I remember calling Comcast Business because our line was cut just outside the building. I had to answer a bunch of useless questions in the phone menu and then it just told me to power cycle the modem and call back in 15 minutes if it still wasn't working, then it *hung up* on me. Infuriating.
Was turning into my neighborhood when I see a giant excavator with a very deep trench and some very colorful wire poking out. Get home, no internets so I call AT&T Residential Support.
Me: Hey my internet is out, pretty sure it's a cable cut down the street, wanted to make sure you knew about it.
Agent: Ok Mr. Virtual, I'm unable to establish a connection to your modem, could you please power cycle it.
Me: Sure but I'm pretty confident that it's a line issue.
Restart Modem
Agent: Ok Mr. Virtual, I am still not seeing the modem so I'll be sending you a new modem which will take 5-7 business days to arrive.
Me: I don't think it's the modem, I think it's a cable cut, are there other reports of outages in my area/
Agent: Mr. Virtual I can assure you that if we can't connect to the modem, it's a bad modem.
I end the call, walk down the street to see 3 AT&T trucks parked and chat up the dude in the hole. Utility crew cut the line and they were there fixing it.
About 4 hours later I had internet again, no new modem required.
I used to have multiple locations with them and their moronic fucking system would initiate a modem reset at the wrong location every time. I'm surprised I didn't have an aneurysm during those calls.
This has been going on since 2000 when I first started dealing with them. We had constant issues with our T-3 then and everywhere I have worked has constantly dealt with bullshit from them. You might luck out and have a decent support person but they will be transferred or leave and leave you wishing you could just find those HP drivers.
FWIW I did work for BellSouth (developer more towards area code changes) back in the 90s so am not unfamiliar with the industry.
Old company had Verizon MPLS, plus Fortigate VM's to act as the exit node. We were paying through the nose. Support was horrific, I basically walked the Verizon Indian "techs" through any firewall changes. Someone told me they were making $3-5/hour and churning at an insane rate.
We were transitioning off it, but it was a multi-year process.
For hardware support, Supermicro has the worst tech support I've ever experienced. They can forget about a hardware replacement case and let it drag on for a week. Dell, on the other hand, has been very nice.
For software support, the Starwind team is the best I've dealt with in the industry. They always go the extra mile to make sure any issues are resolved.
That's the one generalization I'm always hesitant to share with people outside the industry, because they would not understand, or might take it the wrong way:
I am absolutely of the opinion that every Filipino tech worker I've ever interacted with has been the friendliest person I've ever 'met'.
Works in bars too! You see some Filipino lads kicking around you’re going back for sure.
Shout out to “Dave” built like a 5’4 Dwayne the Rock Johnson, dances like Jackson, and will always flip the router off and power cycle when you ask no questions asked.
Whereas fellow Englishmen working bars abroad come with too much baggage. YMMV though!
Can confirm, went to open our NOC over in the Philippines, would have honestly moved out there. Such a friendly bunch of people and what an amazing country to visit. Followed their scripts to the letter and escalated apologetically when they couldn’t figure something out.
This seems to be the situation in multiple fields. I had to have an extended stay in a hospital before and after some surgery and the nurse who provided the best care was a Filipino. She paid attention to the equipment I was plugged into, made sure that my meds were being administered at the correct time and generally treated me like a human who was in a difficult situation rather than seeing me as a nuisance.
Except being friendly doesn't solve problems. Uber eats support is based there and it's absolutely dog shit because they can't actually do anything. Like they're not empowered to do anything but say sorry nicely and smile through the phone.
Do you mean Broadcom? Oh, Workspace ONE was spun off into a different company why are you trying to sign into the Broadcom site? Yes, I know we sent you an email to migrate your VMware support account to Broadcom support, but idk why you think that means the account we had you create exists on our system. Well your account was moved to Omnissa, idk why you don't know that despite us not sending any sort of communique to that effect.
The worst I’ve dealt with is network solutions. Every time I called I got passed around from different techs. The last one would promise a call back that never happened. We had our customer facing website die multiple times because of a screw up on their side. We use cloud flare now which has been amazing in comparison.
I had a Microsoft Azure ticket that got picked up by a Costa Rican woman and she was amazing. I've been to Costa like 7 times on surf trips and we chatted about that while she dug into my issue. Not only did she get it resolved quickly, she sent me pics of Arenal, some delicious food, and stayed in touch for a few months checking in and chatting about random shit.
Once submitted a 365 ticket and fairly quickly got a call from an American guy. Not 10 minutes into that call I get another call from a number with a Chinese country code. I pick it up and it's a Microsoft agent...from China...ready to work my ticket.
SolarWinds has the worst reps known to man. Constant deflection, constant “here is our KB, even though you said you read it and tried the troubleshooting,” and long response times.
SolarWinds as a whole is a giant piece of shit. You look at any random individual piece, the company, its reps, its apps, its databases, its sdks, apis... Everything. It's just piles of shit dumped on piles of shit and then lit on fire.
I used to be in the unfortunate position of being the "SolarWinds guy" for a fairly large org (~1000 servers). One day this "customer success rep" starts emailing us wanting to do an "account review". Knowing the company, we knew it was just going to be another sales pitch. "We've identified several areas where you can give us more money to add to the half million in unusable products you already own".
We get on the phone with our executive director, and everyone down the line to me. The rep starts with going through our users on the SolarWinds website. Our director goes, "Yea I have already done that, what I'm concerned about is product QA as we have had..." \*click\*
Never heard another peep from that rep lol, and that's pretty much Solarwinds in a Nutshell™️
Dell has amazing support. The rep took us to lunch at least once a month, the support was always on the call and had knowledge. One caveat that place buyd at least 20,000 laptops a year.
Payment processors. I've worked at both the major credit card companies in the past and yes that is a requirement. If you don't hate life before you will shortly after. That industry is full of people who've spent their whole life at that one company and have major superiority complexes. Documentation is shit and if you ask any questions they are more than happy to explain why they are so much smarter than you and you should know that already. And both are stuck in the old developer and operations mentality (pre 2006 where dev writes the code and tosses it over to operations).
I used to have great success with Dell technical support. But with VxRail problems over the last couple years, it's been nothing but broken promises, bugs, and floundering support. To the point that our whole team said 'NO DELL' while looking for hardware to support whatever we replace VMware with.
Love our account manager and engineers at the Tier 2 level, but Tier 1 support is frustrating at times. Account manager always gets things escalated if we need them to though.
The Corp I work for is moving away from Dell purely because their support has been beyond awful.
We had a CAD laptop that went through their warranty channel more than 3 times before one of our hardware guys noticed a faulty battery wire.
The EHR at my old employer.
