Kentico’s support, Where are you???
I know in a previous post, I mentioned how active Kentico is in trying to help you out with issues, even though it may take a day or so. I am going to over react a bit and say I take all that back.
I understand the need to charge for support at some points but I also believe that you should only charge support if you have a great deal of knowledge base, FAQ’s, and troubleshooting information easily found at the tips of someones finger tips. This is not saying that Kentico doesn’t have a bunch of documentation, but the quality of the support documents is low and to search for anything specific is a nightmare on Kentico’s Development site.
I have had some issues in the past (when I was a paying support client of Kentico’s) and would always go to their documentation and come up completely empty hoping by some chance of luck that I would find something. When I couldn’t find what I needed I would email Kentico’s support and I could expect a follow up email from them about a day later. Most of the time they where helpful.
Now that my year of support is over I cannot get any support help at all. I have emailed, tweated, left messages in forums but no help. The only reason I need any support is because of what I believe to be an upgrade bug from 3.1 to 4.1 from Kentico themselves. I could understand If I gave them no details of my problem but I spelled it out and sent the error I was getting, and I could understand If my problem was a problem with some custom programming done but this site had none.
So now I am done ranting. I will end with this. Kentico would be one of my favorite .NET CMS’s of 2009 but the lack of support has changed my decision. Support for your clients should be above your blog postings that nobody reads. Stop planting trees and give your clients some support. It’s not like I didn’t pay for licenses. I will probably never suggest you as a CMS for any of my clients or any web developers if the topic comes up. OK now I am done ranting.
- CMS
- Web Development
Hi Matthew,
I’m sorry to hear that you’re not happy with Kentico support. Most of our clients actually are.
I checked your account history and all your questions were answered until next business day as we declare in our support policy. In fact, 70% of incoming e-mails are answered within 2 hours!
The reason why you’re no longer receiving support is that you haven’t renewed your maintenance and you’re certainly aware of that since our support and sales staff told you that several times.
The annual maintenance for your license is around one thousand dollars and it includes unlimited phone and e-mail support and free upgrades to all new versions.
Since your license covers unlimited sites for an unlimited number of clients on a single physical server, you can easily spread these costs over multiple clients.
If you find anything unreasonable in renewing your subscription, please let me know.
Thank you.
Best Regards,
Petr Palas
CEO, Kentico Software
Hi Matthew,
I have checked the ticket history and found that you send us the email concerning this issue at 12/24/2009, 8:59 PM. Although, your maintenance for phone and email support already expired you get the first response at 12/25/2009 (after a 16hours). Then you replied on 12/25/2009 7:02 PM and get the response 12/25/2009 8:14 PM (after one hour). Please notice that all of this was on Christmas Day. Since that moment I couldn’t find any ticket from you within the system, so it seems to me that the advice provided helped you to solve the issue.
The e-mail and phone support is only available to the users of paid licenses with a valid maintenance and to the evaluators. Without the maintenance you can still use the Forums, KB and FAQ’s. We cannot guarantee a timely response at the Forums, but they are monitored by the support team on regular basis. Only in last year the number of KB and FAQ articles at devnet.kentico.com site grown by 250, so they represent a valuable source of information in addition to the documentation.
You weren’t satisfied with the search at Kentico’s Devnet site. I made a small “test” trying to search for the string from the error message you get and it gave me the following result, finding it on a blog post and in forums:
(URL Taken out – GL)
To be more concrete with your issue, you might get this error message in a case:
1) You upgraded straight from 3.1 to 4.1 (While the upgrade procedures are not cumulative)
2) The upgrade is made on a live site and in the same time the user activity leads to inconsistency
In your last article you wrote: “Their (Kentico) support is descent. Better than most companies. You can email them and they will usually give you a good answer or push in the right direction within a day. I have even Tweated about Kentico once, complaining about how difficult some things are and shouldn’t be, and they actually called me that day to ask if I needed any specific help.”
I’m happy to hear that you had a good experience with our services, so I hope that you might consider renewing your maintenance in the future. And if not, I hope that our Forums, FAQ’s, KB and Documentation will provide you enough information to take advantage of all the great features Kentico CMS is offering.
Best regards,
Petr Passinger
PR Manager
*Kentico Software
Petr’s,
I thank you for your responses but even the link you provided me took about 1 minute to even get to the page (very slow). On top of that it wasn’t even close to the problem I am having. My PERSONAL thought is that support should be free if the information is not accessible in an easy way. If you help out the developers implementing and maintaining Kentico sites you will keep their customers wanting more from Kentico, hence buying more licenses. In the end everyone should win.
Also, If you have time to comment for free in such detail, and contact the company I work for about this post (which again, is my personal opinion), I would think you could give the same effort to your support. If you would have taken about the same time you did for posting, to support, there would have been no post.
I believe you are confused about what issue i had. I sent an online support issue through the CMSSiteManager in the support tab. I then did not get any response for 2 days at least, and when I did it was from Kentico sales (which was fwd’d my support question from your support team). This was about 2 weeks ago or so. Either way I have received 2 emails that have my company CC’d from you guys when this post is a personal post representing my opinion. To me this is very disappointing.