Reopening support tickets not possible

[Carsten Schmitz]

(edit: please move this to the Customer Care sub-space if applicable, thanks)

 

 

Hi.

 

Please allow me to question the following policy matter: why is it impossible at CA to reopen support tickets after more than two weeks, even when calling in?

 

I attempted to reopen a ticket because the supposed answer given by the support engineer is very clearly off-topic. The ticket has been closed with that supposed answer right away, and due to a combination of factors like me being away on christmas holidays, two weeks have expired before I got aware of this fact. Now I am being told I have to open a new ticket instead.

 

Filing new tickets is no good substitute. It causes additional work for the customer, regularily causes communication issues due to written history being in another ticket, thus making it harder to review in practice, and the new ticket likely does not end up with the same engineer.

 

In fact, in this case once more the product issue it's about is a one-time issue during an update that we won't revisit, but other clients will be hit by it when they perform the update. I am trying to help you improve your products and thus, help out other clients, but CA makes it feel like bug reports from clients are a nuissance rather than valued feedback.

 

Please kindly revise the policy about reopening tickets.

 

p.s. even the survey link has expired, so I can't voice my concerns about that ticket handling in that way, either. Since people do go on holidays, this is clearly not a suitable arrangement.

 

Thanks, kind regards,

 

Carsten

[spake03]

Hi Carsten,

 

The purpose for not being able to reopen a case past 14 days is because we feel if an issue has been closed 14 days or longer that the problem for the issue is fully resolved and any other problems should be reported on a new case. We understand that this may cause problems when you are unable to work with support within this time frame so we will pass your feedback and suggestion to our management team. I was unable to pinpoint the exact case that was closed, could you email me at [e-mail] with the case number and any other related details so I may pass it to management.

 

Thank you!

[Shane Ryan]

Hi Kevin

 

Every support organization has metrics in place to track the effectiveness of its team, so there needs to be some limit for the ability to reopen and 2 weeks would seem fair in the vast majority of situations.  This may be a good example of it not being long enough but there are other steps you could employ to avoid such an unwanted closure.  Speaking as a support engineer, personally, if I receive an out of office response, I am not going to close that issue, during that time period, so even here 2 weeks should be enough.  

 

I hope that helps somewhat.

regards

Shane

[Carsten Schmitz]

Hi,

 

Speaking as someone who also had some dealings with generating call center and support metrics many years ago, cheers for pointing that out (also so I didn't have to ).

 

I am, however, of the belief that if the requirements for metrics prevent customers from doing (I hope) reasonable things like reopening tickets, then something needs adjusting.

 

That may take the form of incorporating out of office responses into the workflow, but that would first of all require these responses to be channeled into the ticket system. I did, in fact, have an out-of-office message on my email, but I suspect even while the ticket system sends emails to me, the auto replies from my mail server don't make their way back into the ticket system at present time. After all, if they did, I would see them in there.

 

Back when I dabbled in that field though, we'd allow customers to reopen tickets indefinetly. Yes, customers would occasionally try to hijack old tickets with new problems, in which case they'd be kindly asked to create a new ticket, or one was provided for them and sent into the queues. If they'd legitimately reopen tickets, that would simply be a (rather valuable, actually) statistic on it's own.

 

Just my $0.02

Carsten