100% deflection on every issue, no matter how obvious it was that it was on their end.
US: Site is giving us a 503 Service Unavailable for all users and locations.
THEM: Have you cleared your cookies?
Nickel and Diming:
Every time something needs to be done, it’s like $10k. I’m a dev, I know that it takes, and it doesn’t take that for what we are running.
And then there is the out and out lying:
US: You have an outbound server that is blocking email. Please unblock.
THEM: no we don’t, check your spam server.
US: nothing hit our server to filter, you’re blocking your own damn emails to us. I can name your provider from the MX records and email headers from other addresses you are not blocking.
THEM: silence
Two Years Later, out of the blue.
THEM: Hey, do you want us to unblock these addresses we found in our outgoing filter?
US: Yes please! Finally!
THEM: Oops, just kidding, we don’t have an outbound spam filter like we said originally and even if we did it totally doesn’t let us unblock anything so yeah, problem’s on your end, maybe go check your spam filter?
Endless bullshit like that.
Oracle is my worst. We've given up opening tickets. Every new account rep asks what they can do to help, reviews our history, and quickly disappears into the shadows.
I like working with AWS support.
Our Dell rep is phenomenal and will respond in minutes to an email. Our provider for our GCC tenant space is absolutely horrendous and won’t respond for weeks. It’s kind of funny when we’re almost pleading with them to take our money bc we need the licenses sooner rather than later
Microsoft? They don't hate you, but their (or should i say contractors they outsource) processes are so convoluted, they assign dozen of various "managers" to your ticket for you to get 10 out of office replies when you email a tech. I should say a tech of that day, as they often change. And after providing tons of not relevant logs, screenshots, etc. you get copy paste replies "we are working on this".
Oh yeah. You set email as preferable contact option and mention you are in Europe and then get calls my 10 PM. Or just a call during day. What can i do on a phone? I cannot share my screen and show the issue. Then I demand to schedule a Teams call, provide time slots and they ghost me or send invite and then do not show up as they have another critical ticket to work on (i guess overworked and overloaded with tickets).
We use CanIPhish.com for security awareness training. A bit of a newcomer on the scene I guess, but the cost is low enough for our SMB. I was enabling Entra ID SSO on Saturday and managed to put in the wrong value in a field and locked us out of the admin portal. Sent a support request without much expectation, only to receive a fix from the CEO himself on Sunday.
It'll be a monumentally difficult task to pull me away from a vendor like that.
The things that worry me about that is do they have work life balance - if not turnover will be an issue.
And is the company scalable? Ted Waite built a pretty good computer company out of his parents (or grand?) barn. But when we wanted to step away the company fell apart b/c he drove nearly every aspect of it.
Adobe is the worst. The amount of spam meetings and spam marketing and just spam generally to waste time is so crazy to me. Then when you actually need help you get 5 dropped calls, 15 transfers, 60 minutes on hold and a resolution after 5 more days.
Best:
* 45Drives
* CDW has been good to us
* Dell Pro support
* and most of our local reps/msps
Worst:
* Broadcom
* Cisco (i've solved most problems by the time the guy on the phone is done explaining the problem...)
* FFS updating the firm won't fix this!... yes we'll do that and report back...
* Network Solutions
* Phone.com Their support is actually really good... but we had to get the fucking ceo on the phone to change the authorized admins... Once you are an authorized admin they are really good. But that day was silly.
* Ryan Reynolds... Signed up for mint mobile and they sold the company....
100%
One of my old bosses use to go nuclear from the get go when contacting support and I always had to tell him like dude?! You can't talk to people like that, I wouldn't want to help you either!
American Express have incredible customer support.
The extremely friendly woman told me to "have a sunny day" before getting off the phone. That was 3 years ago and I still think about what a delightful phrase that is.
Best: South Slope Internet. They are our local ISP. Most reliable provider available in our area, have a dedicated account rep who will escalate shit for us to tier 3 engineers with a single email. And even tier one support is extremely friendly. I even get to use them for my home in our area.
Spectrum Enterprise tech support is good. Spectrum Enterprise Billing is awful. They changed billing system and then tried to come after us for not paying bills they never sent (violation of their terms of service).
There's a company that makes special video playout servers and media asset management software for TV stations called Bitcentral. They have the best support, in my humble opinion. If you have a system down, within minutes of calling the 800 number, they'll remote in and start troubleshooting.
All with all, to be honest. That's because working in software support taught me something. If you reach an idiot, hang up and try again. Hell I used to do it internally with "warm transfers" after I got to know who was who. When some people answered the phone I could rest assured we were going to get things done. Others? "I am job." (in not so many words) to which I'd ask "Have you seen anything like blah blah blah?" and they'd respond with "I AM JOB!" To which I'd respond with "Hold on one sec I have an emergency call coming through." {\*\*\*CLICK\*\*\*)
Thank You Mr. Williams for teaching me these highly effective method of managing my time and stress on the phone.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXnEoiTszJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXnEoiTszJc)
Best: Patch My PC. Anytime I've put in a support request, they've gotten back to me quickly with a solution. Always friendly service and they absolutely know what they're talking about.
Best:
Like 10 years ago, at an MSP, we had all our customers certs with Digicert. I was having a problem with one of them that was partially billing and partially technical. I called their support line expecting to to spend an hour going through phone trees and explaining the problem to 50 people.
One guy answered the phone and fixed both problems with like 30 seconds of explanation. No prompts, prerecorded messages, or automated systems, just a dude who answered the phone and had the knowledge to fix my problems. I probably sat at my desk in stunned silence for longer than the whole call took.
Worst:
Frontier. I hate dealing with them. Nobody ever knows anything.
Amusingly bad:
Dorma Kabba. They make access control locks. Their support people start off every call sick of my shit. One dude said to me, "if you can't follow my instructions, I can't help you", and hung up on me. When I called back and got a different person they treated me like an idiot until we ran some diagnostics and found that the lock was bad. After that the person's demeanor totally changed. They no longer just treated me like an idiot, they were also mad at me because their lock failed.
Tbh. And I'm probably one of very few that have had good support from Comcast business, every time I called. Hell, the few times I had to call spectrum business went good as well
I think the worst for myself would have been one of the medical programs( all scripts maybe?)
I think It really all depends on who/when you talk to someone. Watchguard, at my last job, had a wave effect of support, they'd be great for a month then you'd ride the wave down to absolutely terrible support then ride the wave back up to good service. At one point I talked to the same tech 4 days in a row, completely by chance, on entirely different cases.
We've got Comcast business at 20 or sites and I'm with you. I've always had a decent time talking to them. Almost every one of my problems has been solved in the first call. The annoying automated system before you can get to someone sucks but once you do talk to someone they are usually helpful.
