American Technology Companies Have Poor Support Outside the US — Why ?

I use a lot of tech­no­logy that is developed in the US, and, con­sist­ently, when they ship that tech­no­logy to ‘rest of the world’ they pass their sup­port respons­ib­il­it­ies so a dis­trib­utor. While this looks like a good idea, the ser­vice the dis­trib­utor deliv­ers is usu­ally poor.

Why is this accept­able, and as a cus­tomer, why do I have put up with this ? All this “cus­tomer focus” and “listen­ing to the cus­tomer” that we hear so much about from the Executives, doesn’t trans­late into cus­tomer support ?

It star­ted out as …

I think that the roots of the busi­ness model star­ted ten or more years ago when the Distributor was a spe­cial­ist net­work com­pany, with maybe three to five products. Often, those products were com­ple­ment­ary, and this meant that know­ledge and skills built up with the Distributor. Today, dis­tri­bu­tion is handled by large mono­lithic com­pan­ies with little interest in product sup­port and pay lip ser­vice to the idea at best. Not sur­pris­ing when you con­sider that ware­hous­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion is a busi­ness about buy­ing tonnes to ship kilos. Profits are made by keep­ing costs to the abso­lute minimum.

A busi­ness that has a core cap­ab­il­ity of low cost and high volume is not well posi­tioned to make a suc­cess­ful tech­nical sup­port eco­sys­tem. They are not going to see the value pro­pos­i­tion of a high cost tech sup­port func­tion, except at con­tract negotiation.

Tech Support is dif­fi­cult to do, and dif­fi­cult to maintain

IT Managers are well versed in how much it costs to build a team of know­ledge­able people who can resolve sup­port prob­lems. It is also dif­fi­cult to keep them motiv­ated, up to date and to have 24 hour support.

Then you have all the sup­port sys­tems that you need to main­tain — help desk soft­ware, tele­phone and email sys­tems, click to talk as well as the admin­is­trat­ive overheads.

However, com­pan­ies such as Cisco and Microsoft have demon­strated that the cus­tomer will pay for tech­nical sup­port but it must be of excel­lent qual­ity, it must be well manned, and res­ults must be delivered. Cisco in par­tic­u­lar, has a most out­stand­ing ser­vice cap­ab­il­ity and I pos­tu­late that this is a sig­ni­fic­ant part of their success.

Are Americans lim­ited in view ?

I am reg­u­larly told by people who visit the US, that Americans as a group are insu­lar and have lim­ited aware­ness of the global vil­lage. On this basis, maybe American exec­ut­ives are simply ‘hand­ing off’ the global respons­ib­il­it­ies and focus­sing on their own mar­ket and thus not really doing any­thing glob­ally. They may even falsely believe that they are ‘man­aging their global cus­tom­ers‘. For example, there are 500 mil­lion people in the European Union, and 300 mil­lion in the US. There is a much lar­ger rev­enue oppor­tun­ity in the rest of the world, how can tech­no­logy com­pan­ies ignore this opportunity ?

I have not had the same exper­i­ence with vendors loc­ated out­side the US (although I note in passing that global com­pan­ies with US man­age­ment do seem to have the problem).

Long on talk — short on action

I recently bought main­ten­ance con­tracts for two products with this model. The local sales office told me that (1) they did not provide any tech sup­port out­side of of USA and (2) was provided by the dis­trib­utor. I was temp­ted to change my product choice once this was dis­covered, and now regret the decision to pur­chase these products. In both cases, there is only one per­son at the dis­trib­utor who knows the products, they are often on site per­form­ing install­a­tion or sales calls and it can take days to get answers to problems.

On con­tact­ing the sales office, one com­pany does not allow calls on the US head office at all. For the second, I could place calls on the US help desk if I really felt this was neces­sary, but they would only respond in US office hours because we did not have a 24 hour ser­vice con­tract with them. Of course US time is not European time and this was not an adequate solu­tion. When work­ing in other coun­tries, I had the same prob­lem. Obviously, neither of these solu­tions was acceptable.

Staffing Levels in the US even

I recently was work­ing with a second tier net­work vendor, and I asked the exact ques­tion of how many staff were in their 24 hour help­desk. The response was that they about 40 staff. When you do the num­bers on this, you real­ise that they could not handle more than one Severity 1 sup­port case at a time since they could not have more than two staff online at any time, and mostly only a single per­son. Which is ridiculous.

Conclusion

The most obvi­ous point is to invest­ig­ate how main­ten­ance con­tracts are delivered when you are con­sid­er­ing your product selec­tion. It seems to be human nature to believe that the product will just work, because so many people do not invest­ig­ate main­ten­ance or how the sup­port is delivered. This is par­tic­u­larly ironic when you con­sider how much talk about ser­vice and cus­tomer focus comes from the vendors.

The second point is that you need to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between tech sup­port and soft­ware updates. Many com­pan­ies do a good job on soft­ware updates, but a poor job at cus­tomer ser­vice. It is worth con­sid­er­ing what you actu­ally want , and under­stand that difference.

Postscript

This is a dif­fi­cult piece to write without sound­ing vaguely anti-​​American. So lets be clear, I think that the US has an excel­lent model for fund­ing and devel­op­ing tech­no­logy com­pan­ies, and the products are often excel­lent and that is why so many tech products comes from the US. I sus­pect its a cul­tural or his­tor­ical prob­lem that sup­port out­side the US isn’t addressed as a pri­or­ity, but it might just be some poor exper­i­ences on my part. If so, apo­lo­gies to all. But I am going to be look­ing care­fully at my vendor choices and check­ing their sup­port care­fully before I recom­mend them to man­age­ment as part of an architecture .

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