Re: Incompetent Oracle Support
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:43:43 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <d89e7ac3-7ed2-4155-8a5a-f18cb51afd8e_at_o7g2000prg.googlegroups.com>
On Jul 24, 5:39 am, Mark D Powell <Mark.Powe..._at_hp.com> wrote:
> On Jul 23, 9:35 am, John Hurley <hurleyjo..._at_yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> > Mladen:
>
> > # They used to be good, not any longer. I have a SR opened because of
> > node eviction, the SR is level 2, nobody is responding for days. I
> > called in on Tuesday, they opened a new SR, despite my strong
> > objections, and nobody is working on it.
>
> > My experience in the last several years is that pretty much nothing
> > gets worked on that is not at Sev 1.
>
> > Even at Sev 1 ... you roll the dice if you get someone with the
> > experience and authority to know how to actually work an issue.
>
> > In most cases it seems like you have to get it at Sev 1 and then at
> > some point escalate thru a phone call from a manager and ask them
> > nicely to get it placed with someone competent and experienced.
>
> We have not entered more than a few SR's in the last year none of
> which were Sev 1 and support has responded. However, based on the
> solution some of the responses have been slower than would seem
> necessary. Unfortunately, I believe you are at the mercy of the
> problem assignment process to which analyst you get.
Part of the process appears to be people who use OCM go to the front of the line. Unless someone has seen somewhere that that isn't true anymore?
>
> First off I suspect that a big part of the problem is that many of the
> analysts are not that knowledgable and your problem may fall outside
> the analysts experience level. Then there is what may be the more
> serious issue in that I believe that many of the analysts already have
> more SR's assigned to them than he or she can respond to in a timely
> manner.
I have a suspicion (with little actual foundation, so this is speculation) that the support process for databases is being modified behind the scenes. A couple years ago, I'd get a lot of "oh, now we have to spawn another SR for that," sometimes with the analyst confiding they don't like it either. I haven't got that recently. I don't know if it is because I just don't do that many SR's and have a skewed view, or someone realized how stupid it looked and gave more "accountability" to front-end folk (or for those subject to paranoia, that there is a customer file for internal use only where they say "hey, this nerd will complain online, watch how you handle him" - I saw one place that had to do a major cleanup of their db when they allowed customers web access). Given the integration of so many disparate products into the support system, I can't say I'm optimistic that this is just growing pains for a system that will improve.
Not long ago I saw a new Futurama episode, where Bender and Hermes are being chased by kill-bots, while Mom watches on a remote monitor: "That's what you get for calling tech-support! " http://pool.theinfosphere.org/images//d/d7/606-kill-bots.jpg
>
> I do not know how many times I have seen a post on OTN or in the
> Oracle Support Community forums which recommended the poster open an
> SR for questions that were asking for answers that amount to opinions
> on how something should be approached and could have been answered by
> reading the manual and considering the manual information in relation
> to the user enfironment. I suspect that Oracle support is buried
> under SR's for topics that can be answered directly from the manuals.
>
> The way I see it we are stuck. There is no way a major business can
> afford to run without a support contract cause you need access to the
> bug fixes and support in the event you run into a reoccurring
> problem. We have had to patch or upgrade our way out of problems in
> the past and the need to do so again in the future cannot be
> discounted.
>
The thing about being stuck is you can squeal really loud.
jg
-- _at_home.com is bogus. It's stuff like this that makes you understand why some things are missing from EM: http://jakub.wartak.pl/blog/?p=109Received on Mon Jul 26 2010 - 15:43:43 CDT