Actinic Support

[christina]

long time actinic customer here (since v4) & in an attempt to simplify my life when I upgraded I decided to go for v9 multi site, actinic payments & actinic hosting - sounds simple doesn't it!

payments was painful as evry person at actinic towers gives a different story as to what can/can't be done & the product was launched before all the banks had it on their approved list, but that's all done & dusted now & it works fine now it's up & running.

Am trying to switch our third actinic site over from actinic express into catalog, template all set up, products imported but problems with the hosting.

So as a cover customer (not cheap either...) I pick up the phone, get transferred through to the hosting department, then the fun begins

Where exactly are actinic recruiting at the moment? the guy I was put through to had to ask me to spell several times the address of the plesk server control panel - as it's your server guys, I hoped you might know this without asking your customers. This carried on in farcical fashion for 20 minutes & I hadn't even been asked for my log in details yet...
Then I was put on hold to the best of the 80s & then transferred to someone else, who I had to repeat the whole issue to again, then she said she would need to call me back (bear in mind this wasn't a particularly complex request from my end). 3 hours later do you think the call has been returned...

OK, rant over, & yes I am grumpy becuase I didn't get to bed until 5am but for goodness sake Actinic - sort it out & train your technical support to at least know some basic stuff because it's not a good advert for the company at the mo!

[grantglendinnin]

As the saying goes Christina, we were all born virgins. As with all software companies, when they recruit you, you get the lower end jobs before you move up on the ladder. Specifically so with a product like Actinic, where you can know just about everything to do with web development, then get stuck with not knowing how to integrate that with Actinic. Though I do agree, sometimes support is awful - the consolation prize being at least you're speaking to a support person who speaks English

[Stereo Steve]

The only time I have phoned support, the guy was super efficient and sorted everything in minutes. He talked like a machine gun, was just like my days as a stock trader. Brilliant.

[george]

Then I was put on hold to the best of the 80s

I can see why you'd be grumpy.


Seriously, I hope you get sorted asap.

[christina]

well the acid test will be when I shift the site onto their servers over the weekend! I'm assured it is all working & ready to go.

Grant, I understand your point about training etc. but it would be better customer service if the new techies were trained on how to locate actinic's own hosting servers & log in to the customer facing control panel before they are let loose on customers. It doesn't inspire confidence!

Incidentally, after my rant I did get a call back - perhaps someone at Actinic was listening ;-)

[heavenlygirl]

We have spoken to support on numerous occassion and on the whole they tended to be ok.

My Husband, who runs an IT helpdesk for one of TV Dragon's, feels they do not log all calls correctly borne out by the number of times that we had to repeat the issue and carry out the same tasks.

Once you get past first line support and start talking to second line things tend to move.

I do agree training is an issue but as my husband states much training is done on the job

[leehack]

for one of TV Dragon's

Do you mean Jo Brand?

[Darren B]

Do you mean Jo Brand?

Now theres a scary thought, could you imagine the customer service and support

[guccij]

could you imagine the customer service and support

Lots of friendly feck you's I guess. Maybe I should build that sort of response into my staff training. They're too nice to people.

[heavenlygirl]

jo brand - she's a pussy cat compared to his boss.

[malbro]

OK, rant over, & yes I am grumpy becuase I didn't get to bed until 5am but for goodness sake Actinic - sort it out & train your technical support to at least know some basic stuff because it's not a good advert for the company at the mo!

As a relative newcomer to actinic all I can say is that my first and only call to support re a problem with setting up Actinic payments was sorted out within 24 hours. Many thanks to Adam for his excellent work.

[Jarvis]

I have to say, in 25 years in IT, Actinic have had one of the best support team I have come across.
However, since v9 release, the support has taken a massive nose-dive.
It is a number of things that rankle.

1. We pay a premium for priority support, but what was once a rapid response is now dismal. Often the wait is in excess of 30 minutes. Prior to v9 this was at most a queue of one or two.
What makes it worse is that on more than one occasion having finally got through, I have been unceremoniously dumped with a message along the lines of "ext 200 is not available", or words to that effect.
At 0845 prices per minute plus my time, it's not on!

