Enterprise Support: Expectations vs. Reality

Like most companies out there, at Datalogics we utilize and rely on many enterprise infrastructure products daily. As many people do, we expect that support will be readily accessible when we need it, as ours is for our customers. These are enterprise products, after all, and valuable support is always an expectation. Unfortunately, I found out recently this was not always the case when it comes to other companies.

While working with one of these enterprise infrastructure products recently, I was trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular task. I was sure the options that I was looking for were there, but they were named in such a cryptic way that made it very difficult to understand. So, I began troubleshooting. My first thought was to tweak the options in my sandbox until I got the desired outcome I was looking for. That didn’t quite work out for me, so I decided to read through the manual. After a few hours and a couple of re-reads, I was still struggling to grasp the concept. At this point, I decided to contact the support team behind this enterprise product to see if they could walk me through my issue, and finally get my problem solved. They responded back to me the next day, assured me they understood what I was trying to do, and sent me a copy of the same manual I’d been reading. “It’s all in there,” they said, and then wished me a great day. It frustrated me that I had already spent hours reading through this manual, only to be redirected to it again to find the solution on my own. All I really wanted was a few minutes of a support rep’s time to talk through my issue.

Finally, at the expense of even more of my time, I eventually figured out the issue. This time consuming experience got me thinking - is this a common occurrence? Are some support teams more invested in their products than others?

Enterprise products typically have a good support team that should be very familiar with their products. But, a great enterprise support team will not only understand and help you solve the technical challenge you are facing, they can also visualize the big picture and advise you on better ways of achieving your goals. That’s exactly what our support team at Datalogics does. With over 50 years in the industry helping our customers get to market faster, our highly experienced team is here to troubleshoot issues, answer questions, and provide additional resources to help in the future – whether it’s an existing customer or someone currently evaluating one of our products.

When you partner with us, you are immediately assigned a U.S. based support representative dedicated to your account who is just a phone call or email away. Our support team also provides a number of easily accessible resources for our customers. On our Developer Resources site, we offer detailed documentation, samples, release notes, and other tools to help you use our products more effectively. Our Knowledge Base is continuously updated with customer frequently asked questions, and we are actively participating in Stack Overflow as an additional channel to provide developer community support.

I am extremely proud of the support our company offers to our customers, yet am baffled that not all support lives up to that same standard. Why wouldn’t you put your customers’ needs first, and provide them with all of the necessary assistance possible when working with your products? Here at Datalogics, I truly feel that we have our customer’s best interest in mind, and do everything we can to help them succeed. This is what true enterprise support means.