Corel Support incompetence

[jrmach]

Does anyone else have problems with the level of support from Corel or is it just me? It is like they don't even read the message and just write anything down to answer the ticket, and then it takes them for ever to get back to you. I am having horrendous problems with aftershot pro3, from showing wrong dates on files so they are organized wrong (but they show fine in aftershot pro 2 and every other program) to aftershot pro 3 constantly crashing my computer and causing scandisk to run on reboot. The windows event logs all show this, too many many other issues with this program. There answer is to uninstall clean out the directories etc. then reinstall, and if that doesn't work try it again... What the #$#@... where do they get these people, is there not anyone at Corel support that knows what they are doing?
This program should not even be on the shelf from what I have read in this forum. I regret buying Aftershot pro 3, what a waste of money. I don't know what is worse the program or the support.
I have found that this web board is usually better than the support from Corel.

Thank you for reading my rant and I hope you understand my frustration.

[barbt425]

I agree with the support issue. I get the same scripted text from someone named Kevin who never answers my questions. Corel has gone down hill and the support is nonexistant!

[MikeFromMesa]

I agree with the support issue. I get the same scripted text from someone named Kevin who never answers my questions. Corel has gone down hill and the support is nonexistant!

I think it depends upon a number of things.

First, I have submitted several bugs again both ASP and PaintShop Pro, and all have been answered quickly and correctly and I have been surprised at how good the support was.

I am very familiar with how front-line support like this works, having been a software engineer/architect and had dealing with those who did the first line of support, although not for Corel products. It is a very difficult job. Customers file many, many bug reports and they generally fall into a limited number of question categories and often the support people are overwhelmed by the number of these reports. Often the reports are generally only about a small number of questions and the support people, having to deal with hundreds of these reports, only read the first couple of lines and assume, from what they read, that they know what the question is, and that is the problem I run into frequently (although not yet with Corel), and I have to respond with the question "Did you even read my report?". That generally gets someone to sit down and read through my entire email, and gets me the correct response.

It is certainly annoying to have to basically file the same bug report multiple times until someone has the time and patience to read the entire report, but that is what happens when support organization are not properly funded. I often get annoyed at how hard it is to get a bug report acknowledged and understood, but I do understand why it happens, and the fault generally belongs to the parent organization, not the people trying to do the work.

At least that is how I see the problem.

[wilko1971]

Like you I have both worked on, with, and ran support teams, if this is the problem then, support is working to the wrong targets. It looks like one of them must be "first time fix" which, is an awful metric. In every IT department I’ve ran this is the first metric I drop. It's much better to work to satisfaction metrics. If calls aren’t being answered quickly enough, satisfaction falls. If they aren’t getting the right answer, satisfaction falls. If the process is taking too long, satisfaction falls. A simple survey can answer these questions, then you just have to factor in that only the most disgruntled and ecstatic customers will respond, to understand where your pressure points are.

I think this one is a fairly simple though, the support team simply isn’t big enough to provide a good service

[eja]

I have to agree, my experience with tech support has not been encouraging. I have been working on an issue since 26 July 2018. I simply wanted to know why the stacking command is greyed out on both my mac and my windows machine. I give them an A for trying to figure it out, but they do not seem able to give a straight answer. Is this a bug or is it user error? Also, when they scheduled a remote session with me, the tech was over 45 minutes late and then excused themselves after 12 minutes and never returned. Oh well..