Does the 1st level support really READ messages?

[Former Member]

I opened a call on Friday with the last sentence:

>The system connection is open and the access data is maintained.

Today I got an answer:

>I would like to have a look at thiss issue in Your testing-environment.

>Please be so kind to prepare a remote-connection and note the following

details in Your reply:

Markus

[former_member4251]

Dear Markus and Community members,

You started this thread with a direct question: Does the 1st level support really READ messages? , for me, a direct question always deserve a direct answer and itu2019s: yes we do!

Iu2019ll switch the 1st Level Support name to how is know in SAP, we call it Primary Support, but what is exactly Primary Support?

Primary Support is a Global Organization inside SAP Active Global Support, which provide 24x7 first class support (as mentioned by Analysts) for all the SAP Products (in the price list or not); we are located in several countries around the world with the SAPu2019s highest level of expertise, in order to grant the business continuity of our customers.

The Primary Support is not a hotline with few Call Center specialist which answer messages or calls without any clueu2026 SAP Primary Support is, as mentioned before, a well structured organization with several senior consultants including Platinum and Architects, with one single mission: Provide Support to customers, analyze the customer problems, detecting the Root Cause of failure and providing with a fix.

For messages (Problem Solving), we donu2019t have at SAP several support levels, we only have two; Primary and Development Support; our Development Support are the ones who create the Support Packages, the Enhancement Packages and some fixes that require an structural change in the standard application code, but Primary and Development Support are not separated units, so you will find several SAP Notes created in Primary Support level, as well as SCN Blogs, SCN Wiki, SCN Articles and Podcast, Etc.

We also participate in the SAP Software Q-Gate, performing tests to new features or fixes before to release it to customers.

But Primary Support also includes Service Delivery, the famous EWA, the OS/DB Migration Check, the GoLive Check, Etc. are performed by us, and especially with this emerging community (SCN) we have from Primary Support more than 100 moderators in the forums.

I refer to my work in Primary Support as the u201CSAP Santa's Magic Elfu201D; why ? is so easy, no one knows the work, no one care about us, but at Christmas night the present must be on the tree; what I meant is that no matter which solution you have, which problem are you facing or at what time/day it occurs, always you will have someone from SAP to help you there.

So, blame the entire SAP Primary Support by one or few bad experiences is not only unfair, is also like say that less than 1% can define a pattern.

You also mentioned something about the 22%, Iu2019ll have not enough space here to describe you what is SAP Enterprise Support and what is not, for sure you should go to the following link and discover it by yourself: http://service.sap.com/enterprisesupport ... just a clue, Primary Support for message solving is the Mission Critical Box only.... all the rest of the offer and SLAu2019s are the Enterprise Support too.

To finish my comments to your post, Iu2019d like to remark that we need to use the right channels to get the right support, this post will help you to drain your feelings, but if you really want to get an SAP answer related to your problems, please use the complaint management system or now with Enterprise Support, just call to your SAP Support Advisory Center and talk with us.

I hope this explanation helps to understand what is happening behind the scene

Best Regards,

Luis

[former_member374]

Hi SCN Community,

After some internal debate we decided to open this thread again.

I was told, that how you answer the questionnaire when your inquiry is closed is analyzed and has even an influence on the bonus of the service person involved.

Please use these accordingly, praise when people where proactive, put some effort into the answer and got your problem solved in a timely manner.

In an answer to a blog post Markus Doehr has praised the service that he got:

And to finally come to a very good support example: MaxDB Since the beginning with ADABAS the quality is steady or improving, the speed is AMAZING, support people often even call on prio medium or low calls and even if they are flooded with messages just to say "I´m flooded, I will take care of your call as soon as possible" - and they keep up on communicating.

With such a "communication model" it´s a total different experience for the customer. You get the impression that someone is taking care, that there is interest, that there IS support even if the call would take longer than expected/wanted.

That´s really a fact other components can take a leaf out of the book, seriously.

Therefore areas of SAP support are working to high satisfaction. It is a question of transferring that knowledge of what works to areas where we are not up to speed yet.

Internally at SAP discussions on how to do this are in full swing and let me assure you, that we welcome constructive criticism in this forum.

All the best, Mark.

[Former Member]

I agree, and Markus did use <rant> tags even if the subject title was a bit provocative.

For constructive criticism, feedback and usefull ideas from informed people there is probably no better place than SDN (and possibly the Coffee Corner in it) to raise such discussions - to give SAP a reasonable chance of seeing it and discussing it with other peers (and of course reacting to it).

Customers can also flame each other for convincing SAP to do odd things...

This reminds me that I have a development request open which I might want to rant about sometime...

All sports,

Julius

[markus_doehr2]

Luis and all others, especially the people from the primary support reading that thread here,

I was not my intention to step on someones toes.

Admittedly, the subject is very provoking, yes, and I also admit having used a pretty harsh tone but if you were in my situation, you would have maybe done the same or have at least a bit of understanding for this.

