Why is modern Support so bad, is it just Framework's support? A perspective from a tier 3 technical support worker

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On the support side of things, there’s a few factors at play. As someone who works in tech support currently, It’s a bit of a logistical nightmare from a business perspective. You can’t afford quality support since consumers don’t want to eat the costs or pay for higher quality support.

Tech support is frequently broken down into tiers. Tier 1 support is frequently outsourced to MSPs (Managed Service Providers) who build companies, usually in countries outside of the US. Lithuania and India are common. Indian workers tend to work 12 hour days every weekday and sometimes on the weekends at odd hours due to operating at American hours and being on the other side of the world.

In tier 1 support what you’ll see is people who are not very knowledgeable, who are reading things in their 2nd language, and are dealing with very high ticket counts. The technical support provided is usually based off of knowledge case articles which are frequently not going to cover all of the details. As they become more experienced they begin to know more than the knowlege base articles convey, but frequently their hands are tied to only do what the knowledge base articles tell them to.

After tier 1 support comes tier 2 and 3. These higher levels of support tend to have more time to look at issues individually, more experience in the field and company, and they will have people who are somewhat working off of knowledge base articles, but are allowed to use their heads to think about their problems. The number of tier 2 & 3 technicians are fewer than tier 1. It’s a bit like a pyramid structure with the amount of higher level techs being fewer.

This is pretty much the structure across the board for all companies, but the design can vary a bit depending on the company and some use things like swarm support or other things.

From what I can see from others’ interactions with Framework support they have a bit of a hive approach. There is no ‘ticket ownership’ where the tier 1 technicians have ‘ownership’ of a ticket until it’s resolution. This is what’s causing a disjointed experience where you have to repeat yourself or reiterate an issue. A different person is looking at the issue, if not after each reply then after every X number of days or hours.

The cost of technical support is very high but the company as a whole is treating users like internal employees to their company. I work technical support for internal users within my company and do not provide external support to people who bought a product. Their quality and level of support is similar and they seem to be doing a similar level of job to what my company does. Mind you, my company is a very large multi-national company which ranks very high in terms of revenue worldwide.

My experience with getting parts replacements for issues for Dell laptops is that they require really excessive ‘evidence’ for issues. They frequently label manufacturing defects as user issues, such as their ethernet clips breaking, and when they send a technician out they frequently brick mainboards.

So, what I see is a lot of people are frustrated with Framework’s technical support for issues. The feelings people are having are valid, it’s a frustrating experience, but keep in mind that a lot of other companies are offering worse support experiences and they are charging an arm and a leg for the support that is being offered. Framework is offering their support for free, they are replacing parts that are frequently user damaged at no cost to the user, and they are going above and beyond to allow users to order parts that are frequently not supplied by other companies.

Premium support is something that framework could do, but keep in mind the associated costs that come with it. The only places where I’ve seen premium support is where it is being paid for in the price of the product.

The support experience of companies like Microsoft, Dell, etc are frequently something you are paying an arm and a leg for, have worse experiences with, and can’t get parts for repairs from.

While consumer expectations are important from a business perspective, it’s also important to consider the relative experience that they are offering. From the view of a tier 3 tech worker, they are going above and beyond to resolve issues that most companies would just say, not supported go kick rocks for.

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…but that perspective does not make the business grow. As challenging and complex as it already is, technical support is very much result and experience (of the customer) driven (gauged by). Second to the product doing what it’s meant to do, reliably, dependably.

Personally, I belong to the bucket of end-user who do purchase NBD or 4-hr on-site support anything from 3 to 5 years…depending on the city I’m in. Framework has yet to have this infrastructure to offer this level of support, and I would love to see that available (I’ve been hoping for that since 2021, which was premature at the time, of course).

e.g. (Server / enterprise / corporate support entitlement…)
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/9nd96d/does_dell_really_replace_failed_parts_in_4_hours/?rdt=54562

As an example: Back in 2005, 2008 and 2010, I was able to walk into Lenovo’s Service Centre in HK to get the laptop repaired in-person (dropped off, coffee, picked up again within 2 hours). (Three different ThinkPads, each with global service entitlement 4-hr on-site response. But HK is such a small city, it was quicker that I cross the street and walk in). That was my gold-standard experience back then. In North America, it’s mostly NBD on-site. Granted, whether the cost of the support entitlement is worth it does depend on what the down-time is worth. To me, CAD 500 ish to cover 3-5 years (depending on the model) is well worth it.

