Shawn -
I did send copies of several of these complaints to CPQ people both in the product and field organizations. I have posted some of the info I got back, and the general argument ran something like this:
"There are more than 7500 presarios sold EACH DAY. These products are often sold to less sophisticated users, many to first time buyers. We receive service and support calls from all around the world, thousands per hour 24 hours a day.
More than 80 percent of these are people who don't understand how the systems are supposed to work, and also apparently can not read a manual. These are 'level 0' calls, i.e. no real problem. Most of the remainder are from people who are trying to install non-CPQ hardware or software, or have changed system settings. We try to resolve their problems if it can be done by recommended changes to the CPQ components.
Less than a tenth of a percent of calls get escalated out of this 'first line' support because they appear to be 'real' problems. That sounds good until you realize that with the huge volume of presarios out there, that still means several calls per hour get escalated to an engineering support group. Each escalated problem is replicated on an identical machine and configuration at CPQ, a process which can take several hours. Our closure rate on these problems is better than 99 percent within 4 hours.
The real story on the success of the Win98 quality program will not be known until a substantial number of users have the product, and we can begin to understand if the escalation volume is greater or less than it was for Win95 systems."
I think CPQ is paying a lot of attention to this issue and has had one of the most extensive Win98 quality assurance programs in the industry. Based on my own experience with Win98 I would expect a much lower call volume, as it is a much more stable product and solves lots of long-standing Win95 problems.
Keep in mind that with more than 10 million presarios out there, you could have a thousand horror stories on the web, all true, and it would represent a hundredth of a percent of the experience of the user base. |
