An open letter to Acronis on how to fix their current situation

This letter is in direct response to a message posted by Ed Benack, the "Chief Customer Officer" located here: http://forum.acronis.com/forum/25521#comment-79193. Acronis seems to be ignoring me, so I figured I'd pop it up here in hope of getting some response. With over 25 years IT experience that encompasses almost all aspects of mission critical infrastructure (especially in fixing already working IT departments that need serious help), I am really just trying to help here. I have been on both sides of this fence.. the selling and the buying, so I try to bring a combined perspective to the table. If you don't want my "help", at least just say so.. that way I could quit wasting my time talking to people that aren't even listening. On with the letter:

Ed,

1. Whose fault is it that your tech people were helping people with "Windows 101"? Even a 1st level support person should know how to deal with issues not dealing with the product without burning much time. If not, you're not paying your staff enough.

2. You commented on how you had "Customers with up to 50 cases, with none of them being in any way a severe technical issue." What's wrong with that? That's why support tickets typically have a priority code. Just because those 50 cases may have not been "severe" doesn't in any way mean that they are not "technical issues".

3. You mentioned that 85% of your Customer base experiences problems in the first 30 days. If that is true, that means you are purposely forsaking 15% of your Customer base! How can anyone think that is in any way a good ratio?

4. If so many of these support cases were "was largely driven by additional installations of the same license on additional machines", why did you support them? I have had a license number since version 8.0.. you would have seen people calling in repeatedly with the same license number. It didn't take some half-baked registration scheme to stop that.. only tech support people that paid attention to abnormal support activity from the same license.

5. Your support people currently spend an insane amount of time on issues. I've been working with PCs since their introduction, yet the technician still insisted on taking over my computer.. turning a 5 minute support call into a 30 minute nightmare. All I needed was a list of instructions, but your tech insisted on wasting both of our time. Nobody can sustain a support organization like that. You went from one unsustainable business model to another.

6. Sure, you say that the support fee will be refunded if the Customer has a "confirmed bug", but that is so open to interpretation that we have no real way to know if we're going to get that money back or not. Add the fact that confidence is not high with your support right now and you have a bunch of people that simply are not going to call. It's not worth the risk to pay YOU to report a bug in YOUR software.

7. Charging for support is bad enough.. there have been a number of complaints in the forums that people could not even understand the people they were talking to.. and paying for it!

Your extremely open support of the past was commendable but, as you say, not sustainable.. especially as your software gets released with more and more bugs. You NEED a simple way for people to report bugs.

This is simply a case of using the wrong support business model.. which is NOT the fault of the Customers. I could go into how a piece of software as important as disaster recovery should never leave the door without being absolutely bullet-proof, but you know that. But the answer is not to have a "knee-jerk" reaction, shut yourself off from the world and alienate 15% of your Customers, but to adapt (especially on the heals of a release like 2012).

So here are some ideas for you:

1. Open back up support after the 30 day period.. but only email through a form (and possibly online chat). Use real helpdesk software (it's worth the money). Also, by using email, you eliminate many of the communication problems that come with supporting an international product.

2. Have the user select the severity of the issue. When it hits the tech, let them decide if it is correct.. and change it if needed (I think you will find most people are honest about the severity level of their issue. Not all, but most). Then route the ticket to the correct people based on severity (i.e. feature requests go to development, low priority request go to the inexperienced techs and "emergency" requests, after being confirmed by 1st level support, get routed straight to 2nd level support).

3. Requests for basic system support should be referred to Microsoft. No need to learn their KBs (although knowing the biggies would be nice).. just point them to www.microsoft.com/support with a boilerplate letter that says something like "Sorry but your request falls outside of our support. You will need to contact Microsoft to resolve this particular issue."

4. Quit wasting your tech's time with all these system "takeovers" (i.e. WebEx).. it is FAR to time consuming (and quite annoying for those of us that know Windows). For common problems, write concise instruction and send them to the user. If they don't understand it, refer them to #3 above.

5. Do away with this faulty activation system you have. One of your "MVPs" mentioned in another thread that the software was bought from a 3rd party vendor and does not perform as advertised. That's a black eye on you, not them. If the concern is really the number of people asking for support for the same license on diffenent computers, stop them. Just write a program that will mine the support tickets and look for a high number of similar issues from the same license. It wouldn't take long to tweak it to start identifying abusers on its own. Online activation is the bane of honest users.. and it doesn't really stop piracy (but then again, that's not why you said you were using it).

6. Don't wait until after the product comes out to put up documentation. I can't tell you how many error messages took me to an empty KB page. Whack.. another black eye that should not be happening.

7. Release instructions on how to safely remove 2012 from your system! There are people out there spending hundreds of hours trying to figure out how to fully remove 2012 because tech support won't tell us!

You mentioned that your company has realized it has problems, but they're really not that difficult to fix.. I've seen it done correctly (and incorrectly) too many times. It just takes a commitment from management to understand the changes that need to be made and to have to backbone to make them (because it sure seems like Acronis' tech support needs a top-to-bottom shake-down). The end result is a more efficent tech support and happier Customers. After all, you did say that a full 15% of your Customers experience problems after the support period ends. There is no decent IT manager in the world that would think that was an acceptable number.. especially on such a critical piece of software!

Of course the problem goes farther than that.. vers 8, 9 and 10 virtually had no bugs to speak of. Someone needs to go back and see what happened starting with ver 2010 and start a post-mortum on what is going wrong in development. I know that QA departments have been cut way back (as is virtually out of existance), but with software as critical as disaster recover, QA is essential. Regression testing.. the whole nine yards. I don't know if that is what happened at Acronis, but something bad definately happened after version 10. Upper management needs to figure out what it was and fix it so that Acronis can start releasing the quality software that they use to be known for. And they need to do it SOON!

If you need proof, just look at the hit you're taking on Amazon's reviews.. and it is quickly getting worse (and moving to other sites, like Newegg). Someone up there in your company HAS to know the impact those reviews are going to have on future sales.

Does Acronis REALLY want to fall on the sword over something that I am presuming is either driven by somebody lacking real IT knowledge or by somebody's ego (or both)? I hope not.. but it would not be the first time it's happened (and it sure seems like someone in charge is losing touch with reality).

I really do hope that this in some way helps. I really am a fan of Acronis (if I wasn't, I wouldn't care about any of this).

Best of luck,
Rog