I’ve reviewed the ticket and yes, the gaps in communications is due to our hours of operation. Your responses to our inquiries are coming in our very early morning when we do not have staffing available. We currently do not have 24/7 support given our small size as a company and will be adding a European hour shift in the coming weeks. We always strive to respond with 1 business day.
Your first inquiry into Support stated that you had written in previously and had been waiting 48 hours for a response, but per our system, no ticket was received at that time. You had written in on February 19th, and after a few troubleshooting steps communicated, we moved forward with replacement of the display kit on February 24th. On March 3rd you responded stating that the replacement display kit did not resolve the issue.
At this juncture, based on the troubleshooting steps we’ve provided, there is no known root cause to what you’ve described if the display kit did not resolve your issue. Nothing points to any specific component requiring replacement. The only option at this point is for us to get your original laptop back for diagnostics and refurbishment and send you a new replacement laptop. Please understand that the troubleshooting questions that are asked are to understand whether the issue is hardware or software-related and to narrow down a potential root cause to avoid unnecessary hardware replacement. We’ve been successful in resolving the majority of issues through this troubleshooting. Our agents have been polite and professional in their responses throughout the entire interaction. I understand you are frustrated by your situation, but there were multiple day gaps in responses back to us, and we were already on the path to this final step to potential resolution.
We still have quite a bit of maturing to do as a company (we’re still sub-50 employees globally) and we’ll continue to scale our operations in a way that is in-line with our continued growth to ensure we’re around for the long-term. Our Operations Lead will be responding to your ticket later this morning. Thank you.
Can confirm support have alwasy responded with a friendly and polite manner and responded within one business day, honestly your team is great in this respect and if this could be matched with more effective communication given the 24hr turnaround (for EU customers) on replies you would be top tier IMO. Currently it kinda reminds me of the inverse of “Lady One Question” from Banzai!
The greatest improvement could be the live chat solution mentioned above, this potentially could help with troubleshooting turnaround time greatly though costly I’m sure… Maybe down the road.
Live Support requires significantly more resource commitment including redundancy, and I think many underestimate the recurring costs associated with it. We’re still sitting at over 90% CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) lifetime, with an average 5/5 rating in survey responses, so while yes, we can’t meet the support expectations of 100% of our customers, we have to strike a balance in feasible operations and overall customer satisfaction. There will unfortunately always be times where we are unable to meet expectations on an individual basis, but we’ll always work within the guidelines we’re constantly adjusting based on feedback received to provide the best support we can as efficiently as possible.
@TheTwistgibber I think i have to address some issues that you’re papering over:
Firstly, i’d like to note that yes, your staff have always been courteous and replied appropriately on weekdays. It is also why, I have chosen to write this here, and not have to vent to a customer service person for asking for the POST message the third time or making me jump through hoops again connecting an external display when it was already tried before.
Firstly, if you go through the email trail, everything in the first week could have been done in one email. If you expect us to fix our own laptops, give us the right tools and information.
I don’t want to have to sit down every day, unscrew the laptop and reopen my laptop, pull out the battery, pull out the keyboard, etc another time because you guys couldn’t be bothered to write down the instructions all in one go.
Every day of the first week, i would open your email with another step that could have been done had someone taken the time to write it down in the previous email.
You’ve now replied that you don’t know what the issue is. You could made that call on the first week, because the post code hasn’t changed since then. Its taken you guys 1 week to send a display and its going to take you guys another week to send me the instructions to ship over the laptop? Why couldn’t you just have said that 2 weeks ago?
My key points are:
I bought the laptop for its repairability, not to have to repair it myself
If i have to repair it myself, i expect a company claiming “repairability” to offer me the right tools and information to diagnose and fix the issue. For example, no one in the email chain has even told me what the POST code mean, nor is that information even made available.
At the time frame you’re working on, i will not have a device for more than a month. This is not really any better than any other company that does not have some form of repairability claim. Really, a laptop without access to information and parts is not repairable.
Honestly, this is not the kind of support i’d expect, whether i am a techie or not.
Send me all the diagnostic steps if you want me to diagnose it myself
2a) You know what the issue is now: send replacement parts
2b) Don’t know what the issue is: send in the laptop for repair
The point is that your team, either deliberately or otherwise, is dragging out this process, and I am without a device for what now seems will be more than a month
Honestly, i can understand the turnaround times and timezones. That is all really fair. What i’m shocked is that they have had no idea what the issue is for over 2 weeks, and at no point did they say, “maybe send it in and we’ll have a look”.