Right now, with Framework, we just have to accept it is what it is. (And of course it’s unreasonable to expect what I mentioned above from a 3-4 year-old company…but if it does happen, it’ll definitely be the candy I’ve longed for). The ‘option’ needs to be there in due time, and customers can then decide for themself if they need it. But at this moment, it’s pretty much everyone in the same queue.

Just to nitpick… Not truly “free”, you mean for no additional charge, and also legally required by the terms of sale that Framework put forth. It’s included in their pricing (you hope Framework had priced it right, and not running a charity, right?).

I don’t know. The stats are not public knowledge…and what’s frequently here?

Well, that is their pitch…which they ought to follow through.

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That level of enterprise support can be nice, but does indeed come from much larger companies that can afford distribution centers across various parts of the world as well as partners who hold parts in warehouses and have contractors drive out to deliver. It also is baked into the excessive margins that those parts are priced at, so the scope is a bit different.

A lot has changed since 2010 in terms of costs of labor, parts, etc. I don’t know any companies that offer good support in 2024. Apple overcharges you, locks you into their ecosystem, has god awful technicians that basically tell you that you need a new laptop. Microsoft even at the corporate level offers some of the worst support I’ve seen. Dell frequently denies support requests labeling issues as user damage in the business and consumer environment. That’s leaving aside the poor repairability and planned obsolescence that most large companies (even outside of consumer electronics) bake into their products these days.

The quality of Lenovo’s modern laptops deserves an honorable mention as well, just as an aside.

True, I touched on not truly free costs of support in the beginning in that it eats into product margins or increases costs from a business perspective, but yes, not truly free.

As for frequently user damaged, most of the repairs or replacements I see at my company are pretty clearly user damage (though users never seem to know how it happens, lie, or treat their devices like an old Nokia phone). That’s when it’s not an issue with a manufacturing defect, which is a smaller but significant portion of repairs.

My point here is that they are replacing clearly user damaged parts in systems in a similar way that my company does for end users. I’ve read a number of posts in the forum where it’s pretty clear that the user was at fault, or is not understanding something that still gets a part shipped. They do err on the side of the user from what I’ve seen so far in my own interactions and within forum posts.

Things could be better, documentation could be better, processes could be better, etc etc etc. The point I’m making is that customer support is hell right now in the consumer electronics world, but the support being offered actually favors the end user of the product even though it’s slow and even though it’s frustrating.

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I’m inclined to agree with you. There are some things Framework does that I find especially commendable. I am truly enamored with their technical documentation. Somebody FINALLY decided that PDFs were not the right way to do documentation over the web. They have HTML files - with places for people to enter feedback and advice. They show you how to do the steps using videos. Some of the videos I think could be improved - but let’s not nitpick.

My Framework 16 has been unable to power up since October 29th. I’ve replaced the mainboard, the power button/fingerprint reader, I’ve had the battery in, I’ve had the battery out, I’ve tried using my own power supplies and my own cables… I am really at wits end.

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Framework does differentiate between regular damages and “Customer Induced Damage”. Nevertheless, there are damages that will occur given the nature of Frameworks product, because most people, even tech enthusiasts, are not (yet) used to tinker with the innards of laptops unlike with PCs.

The Framework Laptop 16, being a 1st gen. product, is furthermore way more prone to fabrication and handling errors than the Framework Laptop 13, partially caused by unrefined design choices, and its documentation being way more incomplete and lacking, as I can say from my own experiences, because at some point I went to look at the FL13 documentation for a part, that was still missing in the FL16 one. It’s been half a year ago, so sadly I forgot which one it was.

