Smoothwall Pricing

[AMLinington]

@tom_newton is right when we says that there are huge changes afoot in support. Things in that department are undergoing radical changes all with the view to improving the customer experience. In addition to this, we are currently working on a hugely exciting project involving self-help resources to give our customers better access to our detailed and comprehensive Knowledgebase - Did you know that during April, we found that over 40% of cases raised by our customers could have been resolved quickly and easily by one of the Self-help Solutions in our Knowledge base? We are invested in improving this resource and I'm really excited to be a part of that project so over the next year expect to see some changes there. I'm really passionate about this project and could go on for hours about it! LOL

 

Our Triage team have been doing a brilliant job and really hit the ground running. We don't believe in the 'phone monkey' model as our product is far too technical for the usual scripted 'Have you tried rebooting it?' type of questions. If a ticket is very complex it will be escalated to an engineer for further diagnostics.

 

I am always keen to get feedback regarding the Knowledgebase and Self help resources and would love to hear your thoughts as I will feed these directly into our project so please feel free to ping me a PM.

[zag]

- Making the Youtube channel more obvious

- Quick start guides for setting up filtering

- Actually calling back when an escalation is needed and not waiting 10 days

- Better help documentation with pictures

[AMLinington]

- Making the Youtube channel more obvious

- Quick start guides for setting up filtering

- Actually calling back when an escalation is needed and not waiting 10 days

- Better help documentation with pictures

 

Well you'll be pleased to hear that 3 of the 4 are under my sphere of influence and are already focus points for the work we're doing - without giving too much away, some of the things we working on will mean that we can embed our YouTube resources directly into articles so you can search all the resources in one place!

 

Setting up filtering is never going to be a quick thing, but we are hoping (over time) to develop various parts of the KB and the product itself to make this easier. This is definitely on our radar.

 

Help documentation with pictures? I'm certain we can manage that - this is one of the big things I've been pushing in this project - adding screenshots to clarify instructions. I can't comment on changes to the actual 'Help' within the product itself as this would be @tom_newton's sphere of influence, but we will certainly be including much more of this in our knowledgebase articles and self help resources.

 

I'm so excited about this project and I can't wait to get the first phases in place and unleash it on you all.

[john]

Biggest help for me as I told to @tom_newton was the fact that Sale-Farse lost all my past case details thus I lost a LOT of useful resources which were not ever on the public KBs some are on your internal KBs and some were specific qwerks to my setup but that was very damaging

[lmgtfy]

@AMLightfoot the new knowledgebase idea sounds really good to me, I think with Smoothwall being as comprehensive and feature filled as it is, its hard to know all of the features as well as I would like sometimes.

 

I had an idea which popped into my head today about another possible way Smoothwall could improve their support. I have been having an issue with our Frog server which wasn't the easiest problem to solve and instead of having to use teamviewer or remote support into a machine on site here they had a direct connection to the Frog server offsite and were able to test things and putty in when needed and fix the problem and send an email to say all fixed. I know for all my tickets I have raised with Smoothwall more often than not an engineer will end up teamviewing in which either involves me giving them access to my machine with all the right tools on or setting up a test machine with the tools on. Surely it would be a lot easier from both your point of view and customers if you had a back door into your own product. I know this might not be possible with some customers firewalls or some tickets but it is only an idea

[AMLinington]

@AMLightfoot the new knowledgebase idea sounds really good to me, I think with Smoothwall being as comprehensive and feature filled as it is, its hard to know all of the features as well as I would like sometimes.

 

I had an idea which popped into my head today about another possible way Smoothwall could improve their support. I have been having an issue with our Frog server which wasn't the easiest problem to solve and instead of having to use teamviewer or remote support into a machine on site here they had a direct connection to the Frog server offsite and were able to test things and putty in when needed and fix the problem and send an email to say all fixed. I know for all my tickets I have raised with Smoothwall more often than not an engineer will end up teamviewing in which either involves me giving them access to my machine with all the right tools on or setting up a test machine with the tools on. Surely it would be a lot easier from both your point of view and customers if you had a back door into your own product. I know this might not be possible with some customers firewalls or some tickets but it is only an idea

 

A backdoor would be handy and you can configure one under the External Access rules if you want to give us direct access so you can configure this yourself but the biggest problem we find with this is upstream firewalls blocking the connection - LEA firewalls and the such then it's a pain for you guys to have to log a request for ports to be opened and so on.

 

Might be worth popping that idea into Uservoice though as it's certainly something our support engineers have been mentioning for a while. I, too am not sure of the feasibility in writing a back door into our product as I suspect there may be security concerns associated with that that having the customer manually configure it themselves avoids.

[tom_newton]

As it happens "connectback" is in our roadmap - not got an ETA yet though

[Edu-IT]

Has Smoothwall increased its yearly support pricing, out of interest?