Opinions and other stuff......Support

General Wonderings - Support and it's real costs.

I like IT.  I like building solutions, solving problems and learning.  I am lucky that for a living I get to tinker with technology and try to get the best of new software/hardware features.  I like this about my job.  I do find  that when playing with I.T. I sometimes need help, so onto the relevent support group I go.  Recently whilst building an Oracle DR site I had an issue and raised a Service Request (SR).  As the site was working I raised it as a low priority SR (possible my first mistake).  It took over six days for the SR to get picked up.  It did get me to thinking (not something I try to do) that maybe for all the license costs and maintenance costs and extended maintenance costs we pay should we get better service.   Companies (including mine) pay a lot of money each year and part of that is for support, where is the value for money?   My opinion is that few companies get it right and considering we are paying, is this good enough?  Do companies realise that support is the interface to the customer and it is worth the effort to get it right and make the experience a good one.
 
On the flip side,  I recently raised a low priority SR with MySQL support and my experience was completely different.  The team were helpful, timely and thorough.  I felt that they wanted to solve the issue and get involved.  Long live MySQL support.

Not all companies are bad but I will say that most don't give you a good experience.  If this were a consumer service people would complain.   I know we all have account managers but I know talking to mine hasn't really helped.

Rant over.....back to work.....