The only issue I have with the support recently, is that after they took unusually long to reply, I got an auto-message after my reply stating, that they can reply faster, if I were to use the service request form … really? Even for replies to issues that are already being addressed? Are you sure, you’re not going to repeat yourselves with the conversation history being lost that way?

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I take that you’re working with support already?

I’d recommend detailing everything in a community support thread as well, but looking at your post history, after the bios loses power due to the RTC bios battery being disconnected, on the first boot it can take 5-30 minutes for the ram to train on the mainboard, then things usually boot normally. If you have an ungodly amount of ram your mainboard may take even longer.

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I did qualify the statement with the above, though I didn’t explicitly state that.

Limitations

This Warranty does not apply to:

Normal wear and tear.
On products marked Refurbished or Factory Seconds, cosmetic issues that do not impact product functionality.
Damage caused by misuse, accident, neglect, or abuse.
Damage caused by repair that does not follow Framework-published repair guides.
Damage caused by third-party parts or modules not tested and certified by Framework.
Framework-branded products and parts purchased from unauthorized sources.
Non-Framework-branded products or parts.  Third-party manufacturers and sellers may provide their own warranties.
Software or services, including the operating system.  See the software or service license terms for details on the applicable software or service.

What I’m saying specifically is they err on the side of being generous within their warranty to the user in comparison to many other companies support systems.

Yep my mainboard for the 11th gen intel on the 13" definitely is the main reason I did not want the 16" laptop. Their first iteration for major bleeding edge features has had issues historically. Their engineering process definitely could be improved.

Support historically slows down when new models are released and they ignore users who ‘spam’ technicians. Their processes stand for improvement.

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Could you please be more specific about what you mean by the term “err” in this context?

My experiences with Framework support so far gave me the impression of them being service-oriented. I always had to prove my case with numerous photos before receiving anything, and that’s fully legitimate to avoid exploitation. I never felt any error or leniency in that process, and that’s how it should be. Being a service technician myself, I wouldn’t expect otherwise.

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I’ve had the same experience, that Framework mostly chooses, in ambiguous cases, to give me the benefit of the doubt. For example, recently, they sent me a new input cover instead of letting me just buy a new touchpad like I was going to, even though mine was out of warranty. Was it a hardware defect, or just normal variability or wear, or did I damage it? In any case, by rights, it was out of warranty, but I’m getting a free replacement.

I saw the same thing some time ago with a USB failure, where one of my ports stopped working with USB 3. They sent me a new motherboard. I wouldn’t have expected that. By rights, with the warranty expired, the presumption should have been that I broke it.

They did go through all the lengthy, repetitive collection of photos and so on. It would be nice if somehow there could be less scripted reactions and more continuity in the interactions. But overall, their policies seem to be customer-favoring to a degree that might be against the balance of fairness (and don’t really seem sustainable to me, but maybe these issues I ran into were particular ones they were investigating, or something like that).

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Did they provide any kind of reasoning, why they replaced something out of warranty free of charge?
One possible reason I could fathom, could be curiosity about your hardware, making them replace it free of charge in order to be able to investigate it thoroughly after you returned the faulty part, to understand the origin of its errors in order to improve it in the next iteration.

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They didn’t give any explanation. Maybe it’s like you said, and they wanted to inspect the hardware.

They did say that these were one-off exceptions to policy.

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Err meaning to be on the side of.

I erred on the side of caution.

Basically framework support tends to favor the user.

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I am in the process of going through all of the E-mails and putting them into a narrative. I had hoped there would be an easy way to do that. They send their E-mails in a weird format that winds up looking like HTML but isn’t, and the time stamps on the messages are frequently out of order, so the process has been more time consuming that I had expected.

On the other hand, I was able to find the exact comment I made that support missed. Had they caught it, that might have saved 2 weeks of troubleshooting.

I do not want to fault them too much for that. I used to be in customer support. On more than one occasion, I missed something that turned out to be important. On more than one occasion, I caught something important that everybody else had missed. Troubleshooting is like that sometimes.

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