support hell.
What are considered the best corporate alternatives to Symantec's two largest products?
1. Symantec Corporate Antivirus
2. Backup Exec?
I'd love to free myself of this company and their insane licensing process and terrible support... but it is really all I have ever known. What other products do what they do at least as good as they do it?
One time, a local TV station decided to air some cheesy old 3-D flick for the 8 O'Clock Movie in actual 3-D, using a new 3-D process for television. The station struck a deal with 7-11 to distribute the 3-D glasses. The catch? They would cost about 33 cents apiece.
So here's me, Mr. 7-11 Guy in my orange smock, standing behind the counter. All of a sudden, at about 5pm, customers start filing into the store. It seems that just about everybody got a call at work at some point during the day, asking if mommy could pleeeeaaaasse go and get some of those 3-D glasses so everybody could watch the fun movie tonight. 33 cents was no big deal, so everybody did.
The problem was, if they were free I could just toss them at people as they walked through the door. That's the way dumb promotions usually worked. But because they were 33 cents, every single customer that came into the store just for 3-D glasses had to wait in line at my register (I was the only employee on duty). Not to mention all the other people who came in for beer etc., just like usual.
Well, I lost track at some point. But the following day my manager told me that, according to the register tapes, I spent the next three hours ringing up roughly one customer every thirty seconds.
The thing is, a few people walked out. At times the line was as much as 12 people long, which is pretty long for a 7-11. But most of them didn't (as testified by the fact that I rang up so many of them). I kept my cool, cracked jokes, and pretty much nobody yelled at me. In fact, one guy even gave me a $5 tip on a 33 cent pair of 3-D glasses. And because people were waiting in line at 7-11, half of them grabbed a candy bar or a bag of chips or beer or something while they were waiting to get their glasses rung up, so it was a huge windfall for the store.
My point? No, you can't control it when you get excessive wait times at random. But that doesn't mean you can't control your customer service.
Breakfast served all day!
Customers won't be much happier if they don't have to wait as long to talk to someone that can barely walk them through the normal support tree. I'd rather wait longer to talk to someone that can actually help me, assuming that I can't get the ideal short wait AND someone that's knowledgable all in one go.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
What??! You didn't know Symantec had a company song?
Well, here it is in its full awfulness. And no, this is NOT a parody...
- Robin
at the place where I work weve been using backup exec for a long time in all of our servers worldwide.. While thankfully Ive only had a few problems with backup exec, they were usually solved relatively well by Veritas. When symantec bought veritas I knew that wasnt a good sign. Luckily i didnt had to call them until this week...
I wanted to upgrade a few licenses, so our local support had to forward me to US, for licensing support. I was then transfered to another tech support center in the US, and while everyone that I spoke with (about 6 persons) were very polite, NONE of them would send me to the right place. It felt like I was in a loop, always being asked the same questions, then the person would say, -oh, you need licensing support, hold a moment while i transfer you. If it was 1st of april that might have been mildly amusing, but cmon. I had to hang up and call the people that sold me the software to get the license thru other channels...
If they didn't have such a poor product then they probably wouldn't get so many support calls. We have been using Symantec at work for years and with each version their AV has continued to get worse. I could really go on a rant about all the problems with their software, but I'll spare the long post. We are making the change to Trend Micro soon. Almost every side job that I do for people that complain about performance problems has had a Symantec product on their machine. One of the first things I do is get rid of that and there is a huge improvement. We have also been using Backup Exec for years but now are looking for a new solution since Symantec has taken them over. Anything Symantec is history as far as I'm concerned.
I've been with Backup Exec since the early NT4 days. I can tell you that Veritas support wasn't all that slick back then. The thing is, the software works. It takes some tweaking, but the scope of options is impressive. It's not cheap. Back before people knew that running Norton Antivirus client on MS Exchange would completely hose the database, I had to do bare-metal restores from Backup Exec tapes, and the product never let me down. Now that Symantec has taken over, phone support is phenomenally pathetic, but the product is still very capable. If you're doing backup-to-disk-to-tape using libraries, BE 11d is a peach. The Linux client works quite well. Bottom line: you hope the product doesn't malfunction, requiring you to go beyond the online knowledge base. Symantec has too many products and nowhere near enough trained support. I'm willing to bet the product line will slim down eventually, and the support crew will grow to nearly-appropriate levels.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
Considering that ZFS (it's freeware) is about to eat Veritas Volume Manager's lunch. I would say it's high time to jump ship. Symantec has bloated everything they ever bought. re: Norton Utilities....
Its a good time to be a Solaris Admin, and luckily for you Linux folk they finally got the licensing worked out. Oh, BTW, Apple too.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
/crosses arms for boxshot
Standoffish Peter...
is standoffish.
Norton Utilities hasn't been worth buying since Version 3 for Win98.
There are a dozen companies that do a dozen products a dozen times better now. The best thing Symantec does for the world is maintain a searchable trojan and worm database. Which is free.
As I understand it, Veritas used to be a kick-ass company and the one to turn to for enterprise backup solutions. My company bought BackupExec 10d and it's been pretty much a nightmare to deal with. As I understand it, after Veritas was bought out the knowledgeable programmers were chucked and everything was outsourced to the Indians. Certainly the tech support has been. We have an Exabyte 10 tape robotic drive to use with the thing and it's not been pretty. BackupExec will forget which tapes are in the drive, cannot rediscover them, jobs will end with "unspecified failure" and no clue on how to troubleshoot, backup jobs will change lengths at random and for no discernable reason, etc. When you get right down to it, the worst thing about the software is I don't feel like I can rely on it. If it was my sole form of backup, I'd feel like I was one software hiccup away from disaster. So I'm running it because management paid for it and they want to make sure their investment is being used but I'm running duplicate backups on external HDD's with robocopy. It just seems more reliable and dependable.
So, here's the question: am I not giving 10d a break, is it really a good product here, or am I completely right and should be fleeing in horror from it? I hear that version 11 is an even bigger nightmare, more indianized.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
"On a lighter note, your uninstall tool is amazing A+++"
The uninstall tool?
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but in my day we simply made the uninstaller actually work.
Symantec's home antivirus product is a nightmare. Once I remove Windows itself and intentionally hostile software from the list, my clients pay me more often to fix this antivirus product then any other single product. This has been true since the 2003 version.
-Z
Here's what I don't understand with these call center twerps. Ok, so the wait time is going to be a while. Why not take the customer's contact number, stick it in the queue, and hang up? Then after an hour when it's their turn, the system calls them back. Once it confirms a connection is made with a live person, the next tech up gets the call. They do it with telemarketing, Bellsouth does it (or did it) with residential service, why can't the rest of the world get on the same page? I mean, what does the long distance cost them, keeping tens of thousands of people on hold for hours on end?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
OK so wait times are down, but has the service actually improved?
...which is what I should have done anyway, but I was mentally drained and at my wit's end with this whole debacle so I decided to call the "experts" hoping they might be able to at least point me in the right direction. For the record, I eventually determined that the problem was due to bad LTO media. The tape verified fine after the backup, but there was a section with about 1.5 GB of data that the drive just couldn't read from for whatever reason. I've never had a tape fail like that (usually an all-or-nothing failure), but I was able to just restore around the bad section and retrieve the other 1.5 GB from a previous backup. Still, it would have been nice if the people who actually deal with BE problems every day could have suggested that possibility to me. Or any possibilities other than "upgrade first".
In the past couple of months, I've had a couple of occasions to deal with them for BackupExec issues and came away none too pleased.
First situation: I spent 4 - 5 hours with support attempting to troubleshoot an issue over the course of an 11.5 hour day. In the end, BE support couldn't solve my problem and the only solution was a full uninstall and reinstall. Of Windows. Still not sure what happened to break the software. We'd performed the same task on this very server several times (rename server, run BE database conversion utility, connect drives and get to work), but this time the software blew up to the point where only a clean format and reinstall of Server 2K3 solved the issue. I gave up with their "support" when their "clean" reinstall of BE didn't solve the problem.
