Smoothwall - Really poor support

[AlphamaleZed]

I dont know about you guys but smoothwalls support have gone really downhill.

takes a few day in 1st line and always goes to 2nd line. from there they barely respond with the least helpful information.

I barely have any SLAs met.

 

Switched over to cloudfilter in January but it's not what I expected at all.

 

Is it time for me to move on once my renewal happens, any recommended partner to move over to?

I mean usually you lose out by going with the cheapest and this is probably one of the most expensive out there. You do not get what you pay for!

[tom_newton]

Can you ping me your details so I can look into the tickets in question?

I know support have had a harder time than normal this last few months, we've lost a few team members, and replacing folks isnt a quick job!

[GK1999]

Smoothwall, in general, is in the gutter. 

 

I've had about 3 account managers. I paid for engineer's time back in September 2025, still yet have the session with them. They only responded as I kicked off via an email, even then their response was incredibly flippant. 

 

It's a shame, because I have just signed up for a 3 year deal. If it was up to me I would cancel the contract and go with another company who seems to care. 

 

G

 

[JDawgg]

Currently looking at moving provision away from SchoolsBroadband so this is interesting as Smoothwall would be the preferred solution.  

[GK1999]

1 minute ago, JDawgg said:

Currently looking at moving provision away from SchoolsBroadband so this is interesting as Smoothwall would be the preferred solution.  

The product is good...

[tom_newton]

I'm not claiming we are perfect - far from it, and please do get in touch with your details as well @GK1999, anything we can learn from would be really great (sometimes a second set of eyes on a situation is useful). Having said that, unless one of your account managers has gone on maternity leave, 3 seems high, although the team has had a little reshuffle recently in order make sure each team member only has as many schools to work with as the next.

[AlphamaleZed]

9 minutes ago, tom_newton said:

I'm not claiming we are perfect - far from it, and please do get in touch with your details as well @GK1999, anything we can learn from would be really great (sometimes a second set of eyes on a situation is useful). Having said that, unless one of your account managers has gone on maternity leave, 3 seems high, although the team has had a little reshuffle recently in order make sure each team member only has as many schools to work with as the next.

If you are charging higher prices than competitors as least back it up, I know the job market at the moment is not the best but there is no communications to say its busier than usual. Poor me had to result to edugeek lol.

I have raised this multiple times with my account manager over the last 5 years and just fallen on deaf ears about the whole process etc... It's just really gone downhill.

[AlphamaleZed]

35 minutes ago, GK1999 said:

Smoothwall, in general, is in the gutter. 

 

I've had about 3 account managers. I paid for engineer's time back in September 2025, still yet have the session with them. They only responded as I kicked off via an email, even then their response was incredibly flippant. 

 

It's a shame, because I have just signed up for a 3 year deal. If it was up to me I would cancel the contract and go with another company who seems to care. 

 

G

 

I think yo may be able to get out of contract early if they breach SLA double check with https://smoothwall.com/support-agreement and GPT.

Any provider you are looking to move to?

[TechMonkey]

Just to counter, we have just had our annual account manager check-up, have a health check booked in and issues raised have been dealt with.

 

Support, I generally have great responses, but it does depend on the issue.  Having used Smoothwall for 20+ years I can generally sort most issues out myself, so I understand, and appreciate, first line escalating my issue to second line.  That is usual about how I communicate the issue and state what I have done and tried.  In fact, the usual issue I hear techs moan about companies is first line holding on to the ticket two long.

 

I do have an outstanding ticket that I am waiting on a response but that is down to it being a real interesting one that is hard to pinpoint so, being a tech person myself, I understand that it isn't going to be an easy fix.

 

So in balance, support being in the gutter and having gone really downhill I feel are hyperbole, but as with all companies there are always improvements.

[AlphamaleZed]

9 minutes ago, TechMonkey said:

Just to counter, we have just had our annual account manager check-up, have a health check booked in and issues raised have been dealt with.

 

Support, I generally have great responses, but it does depend on the issue.  Having used Smoothwall for 20+ years I can generally sort most issues out myself, so I understand, and appreciate, first line escalating my issue to second line.  That is usual about how I communicate the issue and state what I have done and tried.  In fact, the usual issue I hear techs moan about companies is first line holding on to the ticket two long.

 

I do have an outstanding ticket that I am waiting on a response but that is down to it being a real interesting one that is hard to pinpoint so, being a tech person myself, I understand that it isn't going to be an easy fix.

 

So in balance, support being in the gutter and having gone really downhill I feel are hyperbole, but as with all companies there are always improvements.

Lucky lol I wish I had that.

Health checkups usually all good from them but we do not make large changes where there would be error.

 

[Disease]

I have 3rd party support with Co-connect for our Smoothwall and they are fantastic.

[Norphy]

It's admittedly been a long time since I've had to call on Smoothwall support (4+ years!) but back then,  I generally found with them that getting past L1 could be a challenge but once you got to one of their engineers, they were absolutely superb. There was one problem where we had an Intel 10GBe NIC installed in the server was causing a kernel panic. The problem turned out to be a faulty Intel driver. The engineer sent me a patch with the new driver and it got resolved properly in the subsequent build. 

 

They were also very quick to answer queries about filtering and lists; if I had an issue with an incorrect block, that got sorted very quickly.

Edited April 20 by Norphy