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.