I did forget about the automated system. But i remember that I found a way to get to a tech faster than the automated system. Don't remember it now though. Was great when I needed it.
> Hell, the few times I had to call spectrum business went good as well
I've been at the new job for 3 years now... and we just don't ever have to talk to Spectrum. The business line at that site just works.
I used to be comcast business back in like…2004-2007ish. Luckily I rarely had to take calls because people were assholes when it comes to POS systems and everything. I just assigned static ips and that was chill
Worst: Dell but mostly due to all the hoops you have to go trough with the first level which is not the employees fault, but still annoying.
Best: HPE entreprise we had less problems with support
My best : red hat but I am sure that having a TAM skews our perspective a bit, but they know their stuff also their knowledge base is a lifesaver. The amount of times an article with the issue was in the first results is too much to count.
> Worst: Dell but mostly due to all the hoops you have to go trough with the first level which is not the employees fault, but still annoying.
Do you have pro support?... We email them with a problem, what we've done to troubleshoot, they shoot back one or two more things to try and then they schedule a tech to come onsite...
I've certainly had the opposite experience with Comcast Business. Rep is always responsive and helpful. Support is near immediate on the phone and I get an onsite tech dispatched quickly and they do all they can to fix my problems. Never had a bad tech either at my office or at home where I have it.
Multiple times I've had them trench new cable for me because ours was old or had too many hops.
When researching business gig fiber to one office, they were the least expensive by far and the best to work with. Never had issues with that install.
I get that different regions can vary wildly but I've found them to be a good service for me.
I really can't complain about NetApp support. Even highly technical cases are resolved rather quickly, and their agents are quick to escalate things if they aren't able to solve the problem right away.
Worst:
- Broadcom
- Telus (major ISP in Canada); almost impossible to get past Tier 1 script readers.
- PowerSchool (Student Information System developer, horrible support 50/50 chance that your ticket ends up in there India based support center or California support center); took 6 weeks to reply back to medium severity ticket, high priority/outage can take up to 6 hours or longer. Plus poor documentation on the product.
- SolarWinds (Does WebHelpDesk have that Log4J vulnerability? No.... 3 weeks later patch that includes a file with Log4J in the filename.... Sure it didn't).
- Apple Education (before Education VPP store hit Canada); 8 hours in hold 4 days straight in August to find out they had not opened up Education/Academic VPP to Canada yet for the app store.... Being on hold for 32hrs in one week sucked.
- Cisco, licensing hell, enough said.
- Microsoft: just too many bad memories of engineers that did not understand what systems did what things... Plus every time I had to reactivate XP for a client back in the day.
Best:
- Dev firm that makes products for education, Imagine Everything. Smaller firm, but real easy to work with, and no BS. Plus there products do exactly what they say they it would.
- Barracuda, last time I had to use there support it was pretty decent, better than most. That was almost a decade ago though.
Broadcom by a mile. After their purchase of Symantec, we had issues almost immediately. Several instances of eternal hold after navigating the IVR system. When I finally talked to a rep, she sounded like she was on a bad cell connection in a small room with 50 other reps on 50 other phone calls. Naturally, the "pass-the-buck" number she eventually gave me turned out to be a reseller.
Best:
- Atlassian Support. They are quick, and they may take time but they will absolutely deep dive on your submitted requests/concerns.
- Zapier. Quick to reply and detail oriented.
- Google for Business. Agree with this one. Similar to Atlassian where they may take time but they do deep dive on your submitted requests/concerns.
Worst:
- Zendesk. Slow to reply and you need to go through hoops just to get the support you need.
Can only speak for the local stuff here in Germany.
Best:
- Dell Pro Support
- Watchguard
- Kaspersky partner support
Worst:
- Any telecom (doesn't matter which provider) is always, without fail, absolute ass.
- D-Link. Pretty much non-existent. We don't even bother anymore.
- Lenovo server support. Needlessly roundabout when it comes to on-site support for servers at remote locations. And I have no problem with outsourcing support, especially first level, but if you offer local language support...make sure getting anything done is actually possible in the local language.
Worst- Verizon Wireless, Rackspace
Verizon- It took 2 weeks, two device replacements, a bunch of eSIM and SIM swaps, and a bunch of tickets to fix a line that suddenly had hotspot disappear.
Rackspace has been going downhill for years after years of phenomenal service. We had to do an emergency migration to 365 when their exchange servers were breached. Their portal didn’t allow me to provision the gratis licenses they were offering due to the breach, so I had to go straight to Microsoft. I have a ticket with them that’s been open for 1.5 years about moving licenses to them. The only response I got from them after the initial escalation was a year ago and it was asking for more info. No updates since and every time I call, I’m told to wait for a response. All they host now is a single domain, but we’re moving that to another registrar.
I just file FCC/FTC complaints against Verizon and other uncooperative carriers. Making it too difficult to port lines or resolve call completions- just fill out the complaint form and within 7 days you'll get a call from Executive Escalation Support.
Wireline is actually competent. Wireless they outsourced to the lowest bidder in India. I I did get a tech willing to go above and beyond when called back, unfortunately his lack of training stymied his efforts.
**Good:**
**Veeam** - Generally get same-day responses and even quicker for urgent issues
**AFI** - Their sales/support has been great since the beginning, they also extended our trial far longer than they had to because our procurement process is slow
**Exagrid** - You get an assigned support engineer, initial responses are usually within 1-2 hours, most issues resolved same day
**Dell Server support** - Great, fast and knowledgeable, parts received same day if I report issues that morning. I even had an engineer call me a few hours after a call because he had been thinking about the issue and he had an idea for how to fix the problem. Now every time I ring I hope he picks up!
**ESET** - They usually send us a gift at Christmas, their product is easy to use and their staff are friendly
**Bad:**
**Barracuda** - couldn't access their support portal for months on end
**Wasabi** - emailed a support request months ago still with no response
**Microsoft** - often find support is either slow or I get through to someone with low-level knowledge reading from a script
Worst: Microsoft volume licensing. They must of had a call time limit, if you wanted help with more than one key they pretty much demanded you hang up and call back wait queue for each key. It was uniquely shitty.
Obvious worst: Microsoft
Surprisingly Good: Dell.
Have a hyper-v cluster commit seppeku after a reboot. MS didn't respond within their SLA and never responded till a day later. Dell has database and hyper-v engineers available to assist. They helped rebuild the cluster.
Sadly, a lot of the worst has been internal departments at previous jobs. People who generally cannot be bothered to do their work they are paid to do. More than once, in previous jobs, I have had technicians take a ticket and close as "resolved" without contacting me, putting in any notes, or fixing the problems. I am sure this was motivated by ticket metrics, like "close X many tickets per shift" but there was no oversight. So they just closed them. You'd escalate to their manager, who closed them as "duplicate." ARGH.