Scenario two: Apparently I didn't get enough punishment before. Call BE support for a new issue on the same server a couple of days (4 or 5) later. (Restoring data from before the format.) Get a new tech who flat REFUSES to help me until I download and install the latest version. I begin the download, but since our bandwidth is approximately equivalent to a pair of shotgunned 56k modems, I immediately deduce that the 500+MB software won't finish downloading anytime before the end of the work day. I call back and explain that the server has been down for 5 days already due to their inability to solve my issue before and now their "solution", which may or may not work, will cause another day of downtime. I ask that we skip that first step and try some other troubleshooting in the meantime. The tech's response: "nope". He wouldn't help me at all so off I went on my own...
Is it too much to ask that a person supporting a piece of software actually be more capable than I?
If Murphy's Law can go wrong, it will.
Well, I Didn't read the article, but I'd still like to put out my two cents on the Symantec service.
Recently, I've had to contact Symantec on several occasions to ask for their assistance with some problems I couldn't figure out on my own (I support small business customers). Anyway, on every occasion, I was put through within a reasonable timeframe (usually less than 20 minutes) to someone who was able to help me sort out the problem.
On one occasion, even after the problem was fixed, the technician who helped called again. I was quite surprised, but he said that he wanted to make sure that some other service is also working because he was not sure that he told me to switch it back on or not.
I was quite impressed, and still am with their level of service. I have on a couple of occasion been put through to the consumer helpdesk in India, but they were quite helpful. Once I told them that I am an enterprise customer, they would transfer the call to the right number (or just give me a number and tell me the options I should select).
I may sound like a fanboy here, but I actually do have a very high regard for their service centre people.
Where I have a problem with Symantec is with their myriad of products and licensing. It is much harder to get to figure out what product should be purchased for a particular customer, or what the differences are between the various versions of a product than it is to get support from their call centre.
Symantec needs to wisen up and reduce the complexity of their choices. Too many choices doesn't always make for a happy customer.
http://www.forbes.com/finance/mktguideapps/personi nfo/FromPersonIdPersonTearsheet.jhtml?passedPerson Id=940581
No comment necessary.
Sure, telephone wait times might be down to two minutes, but it still takes about an hour for Norton AV to actually DO anything
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Symantec have quite a lot of products. Are you saying none of them are any good?
Seriously...really? You have? Maybe you get different engineers in the UK than here in the U.S. Not to mention the products themselves are abysmal.
I went to the training course for Storage Foundation for Windows a few months ago. During one of the class exercises my system lost all connectivity to the disks and marked them as unknown, couldn't import, etc. The instructor didn't know what to do and said I should just format the disks and start the exercise again.
My real complaint is that this has happened twice in our production environments too, and while technical support has been able to assist us in recovery, their response to our annoyed complaint "this shouldn't happen" has been "well, this is kind of complex stuff, you know...you have to expect the occasional hiccup".
No I bloody don't!. Not in an enterprise level product! I expect it to be rock solid, and if it's not I expect you to be able to interpret the logs, rather than just shrug and say I don't know.
VSFW is nothing but a pain in the proverbial, and I will not use it again. If it didn't mark all the disks dynamic and make uninstallation an impossibility without lengthy restores, I'd take it off all my systems today.
Symantec Enterprise Services in the UK is shite! In order for me to raise a support ticket a 450 server enterpise Netbackup kit going down, so no backups for 24 hours, I was told on the phone by the support rep that I would have to put an email to enterpise support with my problem and someone might be able to pick it up within 3-4 hours! I asked why the hell I could raise the ticket through the website like I used to be able to with Veritas, they said the system were being consolidated and that wouldn't be available again for sometime!!! So your running a multi-million dollar business with no website support presence?! I don't want to be one of your share holders at the next meeting! Don't get me started on how Symantec have mutilated the Veritas Support knowledge-base website, it was just about usable with Vertitas, but now Symantec have just screwed-it up royally! If we weren't tied into NetBackup, I'd happily find another backup vendor!
Windows guys please stop pissing on everyone and the Linux guys stop pissing in the wind, hoping to hit Windows guys!
I had to call them recently for support and they are indeed Symantec. See the ugly Symantec logo here.
What blows my mind is that everytime I call Symantec for Backup Exec support (which I all the freakin' time) the wait times are always excessive. A major issue, which is supposed to have an 8 hr call return time is more often than not, is 3 days of waiting. Good news is that once you get ahold of someone, they own the case and help until its closed. Before the buyout, a Veritas tech was readily available. Symantec management has failed poorly if you ask me.