In my "SAP life" I have created a total of 718 OSS calls (as of today), there have been very bad examples and there also have been very good ones (e. g. such as the ones cited by Mark). Given that fact, I arrogate for myself being thoroughly in a position to appraise whether I´m treated "good" or "bad" from a paying customers position.

The "problem" in my eyes is the fact, that communication is (still) not taking place (everywhere) as I would expect that. If a component is overloaded, why is it apparently impossible to transport that information to the customers? A quick call telling exactly that give customers the impression, that they are heard, that someone is taking care of their problem, even if it´s not now and immediately - but it leaves a "good feeling" and calms down all parties. The same is true if you call the CIC - they are (quote)"not permitted to give an information about queue/component load"(endquote).

If instead messages are skip-read and just put back to the customers to proceed with the next one because there are another 100 more queuing up that need to be processed with the same urgency, it just leaves a bad aftertaste and eventually upsetting customers (as I was).

If I, as a customers, invest already time to attach logs, screenshots, already applied notes - which is a good thing to speed up the processing because all necessary information is there - can´t I then expect the same amount of efforts spent in the support to read the message and answer - with the same quality?

Am I really that wrong with that opinion or asking for someting impossible? (serious question)

... and especially with this emerging community (SCN) we have from Primary Support more than 100 moderators in the forums.

I aware of that and I appreciate it.

I refer to my work in Primary Support as the u201CSAP Santa's Magic Elfu201D; why ? is so easy, no one knows the work, no one care about us, but at Christmas night the present must be on the tree; what I meant is that no matter which solution you have, which problem are you facing or at what time/day it occurs, always you will have someone from SAP to help you there.

I never denied that and if one opens two calls at one day and count the call numbers between the two, I can seriously imagine what is going on there. More than one time I opened calls at weekends, X-mas, new years eve during upgrades and I always got help. However, there is a BIG BIG quality difference between Prio-1 and non-Prio-1 calls, this is not comparable.

You also mentioned something about the 22%, Iu2019ll have not enough space here to describe you what is SAP Enterprise Support and what is not, for sure you should go to the following link and discover it by yourself: http://service.sap.com/enterprisesupport ... just a clue, Primary Support for message solving is the Mission Critical Box only.... all the rest of the offer and SLAu2019s are the Enterprise Support too.

Well - yes, but what you (intentionally?) forget to tell the customers are the contract clauses bound to that, what customers have to do to fulfill the contract until they actually benefit from that support offer (see discussion at ).

In conjunction to that, according to note "521820 - Availability of Business Process Monitoring", point 5, customers will effectively need to invest even more to set all that up (external consultants, internal resources).

Are you really aware what you impose to customers? Especially small to medium sized companies?

Isn´t it a valid question then, what happens with "the rest" of us - not being able to (for whatever reason) fulfill all that - although we also pay the same amount of money?

Isn´t it understandable from a customers perspective that, knowingly not (yet) complying to the contract and receiving answers to (apparently only) skip-read messages, he is seeing a coherency? Is that really so fallacious?

I know, this discussion is the "most unwanted" ever, yes, but I think, since it´s a topic affecting all customers and it should be valid to post it in a public forum - in appropriate manner and with an (I hope) now appropriate tone.

To finish my comments to your post, Iu2019d like to remark that we need to use the right channels to get the right support, this post will help you to drain your feelings, but if you really want to get an SAP answer related to your problems, please use the complaint management system or now with Enterprise Support, just call to your SAP Support Advisory Center and talk with us.

Since we do not yet comply to those new contracts (they are out only for some weeks now) there is no Support Advisory Person that can be called. It´s very difficult (if not impossible) to reach someone to talk about those questions. Sales says "we´re not in charge". The available material at the mentioned site leaves more question (for me) than it actually answers.

I hope this explanation helps to understand what is happening behind the scene

I hope this explanation helps you to understand why I wrote this post as I did it.

Markus

[Former Member]

Hi,

I just want to say that I agree with Markus in his arguments, We are customers and for what is paid every year SAP clients should get more feedback from our OSS calls. I won´t mention the company that I´m working as consultant right now because I´m not an employee but want to give you an Idea about what is happening. More than Two weeks ago an OSS call was send to SAP because a SAPup problem we found and during those two weeks we did not received any comunication from SAP about the status like "we are investigating" or "we are doing tests in our systems". After that time we were told from the SAP expert something like he did not understand the error. Two weeks to write that! and this client is paying Max Attention, in fact the Max Attention personell here saw the problem and wrote to SAP also but nothing was told. Of course supervisors and managers here are really angry about the service, but, wouldn´t any one of us be angry if you pay for special service and get the same as any other "normal" client?

I understand Luis because I was a supervisor for helpdesk in the biggest company in my country and nobody see the good things support people do but mostly the bad things. But this is service and he has to get used to it as this happens in any service oriented company/department and is their duty to help people to get over the problems. One of the key for success that awarded my team when I was supervising helpdesk was exactly that, "total comunication" so clients did know what was the status of their call at any time. We did not let a call to be orphan for much time, tech people keep writing what they were doing with calls and after resolution we always asked for a survey and from more than 30 buildings around the country, I can proudly say, ours was always the best at least during the 4 years I was there.

