Quality of tech support in recent months

[PavloJCP]

Is it just me? I noticed that it became almost impossible to get a support person on the phone without being on hold for hours...

When opening tickets online, it would sometimes take days to schedule remote session and some engineers just don't have enough knowledge.

[nextgenhappines]

Same here.  It is really sad..

E

[BPry]

@PavloJCP,

It's not just you and it's a problem that even Palo Alto has acknowledged as far back as Ignite. Sadly, they appear to have moved a lot of the folks that actually knew their stuff off to other projects and level-1 right now is extremely lacking in skill and experiance. 

[PavloJCP]

Oh well... Thanks for confirming. I really did not want to be one of those people who leave negative reviews when there are thousands of positive 🙂

This is sad, because the product itself is good.

What do you think we can do? I already let our account rep know. I wonder if they will hear us if more people will complain

[Mick_Ball]

Glad its not just me that has had similar experience with support. No need to name and shame but most of my resolutions come from this site.

its quite frightening when a resolution for an ipad issue was to remove all files from windows/program files and re-install.

such a lack of confidence in support generally forces us to do things another way.

ok, gripe over but subscribed here to see what can be done... I have complained to my account manager but really to no avail.

[dannon]

My case as well.

I had an issue open for 2.5 months.  I tried escalating the case, but it never did.  One of my calls, the tech couldn't even determine the windows server version we were running for our User-ID agent.  I had to show him how to get that info.  My boss finally had to call our new SE (never told the old one left) and threaten.  We got good service then.

SE told us that Palo prides themselves on top-tier support, but in the last year have grown so much that they can't get competent people to fill level-1 support.  We had a meeting with our SE and the regional manager and they both said Palo is very aware of the problem and are actively taking steps to fix.  He said this comes from almost the very top of management.

I hope Palo comes through.

Dannon

[jdprovine]

I think it is mostly the level 1 support that lacks the most, if you get sent to the next level its not quite as bad. I too find a majority of my solution in this awesome community and I really appreciate you guys.

[nextgenhappines]

Well, they are trying to sell us The premium plus support.  That is the only way you can bypass the Level 1 TS.

https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/resources/datasheets/premium-plus-support

It is very expensive, but you will have a dedicated engineer.

[breedend]

I agree, the quality of support has gone down.  I wait on hold for hours or leave my number for a call back and don't receive a call for 4 or 5 hours.  And the online case management doesn't seem to be working - I keep getting SSO errors.  Disappointing change in support.

[steveb1]

Thank you, everyone, for contributing to this thread. We are aware of the issues and actively working towards immediate and long-term changes to help address your concerns. 

For example, we have recently established a Technical Welcome Center to handle all new inbound case calls and help reduce hold times. We also have established specialized teams by product line to help with product-specific issues.

Additionally, we are working to expand our team of support engineers. This is an ongoing effort and takes some time as we aim to hire the right, highly qualified experts.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we work to improve the support experience and ensure you can maximize your investment in Palo Alto Networks technology.

Regards,

Steve Blaz

VP, Global Customer Support

[samuelsmith]

I am new to Palo and I almost went with Meraki when I saw complaints online about tech support wait times but the rep assured me changes were made to address this and it would not be an issue.  We went LIVE this past weekend and here friday afternoon and all week in making several calls have experienced what I feared loooooong wait times.  Even as I write this at 3:01pm EST I have been on hold for 2:12 and running.  I called last night on a serious issue with our DMZ settings and I was on hold for 4hrs plus before ( I called at 5:20pm finally gave up jsut before 10pm) and I gave up and struggled through myself. 

The other alarming thing I found out the hard way is there is a 1 hour time frame for your issue to be fixed or you get dropped back into the queue and there goes another hour or two on hold.  For a critical piece of equipment to all networks - support has to be at the push of a button.

[MP18]

Many long hours on hold.

I tried different times morning evening same thing.

Level 1 is pretty new staff.

Hard to reach right person.

Hope new people can be trained soon

[DPoppleton]

 Level 1 support has gotten really bad, and asking to escalate doesn't seem to help. My last few cases have been to change some App-IDs (applications not getting identified correctly) and it could take 2 weeks to get passed to the correct team.

[ebonjour]

Just open all cases as critical.