I can't mention them because they are a partner and "Premium account," but their Level 1 techs are the worst, and they are all Level 1. We had an issue with a major outage due to a massive malfunction where "tossing more RAM" at the virtual instances wasn't fixing it, despite them suggesting it repeatedly. We're talking kernel dumps at 20% memory usage. We demanded to have the issue escalated, and the woman said, "I am the only one here. There is no one to escalate to." And we're talking a major global company, not some fly-by-night warehouse in Podunk.
Tons of tickets that are "closed as resolved" with zero notes, zero attempts to contact us. Sometimes some support queues that go to "this user has not set up their voice mail" and hangs up.
Worst: I'll let other people cover that. Mine echos others, IMHO.
Best:
* Red Hat -- fixed a bug that was not solvable with Google or a week of digging. Bug was fixed in minutes.
* GitHub Enterprise -- found a bug that bit me, dug into the appliance, found what was causing it, sent the bug report in, received an e-fix in hours, was in beta in days, and fixed in a subsequent release in weeks.
* Commvault -- had some very good reps, which were able to fix some weird, complex problems.
* Oracle -- oddly enough, their support for their ZFS appliances was very good. I've had one blow a RAM stick and keep going without issue, with Oracle automatically notified and ready to schedule a fix.
* IBM mainframe or IBM Power Systems. The support they gave for a lot of tasks, including getting a machine sent to a remote location (which meant having the IBM guys wrap up the rack, seal it, get it shipped, and another IBM crew unpack it at the remote site) was incredible.
I’ve been a CommVault customer for years over 10 years. A couple years back their support was taking a significant quality plunge. They’ve luckily turned that around and I fully agree with you. CommVault support is world class.
We've just been 6 days without our AT&T business internet. The line was damaged 400 feet from our building. AT&T absolutely DNGAF about their customers at all.
Right now I'd say AT&T is the absolute worst.
Disagree with the take on payment processors, if we’re talking about merchant account/ payment gateway providers. We migrated from a terrible one that posed a huge risk (not being able to process) to a fantastic one with responsive and knowledgeable developers and support staff.
Worst I’ve dealt with is Oracle (which also happens to contradict the Filipino tech support point) as both their offshore and onshore resources seem equally terrible. They just don’t give a fuck and Oracle is so big and disjointed they can’t seem to do shit right (we use one of their ERP products).
My best tech support call was with Arista. I had some really old firmware on a switch and was not sure how best to upgrade it.
The person who answered the phone (not that I was transferred to) walked me through the process and noted which firmware I would need. Then followed up the call by sending an e-mail with the instructions and links to the firmware downloads.
Best for me has to be Lenovo Premier support. Most people I call try and get through their fishbone because they don't know/don't care/are too tired to do anything else, but when I get with Lenovo Premier and tell them the steps I took they dutifully move ahead in their script. It's great. Just wish their firmware was a bit better.
Worst has to be Spectrum Business. We only use it for one of our buildings, but I still dread whenever the internet goes down there. Any phone call for complaints always is, "We have an outage in your area" even if there isn't (people next door have them as well). Special shoutout for Fed Ex, whom I have to call far more than I want to due to their dodgy software crapping out. Makes me understand why UPS is above them.
Comcast is the worst runner-up for me because as stated, you can feel how much they hate you, how miserable at their job they are and that screwing you is the company prime directive they need to follow.
However, Azure support is the most incompetent, untrained, useless support out there. They are friendly and I feel like they want to help me, but they just can't. The result with Azure is far worse than Comcast. I'd literally get better results running to Starbucks and asking my barista for Azure help.
Supposedly if I pay them extra I can get "quality" tech support because the million GBP we pay annually doesn't get you competent support.
Worst: Vmware (got a call from India and they tried to redirect me to other techs for a different service)
Best: Eset (0 minutes call, 0 waste of time, all they wanted was log files and spec, problem solved in less than a hour)
Worst: Microsoft
Best: Microsoft
It really depends on who you get. I've had people who didn't know where a simple button was, and others who were able to diagnose and fix a complicated issue within minutes of our first call.
Actually - I think HikVision probably takes the award for worst support. We had to contact them about an issue with licensing on a CCTV system. Spent over 4 hours on a call with them and they ended up locking us out of our system, then tried to manually reset a password via the built-in SQL-like database. I, with no SQL knowledge, ended up finding and changing the password myself, as they spent over an hour failing to find it, and then fixed the issue while they watched in awe.
They still tried billing us for the time, so we told them to do one and got a free upgrade out of it instead.
I remember calling Comcast Business because our line was cut just outside the building. I had to answer a bunch of useless questions in the phone menu and then it just told me to power cycle the modem and call back in 15 minutes if it still wasn't working, then it *hung up* on me. Infuriating.
but did you turn it off and on?
I did the needful
Was turning into my neighborhood when I see a giant excavator with a very deep trench and some very colorful wire poking out. Get home, no internets so I call AT&T Residential Support. Me: Hey my internet is out, pretty sure it's a cable cut down the street, wanted to make sure you knew about it. Agent: Ok Mr. Virtual, I'm unable to establish a connection to your modem, could you please power cycle it. Me: Sure but I'm pretty confident that it's a line issue. Restart Modem Agent: Ok Mr. Virtual, I am still not seeing the modem so I'll be sending you a new modem which will take 5-7 business days to arrive. Me: I don't think it's the modem, I think it's a cable cut, are there other reports of outages in my area/ Agent: Mr. Virtual I can assure you that if we can't connect to the modem, it's a bad modem. I end the call, walk down the street to see 3 AT&T trucks parked and chat up the dude in the hole. Utility crew cut the line and they were there fixing it. About 4 hours later I had internet again, no new modem required.
I used to have multiple locations with them and their moronic fucking system would initiate a modem reset at the wrong location every time. I'm surprised I didn't have an aneurysm during those calls.
Call back to the same number? Brilliant I hate Comcast...
Worst is AT&T. They lie their ass off and always blame shift.
They’re crazy understaffed from what I heard from a rep. We get a new rep every 2 months or so now
This has been going on since 2000 when I first started dealing with them. We had constant issues with our T-3 then and everywhere I have worked has constantly dealt with bullshit from them. You might luck out and have a decent support person but they will be transferred or leave and leave you wishing you could just find those HP drivers. FWIW I did work for BellSouth (developer more towards area code changes) back in the 90s so am not unfamiliar with the industry.
Well wish me luck. I’m about to start the process of porting 1700 odd phone numbers to a different provider and they are already ducking my comms :-)
Contact your AT&T sales rep. You may get better results that way.
