( ESNUG 201 Item 4 ) ---------------------------------------------- [11/10/94]
Subject: (ESNUG 198 #1 199 #1 200 #4) "Hotline Refuses To Help Via E-mail"
>Our experience has been that the performance of Hotline took a nose dive
>early this year and they have never recovered from it. (My guess is that
>they drastically cut down the staff.)
>
>I personally prefer e-mail. But my experience has been that they usually
>take about a week to 10 days to get back to you by e-mail. (Imagine having
>to wait a week to resolve a bug when you are in the middle of a hot project.)
>
>In most cases I found that hotline did not answer my question. Instead they
>answered soemthing that I did not ask. Also they tell you to look up SolvIt
>which often does not have anything on the subject (it has all the old stories
>but every new release usually has "new" set of bugs that have not made it to
>SolvIt yet.) In my company we now do not use the Hotline any more. (No
>one wants to slip project schedules while waiting for Synopsys to respond.)
>If we have a serious problem we call the Application Engineer who handles
>our account. In most cases that is faster and the answer is correct.
From: [ Bob Dahlberg - Synopsys V.P. of Application Services ]
John,
This user is correct that the U.S. Synopsys Support Center has suffered a
degradation in service capacity over the past several months. Our
performance drop occurred when skilled application engineers transferred to
new positions in different parts of the company combined with not replacing
them fast enough. It was *not* due to a decision to reduce Support Center
capacity. Since July, we have successfully returned the staffing level of
early '94. We are now working to train them, and to increase the staff an
additional 50%. It will take a few months for these new engineers to
become fully competent in the Support Center, but we expect email/telephone
service to return to satisfactory levels in the December time-frame.
Our goal is to put the solutions directly into our customer hands. In
other words once when we have solved a problem for an engineer in Japan, we
don't want to have to solve it again in Germany. With SolvIt we are
endeavoring to publish the *worldwide Synopsys tool experience*, put this
knowledge directly into our customer's hands, and update it in real time.
In short: timely information with no human bottleneck front end!
We are now very confident that SolvIt will go well beyond an individual FAE's
ability to keep up with the latest information. We just completed a survey
of 83 SolvIt users. Respondents told us that 48% of their issues were
*directly* solved, and another 38% of respondent issues were solved because
SolvIt gave enough information to enable the engineer to solve their own
problem faster than the return phone call from an FAE or the Support Center.
In addition to automating problem solving, we are *definitely* committed to
building a competent team to solve the problems we haven't seen before.
SolvIt reduces the repetitive nature of a Support Center tasks, so we can
now attract people that enjoy solving challenging problems. To improve
access to this resource, we are now testing a low cost alternative to on-site
consulting called On-Call Consulting. This service enables customers to
access to a competent, specific Support Center engineer who sticks with you
throughout your design process. This engineer will come to understand the
customer's design style in-depth and will be a committed customer resource
(i.e., she won't leave to attend trade shows, or disappear to support the
pending big sale.) This will deliver even better service to the customers
that recognize its value and are willing to pay for it.
As always, we encourage Synopsys customers to share their ideas on how we
can improve our support effectiveness.
- Bob Dahlberg, Vice President of Application Services
Synopsys, Inc.
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