Story about customer support from a big company

[Tril]

From my experience, customer support from big companies is not always as good as it would be in a smaller company. You get replies from someone that works for customer support all day long and that does not always take the time to read carefully what you ask. Their first automatic reply is to copy/paste a link to help online on their website. If that does not help, they'll give more personal help but if they don't know what they are talking about, you'll get nowhere.

This post is about a small exchange of emails between me and Creative customer support. I've removed names but I've given the full text. It's from 2006.

Detailed Problem Description:
The specifications of the card says the
following :
ASIO 2.0 support: 16-bit/44.1kHz, 16-bit/48kHz,
24-bit/44.1kHz, 24-bit/48kHz and 24-bit/96kHz
with direct monitoring

I'm an ASIO host programmer and I need ASIO IN to
work at 16-bit/48kHz for my host. There is an
option in the drivers to set the frequency to
48kHz but I don't see an option to set the sample
type to 16-bit. How do I set the ASIO sample
type to 16-bit?

Thank you. I look forward to an answer.

Dear Tril,

Thank you for contacting Creative Technical Support; we appreciate the
opportunity to assist you.

With regards to your enquiry, I would like you to refer to the following
knowledge base article for more information:

Title: ASIO - General Information and Essential Troubleshooting
Link: http://us.creative.com/support/kb/artic ... 3&sid=2378" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

I hope that this information is helpful and will be looking forward to
your response/feedback.

If you still require assistance, please reply to this email with any
previous correspondence to ensure the quickest and most accurate
service.

Best Regards

Technical Support
Creative Labs Americas

I'm sorry but this information does not respond to my question. On previous sound cards from Creative that supported 16-bit and 24-bit, there were two different ASIO drivers (one for 16 bit and another for 24-bit). The X-Fi
has only one ASIO driver. The ASIO driver of the X-Fi is called "Creative ASIO". This driver seems to be fixed at 24-bit but the specifications of the X-Fi mention support for ASIO at 16-bit. This is contradictory. I'm particularly interested into having ASIO IN work at 16-bit.

If it is possible to set the ASIO IN to 16-bit, I wish to learn how.

If it is not possible to set the ASIO IN to 16-bit, the specifications are misleading and I would like an explanation of what was meant by mentionning 16-bit support.

Thank you for taking the time of reading the whole explanation.

Dear Tril,

Thank you for reaching us at Creative Email Technical Support; we
appreciate the opportunity to assist you.

I understand you are having trouble with the ASIO driver settings on
your Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic soundcard.

I apologize that the provided information did not assist you.

I would like to know what program you are using when trying to adjust
the ASIO drivers. Are you using Creative's Audio Creation software? Are
you using a third-party software program, if so what program?

Lastly, I would also like to know what leads you to believe that when
you set the driver to 48kHz, it is NOT using 16-bit. If the settings are
grayed out and show 24-bit or something along these lines, please
respond with this information. Otherwise, what indicates to you that
16-bit is not being applied?

Once we receive your reply, we will be better equipped to assist you.

I thank you, again, for contacting Creative Email Support.

If you still require assistance, please reply to this email with any
previous correspondence to ensure the quickest and most accurate
service.

Best Regards,

Technical Support
Creative Labs Americas

I was trying to add support for the X-Fi sound card in a program I was writing at the time. My program needed samples in 16 bit. The X-Fi specification said that it supported 16 bit and 24 bit. I noticed that the X-Fi ASIO driver was working at 24 bit and it was putting the 24 bit samples in a variable of 32 bit. At the time, I though there might be some way to tell the Creative ASIO driver to switch to 16 bit and give me 16 bit samples in 16 bit variables. That would have been the easiest solution for me. Now, I don't think that it's possible. I think that the card always works at 24 bit and I think that the specification says that it supports 16 bit because commercial ASIO software has 24 bit to 16 bit conversion built-in. What I needed was a reply from a programmer from Creative telling me how the 24 bit samples were stored in 32 bit and how to convert that to 16 bit.

After that small email exchange, I gave up. Maybe I could have gotten what I wanted if I persevered but it was not worth wasting my time. I did not have an X-Fi (I was adding support for a freeware program I wanted to share with others) so I did not mind too much if it did not work well.