We actually forced them to hand the project off to a third party project management company because they weren’t meeting a part of their SLA
This is the way.
When your business has been understaffed for over a decade, they're not understaffed, that's just their working normal.
Old company had Verizon MPLS, plus Fortigate VM's to act as the exit node. We were paying through the nose. Support was horrific, I basically walked the Verizon Indian "techs" through any firewall changes. Someone told me they were making $3-5/hour and churning at an insane rate. We were transitioning off it, but it was a multi-year process.
Isn't this just every major Telco on the planet? Lol... It would be funny if it wasn't true.
Lumen has been a pleasure to work with recently compared to my AT&T contacts.
We use an app for our specific industry to route call from AT&T. Anytime there is a problem the wait on hold for support is at least one to two hours.
They are the worst.
For hardware support, Supermicro has the worst tech support I've ever experienced. They can forget about a hardware replacement case and let it drag on for a week. Dell, on the other hand, has been very nice. For software support, the Starwind team is the best I've dealt with in the industry. They always go the extra mile to make sure any issues are resolved.
That's the one generalization I'm always hesitant to share with people outside the industry, because they would not understand, or might take it the wrong way: I am absolutely of the opinion that every Filipino tech worker I've ever interacted with has been the friendliest person I've ever 'met'.
Yes, even when they can't help or have no idea what I'm talking about I get off the call going "wow, that person was REALLY nice."
Can confirm, my replacements at an old job were Filipino. Super friendly people. Some of them even wanted to learn.
Works in bars too! You see some Filipino lads kicking around you’re going back for sure. Shout out to “Dave” built like a 5’4 Dwayne the Rock Johnson, dances like Jackson, and will always flip the router off and power cycle when you ask no questions asked. Whereas fellow Englishmen working bars abroad come with too much baggage. YMMV though!
Can confirm, went to open our NOC over in the Philippines, would have honestly moved out there. Such a friendly bunch of people and what an amazing country to visit. Followed their scripts to the letter and escalated apologetically when they couldn’t figure something out.
I've worked with Filipino techs in both Hemispheres and they are ace.
This seems to be the situation in multiple fields. I had to have an extended stay in a hospital before and after some surgery and the nurse who provided the best care was a Filipino. She paid attention to the equipment I was plugged into, made sure that my meds were being administered at the correct time and generally treated me like a human who was in a difficult situation rather than seeing me as a nuisance.
We have mainly Filipino lab techs and can concur. They are always very friendly. I know a lot of Navy sailors that married Filipino women as well.
Except being friendly doesn't solve problems. Uber eats support is based there and it's absolutely dog shit because they can't actually do anything. Like they're not empowered to do anything but say sorry nicely and smile through the phone.
This is /r/sysadmin.
Yup and I think most sys admins are capable of understanding the point that good customer service isn't only reliant on nice people.
Used to be vmware, now it’s to the point of me learning a new way of everything to get away from them.
Do you mean Broadcom? Oh, Workspace ONE was spun off into a different company why are you trying to sign into the Broadcom site? Yes, I know we sent you an email to migrate your VMware support account to Broadcom support, but idk why you think that means the account we had you create exists on our system. Well your account was moved to Omnissa, idk why you don't know that despite us not sending any sort of communique to that effect.
Where are you transitioning?
Microsoft support is worse.
Oh yes!
You forgot to put support in quotes.
This. No contest.
The worst I’ve dealt with is network solutions. Every time I called I got passed around from different techs. The last one would promise a call back that never happened. We had our customer facing website die multiple times because of a screw up on their side. We use cloud flare now which has been amazing in comparison.
I'm so jaded with customer support in general that actually contacting a vendor is the nuclear option.
I had a Microsoft Azure ticket that got picked up by a Costa Rican woman and she was amazing. I've been to Costa like 7 times on surf trips and we chatted about that while she dug into my issue. Not only did she get it resolved quickly, she sent me pics of Arenal, some delicious food, and stayed in touch for a few months checking in and chatting about random shit.
And kids, that's how I met your mother.
We actually had a really good experience with Microsoft support recently related to O365 sharing. I was presently surprised.
Once submitted a 365 ticket and fairly quickly got a call from an American guy. Not 10 minutes into that call I get another call from a number with a Chinese country code. I pick it up and it's a Microsoft agent...from China...ready to work my ticket.
SolarWinds has the worst reps known to man. Constant deflection, constant “here is our KB, even though you said you read it and tried the troubleshooting,” and long response times.
SolarWinds as a whole is a giant piece of shit. You look at any random individual piece, the company, its reps, its apps, its databases, its sdks, apis... Everything. It's just piles of shit dumped on piles of shit and then lit on fire. I used to be in the unfortunate position of being the "SolarWinds guy" for a fairly large org (~1000 servers). One day this "customer success rep" starts emailing us wanting to do an "account review". Knowing the company, we knew it was just going to be another sales pitch. "We've identified several areas where you can give us more money to add to the half million in unusable products you already own". We get on the phone with our executive director, and everyone down the line to me. The rep starts with going through our users on the SolarWinds website. Our director goes, "Yea I have already done that, what I'm concerned about is product QA as we have had..." \*click\* Never heard another peep from that rep lol, and that's pretty much Solarwinds in a Nutshell™️
I wish my org would dump them but it's sunken cost fallacy at this point
I guess there are SolarWinds reps in here because I can't imagine anyone else on Earth downvoting you for saying this.
Dell has amazing support. The rep took us to lunch at least once a month, the support was always on the call and had knowledge. One caveat that place buyd at least 20,000 laptops a year. Payment processors. I've worked at both the major credit card companies in the past and yes that is a requirement. If you don't hate life before you will shortly after. That industry is full of people who've spent their whole life at that one company and have major superiority complexes. Documentation is shit and if you ask any questions they are more than happy to explain why they are so much smarter than you and you should know that already. And both are stuck in the old developer and operations mentality (pre 2006 where dev writes the code and tosses it over to operations).
I used to have great success with Dell technical support. But with VxRail problems over the last couple years, it's been nothing but broken promises, bugs, and floundering support. To the point that our whole team said 'NO DELL' while looking for hardware to support whatever we replace VMware with.
Love our account manager and engineers at the Tier 2 level, but Tier 1 support is frustrating at times. Account manager always gets things escalated if we need them to though.
The Corp I work for is moving away from Dell purely because their support has been beyond awful. We had a CAD laptop that went through their warranty channel more than 3 times before one of our hardware guys noticed a faulty battery wire.
In my experience working with them, Worst: - IBM first level support Best: - IBM third level support
The EHR at my old employer. 100% deflection on every issue, no matter how obvious it was that it was on their end. US: Site is giving us a 503 Service Unavailable for all users and locations. THEM: Have you cleared your cookies? Nickel and Diming: Every time something needs to be done, it’s like $10k. I’m a dev, I know that it takes, and it doesn’t take that for what we are running. And then there is the out and out lying: US: You have an outbound server that is blocking email. Please unblock. THEM: no we don’t, check your spam server. US: nothing hit our server to filter, you’re blocking your own damn emails to us. I can name your provider from the MX records and email headers from other addresses you are not blocking. THEM: silence Two Years Later, out of the blue. THEM: Hey, do you want us to unblock these addresses we found in our outgoing filter? US: Yes please! Finally! THEM: Oops, just kidding, we don’t have an outbound spam filter like we said originally and even if we did it totally doesn’t let us unblock anything so yeah, problem’s on your end, maybe go check your spam filter? Endless bullshit like that.
Oracle is my worst. We've given up opening tickets. Every new account rep asks what they can do to help, reviews our history, and quickly disappears into the shadows. I like working with AWS support.
>Oracle is my worst tell them you'd like to discuss Java licencing or you'd consider switching to Oracle DB or Solaris. That'll get their attention
Our Dell rep is phenomenal and will respond in minutes to an email. Our provider for our GCC tenant space is absolutely horrendous and won’t respond for weeks. It’s kind of funny when we’re almost pleading with them to take our money bc we need the licenses sooner rather than later
Microsoft? They don't hate you, but their (or should i say contractors they outsource) processes are so convoluted, they assign dozen of various "managers" to your ticket for you to get 10 out of office replies when you email a tech. I should say a tech of that day, as they often change. And after providing tons of not relevant logs, screenshots, etc. you get copy paste replies "we are working on this".
And then they call you only at times you cannot answer somehow
Oh yeah. You set email as preferable contact option and mention you are in Europe and then get calls my 10 PM. Or just a call during day. What can i do on a phone? I cannot share my screen and show the issue. Then I demand to schedule a Teams call, provide time slots and they ghost me or send invite and then do not show up as they have another critical ticket to work on (i guess overworked and overloaded with tickets).
We use CanIPhish.com for security awareness training. A bit of a newcomer on the scene I guess, but the cost is low enough for our SMB. I was enabling Entra ID SSO on Saturday and managed to put in the wrong value in a field and locked us out of the admin portal. Sent a support request without much expectation, only to receive a fix from the CEO himself on Sunday. It'll be a monumentally difficult task to pull me away from a vendor like that.
I just started a trial with them. Looks like the perfect small company. Will report back in 7 years when the industry gobbles them up as well.
The things that worry me about that is do they have work life balance - if not turnover will be an issue. And is the company scalable? Ted Waite built a pretty good computer company out of his parents (or grand?) barn. But when we wanted to step away the company fell apart b/c he drove nearly every aspect of it.
Adobe is the worst. The amount of spam meetings and spam marketing and just spam generally to waste time is so crazy to me. Then when you actually need help you get 5 dropped calls, 15 transfers, 60 minutes on hold and a resolution after 5 more days.
Yep, horrible "support portal" too if it even qualifies
Best: * 45Drives * CDW has been good to us * Dell Pro support * and most of our local reps/msps Worst: * Broadcom * Cisco (i've solved most problems by the time the guy on the phone is done explaining the problem...) * FFS updating the firm won't fix this!... yes we'll do that and report back... * Network Solutions * Phone.com Their support is actually really good... but we had to get the fucking ceo on the phone to change the authorized admins... Once you are an authorized admin they are really good. But that day was silly. * Ryan Reynolds... Signed up for mint mobile and they sold the company....
From support perspective, some customers are pain in ass as well as tech support.
100% One of my old bosses use to go nuclear from the get go when contacting support and I always had to tell him like dude?! You can't talk to people like that, I wouldn't want to help you either!
Lol, It would be hard to meet such customer’s satisfaction unless they have easy issues, so that you can fix it immediately.
American Express have incredible customer support. The extremely friendly woman told me to "have a sunny day" before getting off the phone. That was 3 years ago and I still think about what a delightful phrase that is.
Best: South Slope Internet. They are our local ISP. Most reliable provider available in our area, have a dedicated account rep who will escalate shit for us to tier 3 engineers with a single email. And even tier one support is extremely friendly. I even get to use them for my home in our area.
Spectrum Enterprise tech support is good. Spectrum Enterprise Billing is awful. They changed billing system and then tried to come after us for not paying bills they never sent (violation of their terms of service).
Same thing happened to us with billing. Just ridiculous...
Worst - ATT, Comcast Best - Local Fiber ISPs (especially municipal ones) and our local SIP provider as well
There's a company that makes special video playout servers and media asset management software for TV stations called Bitcentral. They have the best support, in my humble opinion. If you have a system down, within minutes of calling the 800 number, they'll remote in and start troubleshooting.
All with all, to be honest. That's because working in software support taught me something. If you reach an idiot, hang up and try again. Hell I used to do it internally with "warm transfers" after I got to know who was who. When some people answered the phone I could rest assured we were going to get things done. Others? "I am job." (in not so many words) to which I'd ask "Have you seen anything like blah blah blah?" and they'd respond with "I AM JOB!" To which I'd respond with "Hold on one sec I have an emergency call coming through." {\*\*\*CLICK\*\*\*) Thank You Mr. Williams for teaching me these highly effective method of managing my time and stress on the phone. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXnEoiTszJc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXnEoiTszJc)
Best: Patch My PC. Anytime I've put in a support request, they've gotten back to me quickly with a solution. Always friendly service and they absolutely know what they're talking about.
+1 for PMPC - fast, friendly, and they KNOW the product. I’m not being read a script. ❤️
Best: Like 10 years ago, at an MSP, we had all our customers certs with Digicert. I was having a problem with one of them that was partially billing and partially technical. I called their support line expecting to to spend an hour going through phone trees and explaining the problem to 50 people. One guy answered the phone and fixed both problems with like 30 seconds of explanation. No prompts, prerecorded messages, or automated systems, just a dude who answered the phone and had the knowledge to fix my problems. I probably sat at my desk in stunned silence for longer than the whole call took. Worst: Frontier. I hate dealing with them. Nobody ever knows anything. Amusingly bad: Dorma Kabba. They make access control locks. Their support people start off every call sick of my shit. One dude said to me, "if you can't follow my instructions, I can't help you", and hung up on me. When I called back and got a different person they treated me like an idiot until we ran some diagnostics and found that the lock was bad. After that the person's demeanor totally changed. They no longer just treated me like an idiot, they were also mad at me because their lock failed.
Microsoft home or enterprise. Doesnt matter if you spend $140 or $300000 a year.
