what is the average time do you wait on the phone with PAN TAC?

[dtran]

I'll go first.  At least 45 minutes. 

[jdelio]

We hate to hear about the Long wait times.. and are working to help reduce these waiting times.

[dtran]

@jdelio:  Then perhaps PAN should do something about it, IME, It has not changed in the past year.

I gave up after waiting around an hour or so.  Put in my number for a call back but no one is calling me back, still waiting.

I wonder if there is a Sev-1 outage and I have to wait an hour for TAC.  It does not look good.

[TomYoung]

Cool!  I guess this is a poll.  I called the other day.  I waited only about 5 minutes.  I had to call because I was getting an SSO error when clicking on the Support Cases menu in the support portal.  Otherwise, I open a case online.

Edit:  Bad news:  I called this weekend for a Sev1, and was on hold for over an hour.  I hung up.  Good news:  I opened a Sev1 case online, and got a response within an hour.  I guess I got lucky the 1st time.

[BPry]

Support wait times have, and in my mind always will be, an issue with every single network vendor including PAN. I always recommend opening a case first online and filling out everything as you need, and if you need immediate assistance then call in with the open case number in the event of a sev 1 incident. Engage your SE and AM to push things along internally if its truly a sev 1 priority and a network down situation. 

I'll admit that support in general isn't as good (generally) as it was years ago, but pretty much every company eventually reaches a point where that happens. Ticket queues grow as more customers come online and training really good TAC engineers can be a huge challenge and costs a lot from a time aspect. You also have an increasing need for resident engineers and sales engineers that will generally take from the more experienced TAC engineers which compounds the issue. 

In fairness to PAN, they are actively trying to address the issue with passing more cases through to SEs and they are trying to get TAC engineers in house and trained properly. It takes time to get people trained up however, and experienced staff are needed throughout many areas of PAN itself, but they also have to compete against everyone else looking for experienced PAN staff. I'd rather, personally, PAN took the time to properly train staff so they can actually support issues and not focus solely on response times as a metric. Getting someone on the phone quickly that doesn't know any more than the person calling in doesn't do anyone any good. 

[dtran]

Are you working for PAN? 

[dtran]

I always open the ticket online as S2 ticket.  Problem is that PAN does not get back to me until 4 hours later (S2 has a two hours response time).  Many times, they don't even read what is in the ticket.  I then had to call back in and wait on the line. 

[dtran]

A typical example:

1- open a ticket online yesterday with a description of the issue,

2- call in an hour after open ticket to "try" to get an engineer,

3- gave up after an hour on the phone, put in my number for a TAC engineer to call back,

4- nothing until five hours later (SLA is two hours), got an email from TAC, asking for more information.  No callback whatsoever,

5- call PAN support this morning, try to get a hold of an available TAC engineer to work on the issue, and still waiting for the past 45 minutes,

[TedMay]

I wish I got 45min.. The average is 2-3 hours.. That's not even getting a person. That's the point at giving up. Sometimes its a whole day.. 8 hours. On hold. I don't know how they still have as many people as they do because of that. We are also premium support.. We are looking at Platinum but doubt that will even fix the problem. There is this "focused level" but its also the same bag. Except the designated engineers. On our sides we have PCNSEs so when we call in, we actually have no idea what is going on as we've tried everything the Basic L1/L2 guys would try.. So its even more frustrating when we get someone and its going over the same stuff.

[ToshiNakano]

I am wating for about 3 hours now. Something is wrog with Palo Alto support today???  

[ToshiNakano]

Now I am wating for more than 4 hours. Is this becase of the russia and ukraine issue?

[ToshiNakano]

I found the tick. I was on hold for 6 hours. However I used another phone and called without the case ID. Then, a new engineer picked up within 5 min. This is very strange. Maybe something is wrong with their phone call queuing system. 

[dtran]

I opened a S1 ticket and waited on the phone for almost an hour, finally gave up after that.  Didn't get a call back until more than two hours after that, and the engineer doesn't have root access to fix the issue, he had to get another engineer to get root access, more waiting time.  What a waste of time and resource.

[JoshuaSanders]

We had 2 firewall upgrade tickets that were opened. One was opened Wednesday afternoon and the other Thursday morning. It is now Friday morning and I've yet to hear a single peep from the Palo Alto support team. I spent 45 minutes on hold after calling in without a person to even answer my telephone call. I've sent many angry emails/telephone calls to my AM and SE which have been escalated. Still no response. It's now been almost 48 hours since my first S2 ticket went in. I try not to abuse the S1 priority but does everything just now have to be marked as Urgent to get a response from PAN? My firewalls govern access to sites where personnel depend on them for their actual safety. Completely unacceptable. My expectations are so low at this point, that I'd be happy to get a boilerplate email saying we are experiencing long wait times, please stand by. What's the point of paying for Premium Support if I get nothing out of it?

[JoshuaSanders]

Finally got my first response on tickets 36 and 54 hours after I opened the ticket, only after several angry emails that got the issue escalated to S1 and a regional vice president involved. Ridiculous.