The customer support experience was still good even if it did not answer my questions. They were always very polite and trying to solve the problem. The issue if that it looked liked they did not really read what I was saying. I'm thinking it's more likely that they simply did not understand because this question falls out of their expertise. They have no idea of the internal workings of the ASIO drivers, they are just customer support. That's what I don't like about that kind of customer support. They are there to help but they only know the answers to basic questions. It's a nonsense because, if you have a basic question, you'll figure it out yourself without asking the question (at least, that's what I do). You will only resort to customer support for really hard to answer questions and that's when they won't know what to reply.

If this was a small company with less than 20 employees, the message would have gotten through to the people with the correct answers. With companies with hundred of employees and offices in many countries, it's much less likely that your question will get deep enough in the company to get a reply from someone with the knowledge to answer you correctly.

Share your stories. I'm sure there are plenty of people here with inadequate customer support from big companies.

[cybereality]

Customer support are retards. All they ever tell me to do is unplug the thing and then plug it back in.

[Neil]

I worked in customer service in another life.

This video is SO TRUE!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q8DriPCX2o" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Regards,
Neil

[WheatstoneHolmes]

ID10T!

But, seriously when you are a tech/programmer the help desk people do tend to treat you as though you don't know what you are doing (IMHO) and it can be aggravating.

Most of the time I let them go through their routine and wait for them to catch up to me.

But I can totally understand the help desk persons position, they are probably only authorized to go through the list and that's it.

Of course I don't know for sure having never been a help desk person, but I was a service writer for a while.

[Welder]

I am a tech support person as I'm sure you know, and sometimes it can get automatic to assume the user is not too experienced. And it can sometimes be a surprise when the person IS highly experience.

Those guys work with 100's of users a day I'm sure, where most problems are solved by plugging the speakers in lol, so yea, I'm sure their minds can get stuck on a setting to just give an easy answer.

My favorite memories of bad tech support:

AOL.... I call them up, get someone in India, and the person reads from a script the answer to my question and asks me to call back if it's not solved. I would then call back, and a new person would literally read the EXACT same script! And i'd have to interupt them and tell them that they had JUST told me that and it doesn't work. That really throws them off their tracks and pretty much renders them useless. Man I do not miss those days.

Then, my most disastrous experience was with a game server company I will not name.

I rented a shared game server that was very popular, but had one problem: LAG!
I went through a TON of support tickets, and EACH one was answered by a different person. most did not even bother to read up on what the others said, and after 5 tickets they would start going in circles.

Well, they finally figured out it was due to an overload of the server they had us on, and said that they HAD to move us, which meant losing our IP address, but I said OK.

Well, they moved us, and didn't bother to back up our configs! We lost all of our maps, settings, mods, etc. Was a catastrophe!

You know what they offered in return for their screw up(s)? 3 DAYS of free hosting.... lol what a joke

They seriously needed a lesson on how to make a customer happy, cuss I left their company instead.

[UndeadD3vi1]

I contacted Creative a few months ago about the awfull sound quality on my X-Fi when using Creatives own Headphones (Sounds great in 2.1, second you switch to Headphone mode you get nothing but distortion, only the newer drivers do it)

The only response I got was asking me for Photographic Proof of the Serial Number on my X-Fi and the Headphones Box! I chucked the latter hence being able to go no further.

Tril, i know its not helpfull now but devsupport@creativelabs.com is exclusivly for coders
To me that shows Creative are going way beyond most other big companys!

AOL.... I call them up, get someone in India, and the person reads from a script the answer to my question and asks me to call back if it's not solved. I would then call back, and a new person would literally read the EXACT same script! And i'd have to interupt them and tell them that they had JUST told me that and it doesn't work. That really throws them off their tracks and pretty much renders them useless. Man I do not miss those days.

I was with a ISP called Demon for many years of my life. They where once considered the best UK ISP (In the Dial-up days), I'd phone and get someone that actually understood what a packet was. I left them for a few years but then got 2mbps broadband with them. Only to discover all tech support was now out-sourced! (Sales wasn't funny enough!)
Drove me nuts until I finally left them, Thankfully a few UK ISP's actually have a team team you can talk to though. But give it a couple more years and that will probably no longer be the case.

I blame Greed as the cause here, Out-Sourcing should quite frankly be illegal.