2. When you do get through, it is getting more rare to get a solution there and then, with a complex issue having to be passed on and a ticket issued and a promise of a return call.

3. This is also having a knock-on effect from my clients. Frustrated with the length of time waiting for a support engineer to answer and the lack of a working solution, my clients are increasingly relying on me for support. This has the effect of raising my clients expectation of my relationship with them and making it more and more difficult for me to meet those expectations. Annoyingly, the answers are often simple and would have been dealt with by pre-v9 support. The more difficult ones I have often to contradict Actinic support when they have said that a solution is not possible when a solution is already posted on this forum. Many I have to work through myself.

For the record, I reckon that the ridiculously buggy v9 initial release and the pathetic subsequent patches have placed such a burden on support that the best men have been taken away from front-line premium support and put onto training new staff to cope with the high level of demand from 'out-of-box' users. This has had the effect of reducing the number of engineers available to premium payers and forced a second level of support to be introduced.

The overall effect is that whilst the excellence remains, it is discreetly hidden beneath a layer of less experienced support and almost impossible to access. Tell me I'm wrong!

[dave.webb]

Ordinarily I'd say that my expectations are met by the support team at Actinic, but as I've been waiting 6 weeks for them to solve a problem I'm certainly not saying that now. My web site is still not working and despite promises to call me back they don't, so I'm left to call them, sit in a queue for ages and then speak to someone different who can't really help.

I've lost count of the number of people telling me my site isn't working, and it's really bad for business. They need to have a hard think about customer care as I'm really not getting value from my support contract and am thinking about using instead.

I hope the rest of you are not experiencing the same as me

Dave

[Sean Williams]

My experience of Actinic support has been mixed, but mostly bad and on one or two occasions laughably so.
I waited 6 weeks for a solution on one occasion and finally had to speak to a Director (not CB) before I got anywhere. Once the person who knew what they were doing (Toby IIRC) was on the case, the problem was sorted within an hour.
It's got so that I don't bother ringing Support any more - I use the Forum instead. Not much good for my £450 per annum support fee, which includes a free upgrade to V9 which instantly junked all my html and was unusable.

I'm a dissatisfied customer

[cbarling]

Good afternoon everyone, I wanted to reply to some of the comments regarding Actinic support. It’s true we are currently struggling a little and I apologise for that.

I want to reassure you that we are fully aware of this and are putting proactive measures in place to resolve it. Historically, we have had a good reputation for support, and we intend to return to that level as soon as we can.

A quick overview:

- Feb: Based on research with customers, we closed down the Indian support centre and moved it back to the UK. One of the resounding comments about our Indian call center was difficulty of communication; we listened and made the decision to bring the team back. One of the side effects of this move was the loss of over 9 years of support experience from the support team.

- March: We lost an experienced member of the UK team.

- April: It became clear that the expansion in the complexity of the product range (v8/9, EPOS etc) has meant that it takes much longer to train support than it has done previously, but we expect things to get better as the team become more experienced

- June - August: Three members of the UK team, including some experienced heads left Actinic.

So unfortunately as we have recruited to get the team up to speed, we have experienced attrition. Of course, it’s very hard to sit on the phone all day when your knowledge is limited, and people have been waiting a fair amount of time so are understandably impatient once they get through.

However we have been busy…what have we done and are doing:

- Boosted third line support (developers who specialise in support) by around 50%

- Brought back members of the online support team, who do email and the Knowledge Base, to front line support. Also one of the experienced Indian employees has moved to the UK for three months.

- Taken back another former Indian team member part time to help with the community and emails

- Recruiting 6 people: two are on their way and four more are to be found. It’s all hands on deck for this recruitment. If you are interested, please get in touch.

- Changing the training regime to try to get people more focussed and therefore more helpful in a shorter time.

I have tried to keep this totally factual. In summary:

- we are experiencing problems. In retrospect, we should have handled things better. The changes we made were intended to improve support, which they will do in the medium term

- in the meantime, we are doing everything that we can, irrespective of cost

- things will get significantly better as the team becomes more experienced, but this will take time

Chris Barling
CEO, Actinic