Arbor Support - or lack of

[SpreadsheetJockey]

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.

 

I suppose I should be happy that the AI is so very enthused by answering support tickets rather than planning a Skynet-like takeover...

[supportman]

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.

 

Just had a great experience for my issue with Smoothwall tech support! No AI chatbots, no call queues, just quick knowledgeable email direct support.

 

1st line noticed an issue with our SSL certificate and advised a fix, spoke good English and was clear that my original Radius accounting enquiry needed to go to 2nd line which he did quickly.

 

2nd line support responded within 20mins to it being escalated. Noticed the issue right away and suggested a fix on our Unify setup.

 

Call was resolved within 24hrs. Please pass on my thanks to Chris and Matthew at smoothwall support.

 

A breath of fresh air!

Edited March 13, 2025 by supportman

[tom_newton]

Thanks - I have posted this companywide, it's always great to get nice feedback.

[snagrat]

I nearly came here the other day to say how great Arbor support is. And to a degree I still agree with that.

 

However, if you have a migration issue get hold of someone is a nightmare. We have four schools migrating, two which haven’t received any log in details yet. The onboarding team just tell us it’s done and the leads have been emailed - they haven’t. Any email communication takes 24 hours to reply. I’ve even passed on my contact details for someone to ring me but no one does.

 

Account manager is useless and has also confirmed he can’t do anything more.

 

A couple of disappointed schools, and a very annoyed MAT

[jhothersall]

Today the phone lines are down !!! Not great 

[daturum]

We considered going direct with Arbor Support when our third-party MIS support came up for renewal because our technical questions were getting stuck between our support unit and Arbor and we thought it might be easier to deal with them directly. However, their pricing model appears to be discouraging this because it was not much cheaper and it was actually possible to find a third-party support unit that was cheaper than getting supported by Arbor directly. So I would recommend finding a decent MIS support unit, although it might be a bit late for the next financial year now.

Edited March 28, 2025 by daturum

[SpreadsheetJockey]

On 12/03/2025 at 16:01, JamesWeatherill said:

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.

 

Just to update this forum, in fair play, the Arbor bot replies are far better now, and much less... manic. They also state they are a bot now (more or less), which makes it much less frustrating because it doesn't feel like a support person didn't bother to read your email properly. So, nice job Arbor. I would still rather have a real person, but I can see it would be cost saving to try to bounce as many basic query tickets as possible before a real person gets involved.

[jtcoops]

We've signed up for support with a third party as even when a human gets involved with Arbor it takes far too long to actually get a resolution to a problem.  It may be a cost saving to Arbor to frontline with a bot, but it's not a cost saving for schools that need issues resolved quickly.

 

Even if they had a support team on hand for the first few weeks after going live it would save a lot of grief as generally that is when more assistance is needed after a migration.