December 22 2009 3:56 PM by Adam
filed under ColdFusion

You might have noticed I tweeted about being on hold with Adobe Customer Service so I could learn firsthand what the experience was like as a ColdFusion customer. It's unfortunate, but I've been fielding an increased number of complaints about Customer Service and Technical Support these past few months. Some reports just sounded too outlandish to be true, so I decided to investigate for myself.

Let's be honest, if you are calling Customer Service or Technical Support there is high likelihood that you are already unhappy. Something has either gone wrong with the product or you have some issue that you can't resolve through a simple Google Bing search. While it may not always be possible for CS/TS to provide complete satisfaction, under no circumstances should you end feeling worse about the situation. Sadly, this has been the case with a few customers who have been calling Adobe for ColdFusion-related help.

I'm trying my best to fully understand the problems with support. However, it's a bit challenging to separate the displeasure in discovering an issue in ColdFusion vs. the poor experience in finding a resolution. There are definitely some customers who have decided beforehand that no resolution is acceptable and just want to vent on an undeserved customer service representative. This is why I decided to call Customer Service myself and impersonate a real ColdFusion customer with a real issue.

After 50 minutes (and more elevator music than I care to hear), I hung up without a resolution to my problem. Over the next few days I called back a few times to rule out the "one bad representative" cause. Each time I called I was given a different reason as to why Adobe would not resolve my problem. One department would transfer me to another and that department would transfer me right back. It was clear that there was a system wide failure.

This is but one example and I know there are many more out there. Prior to the ColdFusion 9 launch, I asked the frontlines team (Sales and Evangelism) to send me any/all customer dissatisfaction stories they might come across. I wanted to build a strong case for change and try to solve some of the frequently occurring problems. Next month, I'll be meeting with the person in charge of the Adobe Technical Response team and I want to make sure he fully understands that this isn't a one-off issue or just a crazed Product Manager with high expectations.

Thankfully, not everything I've found is bad news. There are some really great parts of Adobe Support that are working very _very_ well. Adobe has a 3-tiered support system. When you call the general support number, a Tier-1 representative takes the call. Once Teir-1 gets your information and establishes it as a ColdFusion issue (as opposed to Acrobat, Photoshop, etc.) you should get routed to Tier-2. Tier-2 in Adobe has been dramatically expanded with fresh new faces. While that might sound like a good thing for the future, the problem is that today these new hires have a lot less experience with ColdFusion than the average ColdFusion customer. We are actively training more and more of thew new Tier-2 representative and tracking the resolution times and customer satisfaction. Bad news, it was a rocky start. Good news, it's improving by leaps and bounds each month. Of course there are many issue that Tier-2 just aren't able to solve, this is when you might get escalated to Tier-3.

Tier-3 is where you'll get to talk to the resident ColdFusion experts at Adobe. These gurus have been debugging ColdFusion issues since the Allaire days and are damn good at it. Once a Tier-3 representative is involved, the problem is usually solved with a quick turn around and everyone ends up happy. I can honestly say, I've yet to come across a dissatisfied customer who has worked with Tier-3.

In the past few months (separated by the holiday break) I've met with the head of Adobe World Wide Customer Case (WWCC) and the Technical Response Team (TRT). I'm very happy to report that they are very committed to solving some of these issues and we are discussing everything from the price of support, to how issues are escalated all the way to how the engineering team issues hotfix and security updates. I'm very optimistic that we can make some positive changes to enhance the overall system.

With that, I'd like to ask that if you have had a bad experience with Adobe Support or Adobe Customer Service in relation to a ColdFusion issue, please send me a synopsis of the problem. While I'm fairly confident I know about most of the issues to date, it's always helpful to have factual data to back it up. In case you didn't already have it, my address is adrock at adobe.com. Please put "ColdFusion Support Issue" in the subject line so I can easily find in the endlessly churning ocean that is my inbox. Please don't send me your angry rants. I'm really just looking for friendly and polite criticism I can share internally.

Peace out.

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