The key issue with this is that I am now without a mobile device for almost 3 weeks, and if i have to send it in, i will be without one for what now seems like more than a month. Its affecting my travel plans as i now can’t travel for any meaningful time
This comment specifically is hinting toward the fact that we are acting in bad faith, which could not be further from the truth and is a completely unfair statement.
You are oversimplifying the Support process and are insinuating there is a blanket process that should be applied given your individual situation.
We will not provide all of the diagnostic steps for all potential issues in one-go. That is just not how you provide support and will lead to unnecessary frustration and human error in trying to self-diagnose issues. Overloading a customer with potentially hundreds of steps in multi-forked decision tree is not a solution. Even if that worked for the most tech-savvy individual, others could easily be overwhelmed with a wall of information and steps. This is why we have a knowledge base and our how-to guides.
Given that we couldn’t diagnose your issue after asking the correct questions, the only gap here is the time between responses, which we’ve determined is a mix of staffing availability in European hours (which is being rectified shortly) and delays in receipt of responses to our inquiries/troubleshooting steps.
We’ll have to agree to disagree with some of your comments in the previous post. As someone who has managed Support teams for nearly 20 years, I do think some of your expectations are unfortunately not in line with what can be provided at this time.
@TheTwistgibber fair enough. I did not mean to imply bad faith and i apologise for my badly worded statement. I also appreciate that you’ve taken the time to address my concerns.
I’m gong to refrain from commenting on the support process, as admittedly i have no inkling of what it takes.
I want to make it clear i am supportive of the RTR mission and any manufacturer that aims to further it.
That said, i have an expectation that the product i buy works, and if it doesn’t i receive timely support so that it doesn’t affect my own productivity.
I’m sure you’d understand that I will now be without a functional device for what seems will be more than a month. I don’t find this acceptable.
Of course, I can absolutely understand this can be frustrating, but the timeline of events contributes to the overall timing. We did hope that the replacement display kit would resolve your issue, and that was executed within days of your initial contact.
We’re sorry that you’ve been without a functional laptop for as long as you have, and we hope the replacement is smooth sailing for you going forward. Your original laptop will be analyzed and refurbished for future use.
I’m new here, getting up to speed while still waiting for my FW to be delivered. But I’m not an IT newbie, have been professionally employed in the computer industry for over five decades so feel I can comment from a perspective informed by a reasonable amount of experience.
First comment, without getting knickers in a twist about sensitivity to criticism and insinuation of bad faith, the second of these quotes clearly states the first is correct.
I see that as a philosophical choice about how to deliver support. Personally, I find that choice paternalistic, a bit condescending, and perhaps a touch arrogant. I know I’m being harsh, but it really rubs me the wrong way.
It fails to distinguish among various levels of knowledge on the part of support callers, and assumes the lowest common denominator for them. To me that seems an inappropriate view of customers who self selected for a higher standard by spending their money based on a DIY RTR product positioning.
I strongly urge Framework to rethink that philosophy. Perhaps at initial contact ask if the caller would like a comprehensive DIY troubleshooting guide, or to have their hand held to be led step by step through the process.
Might also be useful to qualify urgency by asking whether they are a hobbyist who can afford a month downtime, or trying to use Framework as a business tool where time is money and protracted downtime is unacceptable. For now I’m the former, goal of becoming the latter but this thread is making me wonder if Framework will be the wrong choice for that.
Just my .02 worth, take it as you will. Or maybe more like $2k+ worth, based on the coin I dropped into your coffers over the past few days…
Thank you for your feedback. It’s difficult for the Community to understand context without seeing verbatims from the conversion in Support, so much of what is digested is from what is provided by customers on social media and these forums. While I appreciate that you personally may feel that way about our support strategy, I promise you is has nothing to do with being paternalistic, condescending, or arrogant. It is based on real metrics/analytics, customer feedback, survey results, and years of shared experience across not one, but a number of support professionals that work here at Framework.
