Salesforce has rolled out their new and improved support model but unfortunately it falls short and is now angering users, especially Salesforce System Administrators like myself who depend on the service to offload user support requests.

Before, if you had Premier Support, anyone in the Org could call and get a support rep on the phone within minutes, who would work with you to resolve the problem. Pretty darn good service especially when you or a user needed fast answers.

With Basic Support you used to be able to get a support rep on the phone to help out but now that has effectively been shut down and users must use online support unless you have a critical issue.

Now all Premier Support phone requests first go through a “gatekeeper” or what Salesforce is calling a “triage agent” who is just a glorified ticket generator, then the correct specialist will call you back within 2 hours. Big change from near instant service to “someone will call you back within 2 hours”. What happens if the specialist calls when you are unavailable? They leave a message with a call back number to the main support line – now most likely you will not reach that specialist as they will be on another call plus no other specialist will be able to work with you since the ticket has already been assigned.

This new system is being touted as being “more effective and efficient” but as you can see, at least from a user perspective, this is anything but efficient. In fact this is already creating more complexity and additional effort in order to get service:

1. Call Premier Support line;
2. Explain the entire problem to the triage specialist who documents the case;
3. Wait up to 2 hours for a call back;
4. Miss the call;
5. Call back Premier Support to learn your specialist is not available;
6. Email your specialist;
7. Play phone and email tag and finally connect;
8. Explain the whole issue again as the notes from the triage specialist are not always clear;
9. Work issue to resolution;
10. Wondering why you are paying for Premier Support.

Amazingly this new model was rolled out with no warning or notification to the end users, SFDC partners or even my account rep. I did finally get an email notification with the following:

Support Process Enhancements:
We are introducing a new skills-based, customer support triage process that will enable us to address your support issues more effectively and efficiently. This process will ensure you are quickly connected with an expert that has the right knowledge and experience to solve your specific issue.

To accomplish this, our online case submission choices have been streamlined to route your case to the most qualified individual. For those times when you call for support, a triage agent will now answer, document the details of the case and provide you with an anticipated call back time by a specialist. We will then have the most knowledgeable expert call you back to resolve your issue.

The original Premier Support was so much better and provided real customer service whereas this new service is a problem looking for a solution. In fact, as far as I am concerned, this is a violation of the Premier Support SLA that I paid for and thus I will be looking for a refund and will certainly not be paying for this service in the future.

Why was this new model adopted? As I understand, this support model has been imported from Microsoft by the Executive Vice President, Customers for Life and Chief Growth Officer – Maria Martinez. Perhaps this worked for Microsoft users but it goes against the grain for Salesforce users and ignores the history and successful actions of the company in providing great support to small and medium sized companies as well as the larger ones.

I can see that Salesforce was running into a mis-routing issue where customers were punching in the wrong key and ending up with a mis-matched support agent. A better solution would be to just train the existing agents to log the case and then route the person to the correct group if mis-routed. This would avoid the inefficient call-back scenario.

Great customer service depends on:

1. Listening to your customers;
2. Providing customer services tailored to what the customer needs and wants rather than what the organization wants;
3. Fast and knowledgeable support;
4. Properly piloting any new support services, channels, procedures before rolling them out.
5. Keeping customers in the loop regarding any changes before they are launched.

Hopefully Salesforce will fix their new flawed support model before too many users opt-out of Premier Support altogether.l

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