September 2011

What Can You Expect From Customer Support at Help/Systems?

Our customer support gets rave reviews from our customers—how do we make this happen time and time again, year after year?

Our People

First of all, we’re very picky about who we let answer your questions. Sounds simple, but we make great effort to hire the right people. We have a motto that “We don’t hire jerks.” We do hire patient, smart, thoughtful people who care about your needs and go beyond just answering your questions. You’ll find that our support people stay with the company. Once hired, we treat them right. Another motto we have is, “Happy employees make happy customers.” It works. You can meet them here.

No “Voice Mail Jail”

Second, we make sure that when you call Help/Systems, a human answers the phone. We staff our phones with real people, not a tangle of voice prompts and mail boxes. We answer our phones 7 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Thursday (and until 5 p.m. on Friday). We also have on-call support for emergency purposes outside of those times. Our technical consultants have 60 minutes to return your call, but the vast majority of calls are returned within minutes.

Expanded Support

We have support centers around the world including Schaumburg, Illinois; Reno, Nevada; Kent, Washington; Rochester, Minnesota; Melbourne, Victoria, Australia; Fleet, Hampshire, England; Zurich, Switzerland; and Paris, France.

Expectations

The key to our support methodology is to set expectations. Sounds simple, but it can be challenging. We listen to your question or issue, and respond while trying hard to keep the big picture in mind and the role our product plays in your organization. If the issue goes beyond what our first-level support or Technical Consultants, (TCs) have to offer, the issue is escalated to a Research Technical Consultant (RTC). Our RTCs have a vast amount of experience with each product they specialize in and also help test each product before we ship a new modification level.

Finally, our Maintenance Software Engineers (MSEs) get involved if the issue requires checking source code to determine why something works the way it is or if a change is warranted. Don’t be surprised if an MSE gets involved with your issue right on the phone, or during a WebEx remote control session.

WebEx

For the past five years, our tool of choice to support our customers has been WebEx from Cisco. It’s an Internet-based collaboration tool for presentation, meeting, audio conferencing, and remote desktop sharing and control. We’ve had great success using this tool in Support, Sales, and Marketing. In Support, it allows us to see exactly what the customer is seeing. With your OK, we can even take over desktop control of your PC and work directly in your environment. This allows us to quickly collect data to diagnose symptoms and resolve your issue. All of our support personnel—Robot, PowerTech, SEQUEL Software, Bytware, Skybot—use WebEx. Often, we’ll ask if we can record the session (video and audio) so the MSE can visually replay the scenario.

Survey Satisfaction Level

We continually survey the customers we work with and ask them how they feel about the support session they recently participated in. You can see the results here.

Management Visibility

The survey results are shared immediately with the TC. If your overall satisfaction rating is ever 4 or below, you can expect to be contacted for information about what we could do differently or better. If you’re ever not satisfied with the support you’re receiving, please call and ask for a Product Support Manager. We guarantee you’ll be satisfied with the results.

A Big Advantage

Our support philosophy, worldwide support team, and WebEx give us a distinct advantage over our competition. A TC in Paris recently shared an observation regarding a WebEx session, "With WebEx, I can work from Paris with a customer in Lima, Peru and another TC in Minnesota!" Cool!

Contributed by Chuck Losinski, Product Support Manager

The Care and Feeding of Your Robot Products

So, do Robot products really need to be fed? Well no, but they do need updating on occasion.

When Should You Update?

Depending on your industry and the regulations and guidelines you follow, you might update your Robot products when each update is available (typically quarterly). However, if change control and system downtime are big issues for you, you might update less often.For example, many of our customers have to go through a test or validation process (perhaps due to COBIT guidelines) each time they update their vendor products, before they can put the products into production. This obviously has an impact on the frequency of their updates. That being said, you should update your products to keep pace with the ever-changing technology.

Operating System Upgrades

Are you migrating from i5/OS 5.4 to IBM i 6.1, or from IBM i 6.1 to 7.1? All of these operating system release levels are supported by Help/Systems, but we do have a minimum modification level for each product that is compatible with the release of the operating system. Before you update to a higher level of the operating system, please check the Recommended Product/Operating System Compatibility chart.

Product Enhancements and Fixes

We continually improve our products to make them even more robust and compatible with today’s complex computing environments. Your technical support representative may ask you to update your software to take advantage of recent product improvements or fixes. The latest product updates are on our website.

Converting to a New Version

Depending on the product and the version you are migrating to, this process can be an easy product update (such as moving from Robot/SCHEDULE 10 to 11); or may require some planning because of product dependencies (such as moving from Robot/ NETWORK 9 to 10). We include conversion instructions when you download a conversion.

Downloading the Software

All of our product trials, updates, and conversions are available from our website, so there’s no need to request a CD.

Note: Software trials also require a trial code from your Regional Sales Manager.

The process is easy:

Register on the Help/Systems website.
Choose Download An Update or Download A Conversion.
Enter the serial number of the system where the software is located and click Submit. Each product has its own instructions.

The Installation, Update, and Conversion Process

After you download the product to your desktop, the most common way to install or update the software is to use the Robot Product Maintenance Wizard. This wizard runs from your PC desktop, uploads the new product software to your IBM i system, and starts the installation or update process. (For more information, see the Help/FACTS, Using the Robot Product Maintenance Wizard.) Another method is to download an ISO image of our installation CD to place into an IFS directory and use the IBM i Image Catalog feature (click here for more information).

After You’re Done

The Help/Systems installation process restores three libraries—HSBOOT, RBTCDRLIB, and HSSAVF—to your system. In case you’re doing multiple installations, we don’t remove them from your system. You can delete them when you’re finished with your installations.