Time to answer support
 

HI,

Just wondering what people's experience of a support wait is ? Opened a ticket approx 24 hrs ago, contacted a couple of hours later and told it would need to be escalated to a supervisor. Since then nothing.

I feel a bit let down. Have been using Fastmail for 10+ years and have a company account with 12 employees on it, so we're chosing to spend some reasonable $$ on the service.

I think 24 hrs is (way?) too long...but I'm running out of time here. Unless it's fixed I need to move servers...

Can't speak for your particular situation, but I was disappointed how long it took (days of back and forth) to resolve a pretty simple issue with their sister service, POBox.com. You may be falling into some time zone issues since the mothership is in Australia.

Experiences with support over the years have varied tremendously. At times, it has been a weakness in FastMail's service. At other times, people have been satisfied. My own experience has been that initial response to problem tickets has been fast, but what happens when support requests are escalated depends greatly on who it is escalated to, and other tasks the individual is involved in. It does not seem there is proper tracking and response time standards for escalated support requests. Only first line support is subject to such evaluation.

Well FWIW, they got back to me in more or less exactly 24 hrs... and turned out wasn't a Fastmail issue, was a different provider... so still feel this is a bit long, but they helped resolve something that wasn't their fault, so overall not bad.

Some way of escalating things would be a good idea IMHO... Hey, even charge me (like the other provider did) at least give me the option...

I am extremely disappointed with the quality of Fastmail's support. It has really gone downhill over the years and I can only classify the current situation as unacceptable.

I have a ticket that is open 3 weeks already, and my own investigation suggests that FM incorrectly implements an RFC, but it is impossible to discuss it directly with a technically competent person.

I miss the days when I would just shoot an email to Rob and the next day there will be a reply from him either telling me that the problem is solved or explaining why exactly the problem is not with FM.

Yes they were the goooooooooooood old days. :D:D:D

I experienced several times that long outstanding calls are (automatically?) closed. :mad: At Pobox, but I assume it's the same support desk as FM.

I think you're right on that. Seems like the first responder must have a certain deadline to work on issues but after escalating the effectiveness drops.

The problem is that the "first responders" are working from a script and are completely inadequate for helping with anything that falls outside of it.

In fairness to FastMail, I think the first responders are more capable than the random warm bodies employed by some other services. They are capable of some degreee of independent thought, and can sometimes resolve problems that are not just a matter of following a flowchart. That does not alter the basic problem that, when the first line support cannot help, response to issues becomes unreliable and erratic.

I dealt with FastMail support twice while I was setting up my account a couple of weeks ago. Each time, they took eight to ten hours to respond. I don't know if the time difference (15 hours between Melbourne and me) had anything to do with the response time, but I didn't find it unacceptable. It was in line with a recent experience with MediaTemple, which is a not exactly inexpensive host and is better than many of its competitors when it comes to support.