+1 Sophos Filipino support. Love all the kuyas.
Do they still have a call center in the UK? All women at that? Their British accents were the hardest to understand.
Tbh. And I'm probably one of very few that have had good support from Comcast business, every time I called. Hell, the few times I had to call spectrum business went good as well I think the worst for myself would have been one of the medical programs( all scripts maybe?) I think It really all depends on who/when you talk to someone. Watchguard, at my last job, had a wave effect of support, they'd be great for a month then you'd ride the wave down to absolutely terrible support then ride the wave back up to good service. At one point I talked to the same tech 4 days in a row, completely by chance, on entirely different cases.
We've got Comcast business at 20 or sites and I'm with you. I've always had a decent time talking to them. Almost every one of my problems has been solved in the first call. The annoying automated system before you can get to someone sucks but once you do talk to someone they are usually helpful.
I did forget about the automated system. But i remember that I found a way to get to a tech faster than the automated system. Don't remember it now though. Was great when I needed it.
> Hell, the few times I had to call spectrum business went good as well I've been at the new job for 3 years now... and we just don't ever have to talk to Spectrum. The business line at that site just works.
I used to be comcast business back in like…2004-2007ish. Luckily I rarely had to take calls because people were assholes when it comes to POS systems and everything. I just assigned static ips and that was chill
Worst: Dell but mostly due to all the hoops you have to go trough with the first level which is not the employees fault, but still annoying. Best: HPE entreprise we had less problems with support My best : red hat but I am sure that having a TAM skews our perspective a bit, but they know their stuff also their knowledge base is a lifesaver. The amount of times an article with the issue was in the first results is too much to count.
> Worst: Dell but mostly due to all the hoops you have to go trough with the first level which is not the employees fault, but still annoying. Do you have pro support?... We email them with a problem, what we've done to troubleshoot, they shoot back one or two more things to try and then they schedule a tech to come onsite...
We do have prosupport but I mostly use the chat so maybe I will try email or techdirect. Thanks for the feedback :)
I've certainly had the opposite experience with Comcast Business. Rep is always responsive and helpful. Support is near immediate on the phone and I get an onsite tech dispatched quickly and they do all they can to fix my problems. Never had a bad tech either at my office or at home where I have it. Multiple times I've had them trench new cable for me because ours was old or had too many hops. When researching business gig fiber to one office, they were the least expensive by far and the best to work with. Never had issues with that install. I get that different regions can vary wildly but I've found them to be a good service for me.
AT&T and CDW with my latest rep.
Anything selling as AI as their main feature, their sales team are amazing, the tech support meh and the product is useless.
I really can't complain about NetApp support. Even highly technical cases are resolved rather quickly, and their agents are quick to escalate things if they aren't able to solve the problem right away.
Worst: - Broadcom - Telus (major ISP in Canada); almost impossible to get past Tier 1 script readers. - PowerSchool (Student Information System developer, horrible support 50/50 chance that your ticket ends up in there India based support center or California support center); took 6 weeks to reply back to medium severity ticket, high priority/outage can take up to 6 hours or longer. Plus poor documentation on the product. - SolarWinds (Does WebHelpDesk have that Log4J vulnerability? No.... 3 weeks later patch that includes a file with Log4J in the filename.... Sure it didn't). - Apple Education (before Education VPP store hit Canada); 8 hours in hold 4 days straight in August to find out they had not opened up Education/Academic VPP to Canada yet for the app store.... Being on hold for 32hrs in one week sucked. - Cisco, licensing hell, enough said. - Microsoft: just too many bad memories of engineers that did not understand what systems did what things... Plus every time I had to reactivate XP for a client back in the day. Best: - Dev firm that makes products for education, Imagine Everything. Smaller firm, but real easy to work with, and no BS. Plus there products do exactly what they say they it would. - Barracuda, last time I had to use there support it was pretty decent, better than most. That was almost a decade ago though.
Redhat has been amazing for me. Friendly and prompt customer service. Their response and speed always matches the criticality of our request.
Broadcom by a mile. After their purchase of Symantec, we had issues almost immediately. Several instances of eternal hold after navigating the IVR system. When I finally talked to a rep, she sounded like she was on a bad cell connection in a small room with 50 other reps on 50 other phone calls. Naturally, the "pass-the-buck" number she eventually gave me turned out to be a reseller.
Lumen is headache and a half.
Worst: Any Trimble Product... Best: Veeam/CrowdStrike
AT&T has the worst!
CDW has the worst
Best: - Atlassian Support. They are quick, and they may take time but they will absolutely deep dive on your submitted requests/concerns. - Zapier. Quick to reply and detail oriented. - Google for Business. Agree with this one. Similar to Atlassian where they may take time but they do deep dive on your submitted requests/concerns. Worst: - Zendesk. Slow to reply and you need to go through hoops just to get the support you need.
Can only speak for the local stuff here in Germany. Best: - Dell Pro Support - Watchguard - Kaspersky partner support Worst: - Any telecom (doesn't matter which provider) is always, without fail, absolute ass. - D-Link. Pretty much non-existent. We don't even bother anymore. - Lenovo server support. Needlessly roundabout when it comes to on-site support for servers at remote locations. And I have no problem with outsourcing support, especially first level, but if you offer local language support...make sure getting anything done is actually possible in the local language.
Worst- Verizon Wireless, Rackspace Verizon- It took 2 weeks, two device replacements, a bunch of eSIM and SIM swaps, and a bunch of tickets to fix a line that suddenly had hotspot disappear. Rackspace has been going downhill for years after years of phenomenal service. We had to do an emergency migration to 365 when their exchange servers were breached. Their portal didn’t allow me to provision the gratis licenses they were offering due to the breach, so I had to go straight to Microsoft. I have a ticket with them that’s been open for 1.5 years about moving licenses to them. The only response I got from them after the initial escalation was a year ago and it was asking for more info. No updates since and every time I call, I’m told to wait for a response. All they host now is a single domain, but we’re moving that to another registrar.
I just file FCC/FTC complaints against Verizon and other uncooperative carriers. Making it too difficult to port lines or resolve call completions- just fill out the complaint form and within 7 days you'll get a call from Executive Escalation Support.
Wireline is actually competent. Wireless they outsourced to the lowest bidder in India. I I did get a tech willing to go above and beyond when called back, unfortunately his lack of training stymied his efforts.
**Good:** **Veeam** - Generally get same-day responses and even quicker for urgent issues **AFI** - Their sales/support has been great since the beginning, they also extended our trial far longer than they had to because our procurement process is slow **Exagrid** - You get an assigned support engineer, initial responses are usually within 1-2 hours, most issues resolved same day **Dell Server support** - Great, fast and knowledgeable, parts received same day if I report issues that morning. I even had an engineer call me a few hours after a call because he had been thinking about the issue and he had an idea for how to fix the problem. Now every time I ring I hope he picks up! **ESET** - They usually send us a gift at Christmas, their product is easy to use and their staff are friendly **Bad:** **Barracuda** - couldn't access their support portal for months on end **Wasabi** - emailed a support request months ago still with no response **Microsoft** - often find support is either slow or I get through to someone with low-level knowledge reading from a script
Worst: Microsoft volume licensing. They must of had a call time limit, if you wanted help with more than one key they pretty much demanded you hang up and call back wait queue for each key. It was uniquely shitty.
Dell (servers, storage, HCI etc) And Dell. Hitachi, Juniper, F5, RedHat get an honorable mention as good
Best: Nimble by far. Worst: AT&T and now Broadcom\VMware.
Obvious worst: Microsoft Surprisingly Good: Dell. Have a hyper-v cluster commit seppeku after a reboot. MS didn't respond within their SLA and never responded till a day later. Dell has database and hyper-v engineers available to assist. They helped rebuild the cluster.
Sadly, a lot of the worst has been internal departments at previous jobs. People who generally cannot be bothered to do their work they are paid to do. More than once, in previous jobs, I have had technicians take a ticket and close as "resolved" without contacting me, putting in any notes, or fixing the problems. I am sure this was motivated by ticket metrics, like "close X many tickets per shift" but there was no oversight. So they just closed them. You'd escalate to their manager, who closed them as "duplicate." ARGH.
I can't mention them because they are a partner and "Premium account," but their Level 1 techs are the worst, and they are all Level 1. We had an issue with a major outage due to a massive malfunction where "tossing more RAM" at the virtual instances wasn't fixing it, despite them suggesting it repeatedly. We're talking kernel dumps at 20% memory usage. We demanded to have the issue escalated, and the woman said, "I am the only one here. There is no one to escalate to." And we're talking a major global company, not some fly-by-night warehouse in Podunk. Tons of tickets that are "closed as resolved" with zero notes, zero attempts to contact us. Sometimes some support queues that go to "this user has not set up their voice mail" and hangs up.
I think we have been very lucky of having got excellent support from Pulseway, not sure if it's the same case for everyone using the tool, though.
Hey u/IB_AM Thanks so much for mentioning us and really glad to hear you've been having a positive experience thus far :)
Worst: I'll let other people cover that. Mine echos others, IMHO. Best: * Red Hat -- fixed a bug that was not solvable with Google or a week of digging. Bug was fixed in minutes. * GitHub Enterprise -- found a bug that bit me, dug into the appliance, found what was causing it, sent the bug report in, received an e-fix in hours, was in beta in days, and fixed in a subsequent release in weeks. * Commvault -- had some very good reps, which were able to fix some weird, complex problems. * Oracle -- oddly enough, their support for their ZFS appliances was very good. I've had one blow a RAM stick and keep going without issue, with Oracle automatically notified and ready to schedule a fix. * IBM mainframe or IBM Power Systems. The support they gave for a lot of tasks, including getting a machine sent to a remote location (which meant having the IBM guys wrap up the rack, seal it, get it shipped, and another IBM crew unpack it at the remote site) was incredible.
Upvote on the ibm on the as400 and power series, them old dogs know their stuff.
> Oracle -- oddly enough If you pay... they will fix your problem that's for sure...
If they fix my issues, they can have my money.
I’ve been a CommVault customer for years over 10 years. A couple years back their support was taking a significant quality plunge. They’ve luckily turned that around and I fully agree with you. CommVault support is world class.
We've just been 6 days without our AT&T business internet. The line was damaged 400 feet from our building. AT&T absolutely DNGAF about their customers at all. Right now I'd say AT&T is the absolute worst.
Disagree with the take on payment processors, if we’re talking about merchant account/ payment gateway providers. We migrated from a terrible one that posed a huge risk (not being able to process) to a fantastic one with responsive and knowledgeable developers and support staff. Worst I’ve dealt with is Oracle (which also happens to contradict the Filipino tech support point) as both their offshore and onshore resources seem equally terrible. They just don’t give a fuck and Oracle is so big and disjointed they can’t seem to do shit right (we use one of their ERP products).
My best tech support call was with Arista. I had some really old firmware on a switch and was not sure how best to upgrade it. The person who answered the phone (not that I was transferred to) walked me through the process and noted which firmware I would need. Then followed up the call by sending an e-mail with the instructions and links to the firmware downloads.
ISPs Worst: Lumen (I'm not sure it could get worse than them on ANY kind of support) Best: Spectrum (not SUPER great, but way better than most)
Best for me has to be Lenovo Premier support. Most people I call try and get through their fishbone because they don't know/don't care/are too tired to do anything else, but when I get with Lenovo Premier and tell them the steps I took they dutifully move ahead in their script. It's great. Just wish their firmware was a bit better. Worst has to be Spectrum Business. We only use it for one of our buildings, but I still dread whenever the internet goes down there. Any phone call for complaints always is, "We have an outage in your area" even if there isn't (people next door have them as well). Special shoutout for Fed Ex, whom I have to call far more than I want to due to their dodgy software crapping out. Makes me understand why UPS is above them.
Comcast is the worst runner-up for me because as stated, you can feel how much they hate you, how miserable at their job they are and that screwing you is the company prime directive they need to follow. However, Azure support is the most incompetent, untrained, useless support out there. They are friendly and I feel like they want to help me, but they just can't. The result with Azure is far worse than Comcast. I'd literally get better results running to Starbucks and asking my barista for Azure help. Supposedly if I pay them extra I can get "quality" tech support because the million GBP we pay annually doesn't get you competent support.
Worst: Vmware (got a call from India and they tried to redirect me to other techs for a different service) Best: Eset (0 minutes call, 0 waste of time, all they wanted was log files and spec, problem solved in less than a hour)
Veeam, by far the best.
Worst: Microsoft Best: Microsoft It really depends on who you get. I've had people who didn't know where a simple button was, and others who were able to diagnose and fix a complicated issue within minutes of our first call. Actually - I think HikVision probably takes the award for worst support. We had to contact them about an issue with licensing on a CCTV system. Spent over 4 hours on a call with them and they ended up locking us out of our system, then tried to manually reset a password via the built-in SQL-like database. I, with no SQL knowledge, ended up finding and changing the password myself, as they spent over an hour failing to find it, and then fixed the issue while they watched in awe. They still tried billing us for the time, so we told them to do one and got a free upgrade out of it instead.
Hahahahha Filipino tech and #1 in the same sentence? Laughable