Of course this is different in a technical way but in the total sense of the word, this is a Service and clients deserve to feel heard and that you are taking care of us.

Good things can always be better, just keep that in mind.

[Jelena]

AC, you might want to try rebuilding the data using OLI8 transaction. This is, of course, if the source documents (deliveries) are present in the system.

It looks to me though that the person responding had no clue what he/she was doing. Hope you didn't actually give him/her full access to Production system...

[Former Member]

Last week the client where I´m working on the Upgrade (4.6C to 6.0) wrote an OSS note because we had a problem with the S005 table that did not have the data it was supposed to have. The shadow table did have the data so the question to SAP was on how to proceed to copy the data as this was supposedly to be done during upgrade.

Answer was: Sorry I forced migration from SE14 and delete all data from the shadow table, please restore the data from the old system.

So he did delete the data and we are supposed to restore data from 4.6 to 6.0?? How are we supposed to do this if table structures are different now in S005? This is like OH! I just deleted your PRD system by mistake, just make a restore and don´t bother me any longer.

[Former Member]

Hi,

1st level support is the same in every company : very bad.

Their mission is to answer rapidly anything to get good statistics.

For my last message, I was told to implement an OSS note that I had already implemented with no success and it was clealy said so in the text of my message and in the new special fields.

I also experimented a lot of ping-pong between 2 different internal SAP support teams at 5 minutes intervals....

Then after 2 escalations and 10 days, I got on the phone a guy from Waldorf who was very competent and knowledgable and who found the solution...

Olivier

[markus_doehr2]

Just to add:

Monday I opened another call, different component, different topic. Last sentence was

>The system connection is open.

Today it was taken into process and sent to me back with

>...then please give me a systemconnection to check your settings.

This is driving me nuts and making me really upset. I read of "improvements" when contacting the complaint department, I read of "better education" - which is basically pure damage limitation. I think all this has method, customers are intentionally considered "dumb" by definition. Eight calls and six times the same, this can´t be something happening by accident.

Markus

[Former Member]

Had one last week where the 1st line guy asked us to confirm the message, raise a new one and assign it to another resolver team. When I politely refused and asked him to forward the existing message on, he didn't know how to do it!

[Former Member]

maybe the system connection already became invalid since friday?

just a guess.

anton

[markus_doehr2]

Hey Anton,

no - the connection is open, valid and not broken (that was the first thing I checked).

This looks just more like an automated answer (more or less) - just to gain some time and to put the message back to the customer.

And: he did attach a note to the message - so it´s a bad point for our competence center.

It´s also not the first time I´m seeing this (I opened ~ 70 calls in this year) - they just don´t read it. They are trying to gain time so that the message is not in the SAP queue but in the customer queue - which will increase their monthly counters, if the message is coming back it´s "new from customer" and they have another 8 hours (on priority high) before the messages is turning red again.

This has method...

Markus

[rainer_hbenthal]

I had a case that we had idocs stucked up without any errorcode - but only in batch processing. Reprocessing this idoc without any change was always possible.

So we waited until we got this error (it happened from time to time unreproducable) and it was possible to have that idoc unprocessed for a couple days.

In the OSS call i clearly stated that when processing this idoc it will be gone and we dont have any other.

5 Minutes after the call was taken i ALWAYS got the message:

- this idoc could be processed manually, to investigate it more deeply we need another one

or

- this idoc was porocessed by bd87 without any problems

or something else. And because we're always got someone new handled this case everyone was unable to read the history or comments. This is taking now over 3 years and the solution is very simple: this process is not needed any more from april this year. Otherwise we would fight with SAP the next 5 years i guess.

[markus_doehr2]

> And because we're always got someone new handled this case everyone was unable to read the history or comments.

This is taking now over 3 years and the solution is very simple: this process is not needed any more from april this year.

Otherwise we would fight with SAP the next 5 years i guess.

lol

so that's even worse... - GREAT topic!

Markus

[Jelena]

>

> This looks just more like an automated answer (more or less) - just to gain some time and to put the message back to the customer. 

Most of the time I have exactly the same impression - did they even read the message? I usually try to include the steps to reproduce the issue in the message at once, but then I get a reply "please provide the steps to reproduce...".

Once the reply had just absolutely nothing to do with our issue. It's as if I asked a question, ahem, on SDN. After I politely pointed this out, the message went to "the next level of support". If they don't know an answer at all, why not just send the message forward?

Last time after an initial reply I asked our Basis admin Neal to open a connection. He did so and added a note to my message, signed with his name. Well, guess what - after that in all the future communications about the issue I was addressed only as "Neal", even though my replies were desperately signed "Jelena".

[Former Member]

Hi,

>If they don't know an answer at all, why not just send the message forward?

Statistics...

Because they are challenged on the time to answer and not on the quality of the answer.

It is called "Quality assurance" and it is IMHO one of the worst modern concepts.

All the quality indicators are green but the customer is not happy...

Regards,

Olivier