Ticket Response Time?

[Lucas]

Hi,

I was just wondering what's the average response time on tickets? I have made two tickets after purchasing IPB over 24 hours ago and have yet to receive a response. This are not support tickets but simply requesting the IP.Content discount offered when purchasing the IPB and IP.Content together, as well as receiving my customer status on the forum.

[Lockjit]

I'm sure you request will be dealt with after the weekend.

[Brandon D]

Or possibly before, there are still staff popping in and out. You have to remember they're a bit short staffed considering Christmas and New Years.

[Hatsu]

And you're quite sure not the only one submitting a ticket.

[Mark]

Hi Lucas,

Sorry for the delay. There's less staff around on the weekend, particularly in service and sales.
It seems you're not logged in with the same Email address you use for the client area, so I couldn't locate your ticket otherwise I would have replied myself. I'm sure someone will get back to you first thing tomorrow :)

[Lucas]

Yeah, after making the purchase it seems it created me a new account with the e-mail I used, so I cannot change this account e-mail. I guess I'll open another ticket and request the automated account to be deleted and this one to be put as a customer with the e-mail corrected.

[Ambar]

It's still holiday in Va, I also have a ticket.. but of course I expect to wait till monday... for help... not a problem :) aways great service ! at IPB :)

[Ditchmonkey]

My experience with tier one support has been very good with average response times being at just a few hours. Tier two support is a different story however and time to resolution there has probably averaged over a week for me which I do not find acceptable.

[Michael]

We don't make any claims that all tickets will be resolved in X number of hours, just that they will be responded to. Some issues just take more investigation than others.

[Mark]

The point of the Tier 2 support is that it is a complicated issue which requires more time to investigate. ;)

I would just like to point out that almost every day before I go to lunch and when I finish for the day, there are no tickets in Tier 2. If an issue takes a week to resolve, it could be that we need a lot of time to investigate it, we need to discuss it amongst ourselves, we need input from your hosting provider, you might be slow replying back to us or any combination of those - tickets are never left sitting their unanswered though.

Remember when discussing "resolution time" versus "reply time" - resolution time is a two-way effort, if we don't hear back from the customer, or the customer doesn't give us the information we need or doesn't follow our advice (all quite common) - that will increase the time the ticket takes to resolve, but there's not much we can do about that.

[Ditchmonkey]

I would just like to point out that almost every day before I go to lunch and when I finish for the day, there are no tickets in Tier 2. If an issue takes a week to resolve, it could be that we need a lot of time to investigate it, we need to discuss it amongst ourselves, we need input from your hosting provider, you might be slow replying back to us or any combination of those - tickets are never left sitting their unanswered though.

Part of the problem is that if you are a US based customer and you are assigned a tech 2 person across the atlantic then timely communication becomes pretty difficult. My last tech 2 experience was pretty horrible and at this point I'd rather pay my own developers to attempt to fix a problem before I went through that again.

[Mark]

Part of the problem is that if you are a US based customer and you are assigned a tech 2 person across the atlantic then timely communication becomes pretty difficult. My last tech 2 experience was pretty horrible and at this point I'd rather pay my own developers to attempt to fix a problem before I went through that again.

This is understandable. Obviously we want people to get the most efficient support possible, so if you end up with someone in a completely different timezone, we can probably hand it over to someone else.
There are certain issues which certain people are more specialist in (for example, I normally handle Subscriptions issues, Jason L normally handles character sets issues, etc.) and of course people take vacations, are sometimes unwell etc. so we cant ever guarantee you will or will not get any one person - but I do agree it makes sense to have someone in a timezone close to you. Next time you get a Tier 2 ticket, just ask :)

I should probably add a disclaimer that the guaranteed response times for whatever license you have is what we promise - we will do our best to do what we can beyond that, but that is the service level we guarantee.

[Mat Barrie]

Part of the problem is that if you are a US based customer and you are assigned a tech 2 person across the atlantic then timely communication becomes pretty difficult. My last tech 2 experience was pretty horrible and at this point I'd rather pay my own developers to attempt to fix a problem before I went through that again.

You should try my position. I've in a completely different timezone than all of their techs (GMT+12). I almost never end up online at the same time as one of their tier 2 techs. When I do, I'm usually pretty tired.

[skinbydragonfly]

Ditto, GMT +10 here, no down under support staff :P and yet I have never waited more than 12 hours for a response to something, usually much much less (sometimes in minutes) and over the years I have had several tier 2 issues, all resolved in a very acceptable timeframe.

[Oldcrow]

Same here.. Never more than two hours, mostly less than an hour..I find IPS Support excellent..

[jpg]

Well now this is confusing...

[Canal World]

Elephant....

So having made a ticket at 11am about having IPB upgrade our forum (asking for when they can do it, expected down time etc) what time is sensible to expect a reply?

[Charles]

Upgrade requests are lower priority than normal technical support. You can view license terms here: http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/purchase.php

Of course we are usually faster than what is posted there but those are our quoted response times.

[Canal World]

Upgrade requests are lower priority than normal technical support. You can view license terms here: http://www.invisionpower.com/products/board/purchase.php

Of course we are usually faster than what is posted there but those are our quoted response times.

Sounds fair enough.
- Any idea how long it would take to effect the upgrade, in terms of length off down time, when it occurs?

[Fishfish0001]

Depends if somethings goes haywire. You can ask in your ticket and the Tech will give you an estimate. Shouldn't be too long for 3.1.1 to 3.1.2 :) Hope it goes well.

[bfarber]

An upgrade *typically* takes 20-30 minutes probably, depending mainly on the size of your site and how good your server's connection is. There are a lot of variables, however, so an estimate really isn't worth much. ;)

[Canal World]

Just thought a bit of feedback was required.

We have just upgraded our forum to run V3 which was done by IPS. We have been debating the upgrade for sometime but it was at short notice that i found myself with a free week which seems the right time to do the job. So I submitted a ticket requesting an upgrade, and after an exchange of about three messages top confirm a few details, a few hours later. All done. Down time was about 10 minutes. Cracking.

10hours later having got half way though processing the rebuilding of 500k posts we have on file the forum went down, but as the homepage was still up I assumed it was a software error and fired a emergency 'if your forum is down please tick this box' ticket at about 11 at night. Response time. 3minutes!

5 minutes after that they had got to the bottom of the problem, which actaully lied with the host pulling the plug for us hammering there server all day rather than with the software anyway. Top work.


Daniel

[MissNinja]

I'd like to chime in also and say that I've always found IPS support phenomenal. Recently I had a ticket completely resolved in under 20 minutes, and it wasn't even an urgent issue that had my community unusable. I put in a ticket for an upgrade and everything was done within an hour or two of me submitting it. The only time I've ever waited more than a day (even on weekends, which surprised me because I thought IPS was closed on weekends) was when I had a tier 2 support ticket, and even that was resolved in only two days.

IPS support is among the best I've gotten for anything I've had.

[Collin S.]

(even on weekends, which surprised me because I thought IPS was closed on weekends) was when I had a tier 2 support ticket, and even that was resolved in only two days.

Just to clear some things up here:
The "base level" client support is, in fact, staffed 24x7. The billing, account assistance, and sales department are only staffed M-F during work hours. For information on hours, see here.

Tier II and Tier III technical support are usually assigned to a specific programmer or developer for further review. Ie, a ticket about Nexus would most likely go to Mark, whereas an issue with a new feature in IP.Gallery would go to Matt so he can investigate.
These tiers usually have slower response times because the techs for these departments do not work 24x7 and may be away or unreachable.

However, most general support tickets are resolved quite rapidly.

Thanks for your feedback!

[Mark H.]

Well... we're not *quite* staffed 24/7 in Tier I Support, which is where I work, but it's close. Some nights, we do overlap shifts, but it's not always every night.

Still and all, thank you for the positive feedback. It's greatly appreciated. :)