technical support at OutSystems

Rank: #300

technical support at OutSystems

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Am I the only one that after using OutSystems technical support over the last 5ish years the base methodology/process of the technical support at OutSystems is checking checkboxes in their process vs actually solving the problem? I have talked to several people over the years at OutSystems about this and I always hear that "its being redesigned" and "we are completely redoing the process" but it just keeps going back to the same checkboxes.

What drove this post is that the new react search dropdown widget only returns the top 4 items when you search. I made a tech support ticket on the 27th of last month and gave a very good description of what is going on. In my opinion at least, if its a built in widget like that that is showing an error - there is no reason for me to make an espace to demo the issue. That should be something they should be able to EASILY do. Nope, just about a day later (28th) I got an email asking to submit an espace demonstrating the error. So I made an espace and submitted it on the 28th.

Then nothing till today (a week and 2 days) and the response I get back is:

****

Nonetheless, in order to ensure that we proceed appropriately with this ticket, may we ask you to elaborate on the impact that this is having on your business activities? Is this behavior currently blocking anyone from using the application as expected or delivering anything as planned?

Since you mention this is happening in your Production environment as well, is this happening in a Live application, and is it affecting your end-users?

*******

So after telling them what the error is, that it was causing unexpected behavior on my production environment (it was an end user that pointed this out to me), then providing an espace - the focus ISN'T on actually getting a solution to the problem. It is instead on checking checkboxes on their form. I am pretty much at the point that if their goal is to drive people to the forums vs using technical support then they have succeeded. I am a big advocate of OutSystems - my operations wouldn't be where they are without it, but when I talk to people about OutSystems and they ask what I don't like the first thing on my list is always their technical support process. The ONLY reason I even went to technical support for this vs a forum post is that this is a base problem with their widget that I can't edit myself and it needs to be them making the fix on their side.

Ok, rant over for the day.

on 2020-11-06

Miguel Baltazar

Staff

Rank: #3632

Hi Jason

Thank you for your feedback and I apologize for the delay in getting back to you. I wanted to make sure your issues were fully resolved before we can focus on the larger scope of your feedback.

You are completely correct when you say that Support should have been faster in acknowledging and replicating the issue you described. As you also indicated, for the past year we have been dealing with the problems brought on by growth and scale and had to quickly ramp the number of agents and the processes, to deal with the increased volume of issues. Some of these processes move some of the load of troubleshooting to our users, especially when they are as advanced as you. I know this is not ideal and we are working on improving the serviceability of our product to make it easier to replicate and report these kinds of issues.

We will act on the feedback you provided and ensure we fine-tune these processes to allow for faster service and less effort, aligned with the needs to make sure we are able to respond effectively to all the requests.

We are actually starting a set of interviews with our users in the coming weeks with the objective of understanding how we can improve our Support Experience. It would be great if you have the availability to participate and provide your impressions and wishes for the improvement of OutSystems Support.

Miguel

on 2020-11-10

5 replies

Last reply on 2020-12-14

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Jason Herrington

Rank: #300

Miguel,

Thank you for your response. Yes, I would love to be part of interviews to go over how OutSystems can improve the tech support experience. In fact, over the last 5ish years of using OutSystems I think I have been involved in 2 interviews of that type - and each time I was told pretty much the same you said above that the processes are being revamped etc. So yes, I would love to be a part of the solution but this is an issue that has been going on for at least 5 years in my experience. Also, one thing I brought up in at least one of the previous interviews is that this isn't so much a people problem as an approach problem. The whole focus and process for technical support as its done at OutSystems now needs to be completely scrapped and rewritten. I believe that during one of the meetings with several high level OutSystems exec's I said that the building the tech support is in should be burned down, the earth salted so that nothing will grow there again and then move a mile down the road, hire new people who are overall in charge and completely rewrite all of the processes used in technical support. I don't think that went down very well in that meeting though - but the problem is still there. Let me know when you would like to schedule an interview to discuss.

on 2020-11-10

Miguel Baltazar

Staff

Rank: #3632

Replying to Jason Herrington's comment on 10 Nov 2020 16:44:11

Hey Jason

Thank you for your availability. We will reach out and schedule the session. I am also available to discuss further your suggestions especially as it would be counter-productive to burn the building at this point as we are all home ;)

Talk soon.

on 2020-11-11

Jason Herrington

Rank: #300

Replying to Miguel Baltazar's comment on 11 Nov 2020 09:00:39

Miguel,

Just checking in - no word on scheduling a meeting.

Jason

on 2020-12-02

Miguel Baltazar

Staff

Rank: #3632

Replying to Jason Herrington's comment on 02 Dec 2020 18:21:17

Hey Jason,

I am sorry we got delayed in scheduling the meeting. We have turned this into a global fact-finding initiative and the logistics of it have proven a larger challenge than we expected. We are almost there, but if you believe that a direct meeting would be more fruitful, let get it on the calendar this week or next.

Cheers,

Miguel

on 2020-12-14

Jason Herrington

Rank: #300

Replying to Miguel Baltazar's comment on 14 Dec 2020 14:52:12

Miguel,

As long as it is progressing then that is fine. I just wanted to check in as I hadn't heard back. I would definitely like my feedback to be heard but I think we have gone over all of the points I wanted to make.

Jason

on 2020-12-14

Dorine Boudry

Rank: #128

Hi Jason,

I understand that the point of this post was to share your experience with and opinion about the OS support. I share the observation that a lot can be improved both with the quality of the standard OS widgets, and with their process for improving that quality.

I'm guessing maybe they are overwhelmed by growth, and I'm also guessing they could hire more engineers to work on this.

But I'm replying just in case you would be stuck with this problem and want a workaround.

It is possible to have more than 4 results on a search, just add searchResultLimit in the AdvancedFormat.

Good luck with it,

Dorine

on 2020-12-02

1 reply

on 2020-12-02

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Jason Herrington

Rank: #300

Dorine,

Thank you for posting that. I had a tech support ticket and ended up opening another for 2 more issues. The end result is I have the following going in to fix the limit 4, I found an issue that if the search is in an accordion it would cut off the search when you click on it and last if you had "something - another" and you searched for "another" it would not be found. The following fixes all 3 of those.

"{

searchResultLimit: 99,
fuseOptions: { 
          threshold: 0.2, 
          matchAllTokens: true,
          tokenize: true
     } 
}"

on 2020-12-02

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