Arbor Support - or lack of

[jtcoops]

Hi

Our school went live with Arbor last Monday, and to say it has been painful is an understatement.

 

The biggest issue is the black hole of support that seems to be the case with Arbor. It takes days to get a response - we never seem to get a problem resolved, just a link to an article, and the SLT is starting to lose patience.

 

Does anyone have an actual named contact or email address of a human at Arbor? We weren't given a project manager for the migration, and are generally being ignored now by the sales team who see their work as complete. If I get one more reply from their useless support bot.......

 

I'm guessing they have just oversold themselves and simply don't have the resources to cope with the influx of schools migrating ahead of ESS contract renewals, but I'd much rather they had been honest and delayed our go live than promise the earth and give us nothing but a migraine.

[TheHyperTechie]

Hi

Our school went live with Arbor last Monday, and to say it has been painful is an understatement.

 

The biggest issue is the black hole of support that seems to be the case with Arbor. It takes days to get a response - we never seem to get a problem resolved, just a link to an article, and the SLT is starting to lose patience.

 

Does anyone have an actual named contact or email address of a human at Arbor? We weren't given a project manager for the migration, and are generally being ignored now by the sales team who see their work as complete. If I get one more reply from their useless support bot.......

 

I'm guessing they have just oversold themselves and simply don't have the resources to cope with the influx of schools migrating ahead of ESS contract renewals, but I'd much rather they had been honest and delayed our go live than promise the earth and give us nothing but a migraine.

 

Do you pay for their support package? We use iCT4 which is listed as one of their (external) support providers. They are great, I have used Arbor's own support before... and it was as you described. I know they have no obligation to help, but it might be worth a shot to send one of the companies on this list an email. I would highly recommend iCT4 though, and if you are looking for a support provider regardless - go external.

[sefton]

Do you use the Live Chat on the support page?

[jtcoops]

We paid for the support package. We may review that and get a refund as its a shambles.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

We tried live chat - seems to mostly be the support bot which is not useful in the slightest

[6Foot3]

I have migrated all eight of my schools to Arbor with the last being a month ago.

Haven't really had any issues with arbor.

I would say the migration process has definitely gotten smoother over time.

 

We pay for the direct Arbor support.

[jtcoops]

We went all in replacing Sims, Cypad for lunches and Parentpay which was probably too much for them, despite the sales team assurances.

 

8 days on teachers still can't order lunches for their classes - the admin team are having to do it, and we still have entire classes that keep disappearing from the lunch system. We are having to use spreadsheets which is ridiculous and then manually debiting parent accounts. We had an email from them Friday saying they were looking into the issue. Another on Monday saying they would be looking into the issue and since then silence and no responses to any of our other queries.

[sefton]

Type Live Agent in and you'll get put through to a person

[TwistedHelixis]

I have 2 schools with external support and 2 with Arbor support and I find Arbor support to be far better.

[mikes]

We are moving over to it this Easter but our LEA is handling it for our entire county, so I'm guessing they are busy. Our lunch/canteen is separate however so we won't use that bit. It is being handled by our LEA so it's not on our head at least. Hope they can sort your problems out. I remember Schoolcloud obviously had a lot more business with online parents evenings as the first 2 we tried to run stopped working half way through as they were overloaded

[Quark]

We were looking at both options and have gone for Arbor support which one of our staff had experiences with before. Good to know the pros and cons of each

[RCowderoy]

I am an accredited support partner for Arbor and support around 35 schools with their MIS. I currently have 8 schools using Arbor and another 25+ migrating at some point before they terminate Integris next feb.

My experience with the migrations has been pretty poor and Arbor have failed with some of these issues:

No siblings linked after migration therefore 100s of duplicate parental contacts on the system. (a known migration issue which they can fix with script but you need to request through the helpdesk to get this done)

SEN register migrated but none the primary/secondary needs. We had to manually data entry the needs as it was round census time and the helpdesk did not respond with a fix in time.

The former roll students that migrate across have no destination schools. They are working on a fix for this for future migrations but one's already happened you have to add them in (one student at a time)

Destination schools list - linked education instuitions have migrated with no or wrong dfe codes. Plus no address or URN information has migrated only the school names.

There was an issue with Leaner funding added to student records as Post 16 funding but they ran a script to fix that

 

These have been common issues with all my schools which have migrated recently. The support desk is very slow to respond and as I'm a support partner, I find I get treated as though I don't know anything about MIS (only have 20 years experience)

 

My opinion is that they are overwhelmed with schools onborading with Arbor and there are several known migration issues that are not getting dealt with. The support staff are inexperienced and only know how to refer you to help sheets which quite frankly we can all access anyway.

 

I'll have to keep going as my schools are undertrained and very needy. I support them but no-one really supports me. I contact other 3rd party Arbor support partners to get advice or just work it out for myself.

The next 12 months will be really busy as they move all integris schools to Arbor. At least I know what to expect and give the heads up to my schools.

[Quark]

I am an accredited support partner for Arbor and support around 35 schools with their MIS. I currently have 8 schools using Arbor and another 25+ migrating at some point before they terminate Integris next feb.

My experience with the migrations has been pretty poor and Arbor have failed with some of these issues:

No siblings linked after migration therefore 100s of duplicate parental contacts on the system. (a known migration issue which they can fix with script but you need to request through the helpdesk to get this done)

SEN register migrated but none the primary/secondary needs. We had to manually data entry the needs as it was round census time and the helpdesk did not respond with a fix in time.

The former roll students that migrate across have no destination schools. They are working on a fix for this for future migrations but one's already happened you have to add them in (one student at a time)

Destination schools list - linked education instuitions have migrated with no or wrong dfe codes. Plus no address or URN information has migrated only the school names.

There was an issue with Leaner funding added to student records as Post 16 funding but they ran a script to fix that

 

These have been common issues with all my schools which have migrated recently. The support desk is very slow to respond and as I'm a support partner, I find I get treated as though I don't know anything about MIS (only have 20 years experience)

 

My opinion is that they are overwhelmed with schools onborading with Arbor and there are several known migration issues that are not getting dealt with. The support staff are inexperienced and only know how to refer you to help sheets which quite frankly we can all access anyway.

 

I'll have to keep going as my schools are undertrained and very needy. I support them but no-one really supports me. I contact other 3rd party Arbor support partners to get advice or just work it out for myself.

The next 12 months will be really busy as they move all integris schools to Arbor. At least I know what to expect and give the heads up to my schools.

 

Thanks, direct support seems fine for us at the moment, they get back quickly to all our requests but I'll let you know if that changes!

[PotNoodleTech]

This thread is quite shocking. Sounds like Arbor have been talking the talk but are unable to walk the walk. Having basic stuff not working after a migration and then being ignored/unsupported is unnnacaptable.

[sefton]

I've migrated 10 schools, both secondary and primary, and can't say I've had any of these issues. I do know there was an issue with using Groupcall to migrate primaries which they pulled quite quickly and reverted to previous methods.

[Disease]

We moved to Arbor in September 24 and they have been great. In Live Chat type Can I speak to a human and it skips the chat bot.

[AlistairB1983]

To echo the last two replies, we moved in April 2024 and have not encountered any of the problems listed elsewhere in the thread - or any issues accessing their support.

 

My sympathies for those of you who are experiencing issues and hope that they get resolved shortly.

[FN-GM]

It appears that some people haven’t don’t any acceptance testing before going live. Otherwise these issues would have been detected. Am I right in that assumption?

[supportman]

Maybe @JamesWeatherill could take a look at the support situation and look into nuking any AI chat bots.

 

I mean, if a company gets big quickly, these type of things happen and its a shame as Arbor is a great product.

 

As an example, I've been with the bank Monzo for years and they also recently went all "corporate" and sliced out their great UK based support for bots and offshoring. Its been a nightmare since and I am considering moving. Its a shame more CEO's don't realize that and protect great customer service, even if its 1st line stuff.

[gszech]

I've created a support ticket with Arbor two days ago and they solved my problem next working day 8AM. Can't complain.

[JamesWeatherill]

Just to clear up any confusion I have looked at our average response times for the past few months and they are all above normal, and I also looked at our Customer Satisfaction scores for support which are above 96% for each of the past 4 months (these are scores given by a sample of >1,000 schools each month).

 

I don't pretend we get things right 100% of the time, but I would challenge the myth that as you get bigger service levels drop. We on average answer quesitons faster than a few years ago, to a higher level of satisfaction. To those who don't feel this is the case, we need to rectify this and get back to you!

[tom_newton]

When you get bigger, there are growing pains, but it's about how you address them isn't it James. We've had our ups and downs but I'd say our support is better today than ever. Always room for improvement though.

[DBR99]

We migrated our 3 schools last Oct, took a phased approach so have just finished moving payments from Parentpay to Arbor. The program/project management was very good. Yes we did have snags but nothing major considering how big a change it is.

 

We had a long standing relationship with SCOMIS who hosted our SIMS, so chose to keep our support with them.They have been good and as always very responsive. The issue we have found though is that when SCOMIS have to refer something more complex back to Arbor, the response they get back from Arbor is slow and not often the 3rd line expertise we were expecting. This leads me to suspect that Arbor support are understaffed and overrun by the sheer numbers of schools who have joined or are about to migrate to them. Not uncommon in our industry! Hopefully as things settle and Arbor strengthen their team and the 3rd party support providers become ever more familiar with Arbor things will improve.

[SpreadsheetJockey]

Just to clear up any confusion I have looked at our average response times for the past few months and they are all above normal, and I also looked at our Customer Satisfaction scores for support which are above 96% for each of the past 4 months (these are scores given by a sample of >1,000 schools each month).

 

I don't pretend we get things right 100% of the time, but I would challenge the myth that as you get bigger service levels drop. We on average answer questions faster than a few years ago, to a higher level of satisfaction. To those who don't feel this is the case, we need to rectify this and get back to you!

 

Any chance you could stop support being so over the top like "Gosh I am absolutely thrilled to be answering your ticket today" - I know it probably makes me a bitter old user but it is a recent deeply annoying addition to support responses, and makes me assume AI is being used for first replies. To be fair to you though, at least it's a fast response!

[JamesWeatherill]

Any chance you could stop support being so over the top like "Gosh I am absolutely thrilled to be answering your ticket today" - I know it probably makes me a bitter old user but it is a recent deeply annoying addition to support responses, and makes me assume AI is being used for first replies. To be fair to you though, at least it's a fast response!

Fair play! I think you might be referring to the AI support bot which can be a bit effusive, as well as occassionally offering unasked for therapy for your data issues. I think this is a general issue with all Large Language Models at the moment. As you say the trade off is speed, as it can answer questions immediately 24/7. Both quality and tone will improve fast with each underlying LLM model iteration, so hang in there.

[PotNoodleTech]

Fair play! I think you might be referring to the AI support bot which can be a bit effusive, as well as occassionally offering unasked for therapy for your data issues. I think this is a general issue with all Large Language Models at the moment. As you say the trade off is speed, as it can answer questions immediately 24/7. Both quality and tone will improve fast with each underlying LLM model iteration, so hang in there.

 

How do we know your not an AI model? Latest gen LLM model???