Hi,
I'm a developer myself and since we are a small company I also had to deal with the support part of my own development. And believe me I know how hard it is to replicate a bug or to understand what the customer wants from the little information they give you. Therefore I try to be patient and understanding when posting a question to a forum. And I also try to attach sample projects even for very simple problems or questions.
And I've waited three weeks getting angry and anxious while waiting and checking my pending posts before writing this post. At the end I couldn't wait anymore!
Currently I've five posts waiting for a reply with detailed explanations and attached samples. And four them have been waiting for an answer for a week.
Why does it take you too long to get back at our questions? In fact I don't care about WHY all I want is for you to be much more faster.
In order to make my posts not disappear I reply to my own posts complaining about why no body answers. And it seldom works. Here is one of the complaining reply I've sent, to one of my posts which hasn't been replied for six days:
"I don't know what I can do more to help you solve the problem. I've prepared the sample, gave the test cases but the feedback is too slow. And sometimes I get the idea that no one is gonna reply unless I complain about it.
You give us one month trial period and it takes at least a week for you to solve or get back to a serious problem. Sorry but this kind of trial period won't make us decide on your behalf :(
Please answer our questions!"
Finally please figure out a solution to this problem and make our experience with your components much more easier and productive.
Thanks in advance
As you are a trial customer, I can appreciate both sides here. For Infragistics, you are both a cost risk and opportunity. That said, where support do engage in the support forums, the response is generally very positive for the customer but maybe not for Infragistics. If they make significant money out of paid support, then I can understand them not solving problems for free.
But, in general, I think I solve more problems with peer support or simply searching the internet for the same problem. We use Citrix technologies a lot - 99% of resolutions come from their forums.
Infragsitics doesn't have that customer base though for peer support to work and I know I'm more of a taker than a giver - that's more the problem of the technology not been able to feed questions I could answer to me effectively.
It's a tricky balancing act.
Cheers, Rob.
And some of the competitors aren't much different. I looked and trialled Xceed's WPF grid and hit similar problems. It was also because I was trying to get up a steep learning curve to allow me to establish whether their product was suitable. Their forums were slightly more active and I'm sure some of their support did post.
I also use the Redemption DLL and Dmitry does UNBELIEVABLE support through a Yahoo mailing list. Okay, so it's a much different size market but it's very useful to be able to search the public history because all the problems I'd hit had been rasied before and I effectively solved them for free.
Just rambling ;-)