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Ticket etiquette - how long to wait for a response?
I've opened a ticket with a provider a few days ago. I'm not in a huge rush and I don't want to be impolite and nag the customer support if they're simply overwhelmed and haven't managed to get around to me yet.
Nonetheless, I can't wait indefinitely and I'm worried the ticket might've been missed. What is the proper way to handle this situation? How long am I supposed to wait? Do I open a new ticket or do I respond to the current one?
Comments
It depends on the provider. I would bump the ticket after a couple of days to ensure it's not misplaced. I just had a case, where noone answered a client for days, due a wrong ticket status. Luckily, client bumped it.
It depends on the host, what they agreed to support when you signed up and what the specifics of the ticket are.
Perhaps give us some of those details and we can give you some better advice?
I'd rather not mention the host by name here but they advertise 24/4 support on their website. I'll bump the ticket, I usually got a fast response from them in the past - I guess they just missed it this time.
I did not mean support hours, that just means you can open a ticket 24/7 usually, I mean is it managed, semi-managed, unmanaged and what is the ticket for which is the most important part of the question.
Ah, my bad. This is for the migration of an unmanaged storage VPS. I need another VPS set up with them on a different node to copy my data over.
Right, so completely out of your control then and your essentially offering them more money, response time should be <12 hours worst case mon-fri.
Hello,
A good support team should respond in 8 hours, within the day at worse, i'd say you can bump the ticket after 24h.
But you should check your host's SLA.
It really depends on the patience of the client and their expectations.
We have some clients paying $12/year bumping a ticket after 30 mins asking us if we're alive.
Same here.
Perhaps providers could slightly improve the information provided to clients, like clearly state their typical response times on their website or after a ticket goes in - providing a canned response (ie its the weekend, certain tickets get deferred or sales is out today and tomorrow- we will contact you later this week, etc etc) or that there is high ticket volume expect response in 48 instead of 8? So many easy ways to manage client expectations to the point that under most circumstances the cleints reaction would be- oh that makes sense to me. And if they still bombard you with tickets, you can always terminate them at the end of current agreement.
Haven't seen a post from @Ishaq in 30 seconds, must be scam!
30 mins? Pffft by that time, I've already opened a thread on LET grieving the deadpool and there's been three other hosts posting refugee offers.
Triage and routing of a ticket shouldn't take more than a work day (or one hour if the provider claims 24/7 support). Even if they're busy and the ETA for the actual solution takes longer, you should not be left wondering what the status is. If they're not even doing that, find a more competent provider.
And on the flip side, providers who have clients that really expect the world to revolve around them for $1/month should get rid of those clients . . .
You don't have to be ashamed to name the host. Go ahead. It could in fact help others when they are considering which host to buy service from, etc,.
It isn't always good to bump a ticket. Some providers automatically move a ticket to the back of the queue when you bump it. They tell customers not to keep bumping tickets, and remind customers that repeatedly bumping tickets will ensure that it never gets seen and processed.
Do you know what i've generally noticed? a client that is paying $2k a month won't mind waiting a few hours for a response time but a client paying $4 a month will bump the ticket one hundred times during those few hours.
This is honestly the weirdest thing because you would logically expect the opposite to happen.
It's pretty much impossible for anyone using WHMCS to "miss" a ticket, unless they have no alerts setup and simply don't look at their ticket area, so you shouldn't worry about that. As long as your ticket isn't marked as Answered or Closed just wait. I usually think anything over 6-12 hours is too long regardless of what you pay, but this is different for every person. A few days definitely is too long.
It's possible if a ticket isn't escalated correctly. I have had that happen before.
Theory of Mind explains it! :-)
The customer that has the ability to spend the big money is likely to have a serious understanding of how that thing works, and likewise how it can fail and/or what is needed to fix it. I had an Internet outage at home not too long ago, and I didn't even bother to call my ISP until after an hour because I knew that it likely wasn't a phone call from me that would get them started on fixing things. And when they said that, even at 1 hour in, they didn't have a solid ETA on the fix was going to be, I told them I'd just take an early lunch and maybe call them back afterwards if things weren't working again. They were, and I remain a happy customer (such an outage is extremely rare).
The customer who insists on paying the least is likely to have the least understanding of how anything works, and assumes that the bargain basement price they pay is for absolutely perfect service. And as a consequence they of course are going to be the first ones to throw a fit when anything bad happens.
So price is often a proxy for skill level. But the problem in the VPS market is that every provider targets a low price, so it isn't a ready filter for the denizens of LET. The "one hour" rule still works, though.
Hahaha! The best part is that this claim is really true for some guys here!
@Chronic
You may find this helpful: How to Contact Support Properly
Also, this: If you server goes down, here are the steps you should follow
Cheers!
You better have a talk with your host2vps brand then, the best I ever got was about 24 hours and several tickets took much longer than that (multiple days, and in one case over a month). As I am in a good mood, I won't derail this thread to document how horrible my experience was, but you guys sure have a long ways to go if you think what you provide is "a good support team".
my 2 cents.
Cheers!
Someone needs to set up one for providers as well - such as don't submit tickets while I'm in school, mom always wants me at the dinner table, I will fix it after my homework is done or "we really are in a different time zone", we will get to it tomorrow. Honestly how hard is it for companies or pseudo companies to properly set expectations? Obviously 30 minute ticket bumps are silly, but so is saying well its only 12/yr what do they expect? they expect what their imagination allows - unless you reset their expectations in reality.
@TheLinuxBug I will, would you mind pm me some references like ticket numbers, i'd like to investigate.
but really are you still alive :P