While it could be a common perception that many of our customers are more tech-savvy than most, and that starting the support conversation at a lower level and scaling based on the flow of the conversation is flawed or faulty, that is actually not the case, and many of our customers that purchase DIY versions are entering the realm for the very first time and need assistance. While we have spent considerable effort in building step-by-step “how-to” guides (https://guides.frame.work) and our knowledge base (https://knowledgebase.frame.work) to allow customers the freedom to have access to all the information in one-go should they attempt to self-service any experienced issue, many do still contact Framework Support. Our company has unique support scenarios as our mission and our strategy increases the breadth of the support we need to provide and can take us down hundreds of possible forks/paths to determine what the next course of action is. Our product allows for an almost infinite amount of customization through thousands of brands and configurations of components, numerous Operating System flavors, an immeasurable number of peripherals (docks, e-GPUs, hubs, external displays, etc.), and many customers, while understandably frustrated with their current situation, do tend to default to believing the hardware is faulty and needs to be replaced, when in reality, it’s a software, component, or peripheral incompatibility or failure that is not related to the original hardware in question. Shipping out replacement hardware without proper troubleshooting is counter to our mission, increases unnecessary operational spend, increases carbon footprint, and when that hardware doesn’t actually resolve the problem, increases customer frustration. Our Support team probes to better understand what path to take next based on the feedback we receive from the customer at each step as the next path could potentially be in a wildly different direction based on what is provided. Sometimes, we may not receive a response from a customer for multiple weeks at a time because, as we all understand and empathize with, life happens. If we were to provide too much information upfront, feedback we’ve received numerous times is that we’ve overloaded them, they become frustrated with the information, and no longer want to make an effort to troubleshoot because they feel it’s overly complicated. Our mission is to make technology more accessible to everyone, not just those that spend a significant portion of time with tech and are able to navigate complex issues with little external guidance.
As to your mention of a month of downtime, it’s critical to understand that there will always be outliers, sometimes extreme, based on context that the Community does not have. Our Support team will make mistakes, sure, as we’re handling thousands of inquiries, but an assumption that there’s a frequency of extended support timing that begins to creep into the realm of normalcy would be false. In the interest of transparency, for the month of February 2023:
93.14% of all submitted support tickets were responded to within 1 business day
The average ticket resolution timing across all submitted tickets was 31.71 hours
We do appreciate you making a purchase decision to join the Framework Family as I can see your recent laptop purchase in our order system. While I cannot promise that we will adjust support strategy to be more in-line with the expectations you’ve described, I WILL promise that we will continue to evaluate and update our process, structure, and procedures based on customer feedback, metrics/analytics, resourcing availability, and scaling strategy as we continue to grow our small company.
@Twistgibber thanks for the thoughtful and constructive response. I’m very used to the problems outliers present, frequently being one myself. So I’ll consistently try to advocate for nuanced accommodations, and appreciate the inference that you’re at least open to such, within the constraints of a small growing organization. I do really hope you’ll rethink this particular perspective:
It’s in your self interest. The more people can correctly self-diagnose issues the less they burden support with avoidable calls.
It’s also in my best interest, as I’m most often finding myself better able to diagnose issues than the Help Desk/Service Desk/Support engineers I’m working with, especially at Tier 1 level. Not diminishing any of them, just that I’ve been doing this longer than they have.
This is a two sided sword. While yes, theoretically, it can help customers understand and solve their own problems, it can also cause them to try things they shouldn’t which causes more issues down the road.
Customer support is a very complicated issue and I’m afraid nothing that you can completely satisfy everyone with.
While I agree with you I believe that at least replying would be nice.
I have been trying for weeks to just have my email changed and accomplished nothing
Something isn’t right here. I did the same and it took less than 2 interactions (just to verify my identity) to get it switched over. While support has been backed up because of the Framework Laptop 16 launch, if you haven’t heard back at all, something went wrong.
I have been trying…
first time they replied and told me that my email was not valid and told me why ( and i agree is a little stupid…) since then I provided a new email and kept trying
I am now in my third attempt in a multi week struggle (actually more than a month now)…
I still believe that the support team is doing a great job (based on the first interaction) but clearly the is a problem somewhere along the chain
How many times have you gone back and forth with them? Multi-week doesn’t tell me anything, as that could be any combination of them being temporarily delayed due to number of tickets and you taking a few days to respond to their requests.
i talked to them in the end of july about 3 or 4 replies great support… then they didn’t reply to the last one.
after that I tried again and never got a response (repeated this step twice now)
The multi-week is the time without any response besides a confirmation that they recived my ticket.
So I’ll consistently try to advocate for nuanced accommodations, and appreciate the inference that you’re at least open to such, within the constraints of a small growing organization. I do really hope you’ll rethink this particular perspective: