Whilst I am a huge advocate for being as ‘self sustainable’ as possible when it comes to working with partners or vendors – sometimes you can’t solve something on your own and you do need to ask their technical support folks for a hand.
When that does happens though, be smart, do a bit of role reversal and consider how to be a good customer or partner when asking for help.
Eric Steven Raymond is a favourite of mine for his ‘How To Ask Questions The Smart Way’, though whilst it has aged (I do remember IRC) and isn’t quite the direct comparison to what I’m talking about (i.e. to a wider community audience vs a vendor) it has the makings of the right way to approach things.
In a nutshell, if you’re asking for help on a problem with a vendor – swap roles and think about what would be ‘helpful’ if someone was asking you for help on a specialty of yours?
- DO – Provide a clear problem statement, i.e. ‘I am receiving error xyz when I press button blah’
- DO – Provide clear steps to reproduce the problem statement, include a screenshot showing the error, and include a HAR File if you’re using a web browser
- DO – Provide version details of the product you’re speaking of, and whether your environment is ‘standard’ or has any special circumstances (Dark Site, Non-English Locale, etc)
- DO – Review ‘Release Notes’ for newer versions of the product incase your issue has been fixed already, and review the ‘Known Issues’ for your current version just incase this is a known issue already. If the vendor has a knowledge base, or public bug repository, check it out first too. It’s often quicker to find a solution yourself than waiting for someone to tell you it.
- DO – Try different web browsers if appropriate, different networks (ad blocking, geo-restrictions, webfiltering etc) and generally do everything you can to rule out your environment from the equation
- DO – Provide a support bundle / log archive when you submit the query, it will help avoid the tennis game when the support representative uses their first reply to ask you to get the support bundle / logs for them to review.
- DO – Be clear on the business impact of the issue for your business so that your expectations are set and can be matched or discussed with the vendor who may have a different view. By not being clear here can led to a misalignment of priorities where you may think it’s a bigger issue than the vendor does.
- DO – Be kind, but to the point – if an issue is causing you distress it’s fine to share that with the support representative but ranting and raving to make the same point won’t be received in the same way. e.g. ‘This issue is causing our production system to experience downtime that the business is unable to workaround’ is a better way of phrasing ‘It’s broken! FIX IT NOW’ There’s a human on the other end of the conversation.
With all of this done, submitting it all in a single request with everything laid out in a nice concise manner (quantity isn’t quality!) helps the support representative see you’ve put the ground work in to give them the best starting place possible to help you out. (remember, they want to help you, but you have to help them help you)
Why am I writing this on a Saturday you ask?
Well … Read Only Friday was yesterday and we had to raise two production impacting issues with two different vendors and despite following the above principles we received very different responses! (you can only do your bit, the vendor has to do theirs too!) Actually, one of them had been raised since Tuesday but required escalation on Friday… so it still counts.
Scenario 1 – Vendor hosted SaaS CRM platform has blocked outbound email sending during a critical period (exam season)
Vendor confirmed why the issue occurred (unusually high bounce rejection rate) and that the tenant was blocked. (very sensible, and accepted it was a sensible system protection precaution to take)
Customer had on Tuesday confirmed they understood why the block had happened, and that they’d taken steps to resolve it and could it be enabled once again.
No progress in the days following other than the vendor confirming that the product team needed to unblock it but nobody knew when this would happen.
Escalation raised on Friday, expectations clearly set (single point of contact provided here, 24/7 reachability, and expectation to progress on the weekend, let us know if we need to raise the severity of the ticket) which went ignored.
Chased on Saturday to find that the case was not being worked on the weekend because of the severity and that nobody had considered the earlier request. After more phone calls and email tennis the case severity has been increased …. and the message the same as Tuesday – product team needs to fix it but no idea when that would be.
End Result– Issue still happening, lots of email and phone calls with no actual progress in several days. Customer mood is low as they feel they are being ignored and their own customers are unable to consume the service they are paying for.
Scenario 2 – Automation system performed an unexpected action that caused a significant production impact in the working day
Vendor confirmed within 5 minutes of logging the case at 5pm on a Friday that the issue was not unique to us, and that other customers had reported at a similar time similar occurrences.
Vendor asked for some more information to be provided (dutifully provided within minutes as they were trying to help us!) to confirm it looked the same.
Within an hour of logging, the automation system displayed a banner when logging in acknowledging an issue under investigation (with third party) and offered a workaround to mitigate for now.
End Result – Issue might still be happening, but a workaround provided to allow us to continue whilst the clever people figure out the issue at hand. Customer mood is excellent as the vendor promptly understand the impact, confirmed it wasn’t unique to us, and offered a workaround to buy time without further impact.
Now, I’m not pitting these two vendors against each other (though it’d be obvious who’d win and no neither of these are Nutanix) but it really goes to show that even when you provide all of the information up front in a concise, non-emotive manner – sometimes … you still can’t win. (but, you can take a small amount of solace in knowing you’ve done everything you can, and you needn’t feel bad there’s nothing more you could do)