CrossOver Support - Community Forums

About 2 months ago, I purchased a one year license. My impression was that one of the big benefits to this was that they would offer direct ticket support - i.e. they proudly advertise here (https://www.codeweavers.com/store/licensing): "Kick-ass support - Paying customers can submit problems to our elite Ninja support team. As of September 2015, their average response time was 2.5 hours per email."

I submitted a ticket now 8 days ago, and have not gotten a reply. I followed up after 6 days, but it too was ignored. I fully understand that it'd be impossible to always be available at the drop of a pin, and sometimes delays are unavoidable. However, this is definitely a pattern: since purchasing I have submitted multiple tickets and I've never heard back until many days later - often, more than a week. I'm fairly certain I've never gotten any reply within 24 hours.

When they do reply, they're great: thorough & thoughtful. However, it does seem very disingenuous, if not outright dishonest, to claim a 2.5hr response time for paid customers when they cannot even manage to reply within 8 days. 8 days is 75 times longer than advertised - and this is a pattern, not an isolated incident. And note that I'm still waiting for their response - who knows if 8 days will really be 10 or 12.

Hopefully they don't remove/censor this post - I just wanted to make other potential buyers aware that the "2.5 hour average" they list in their "Truth in Advertising" section...does not appear to be the truth.

They don't seem to be responsive this year. Might have something to do with current events? I wouldn't be too hard on them, they have been good to me in previous years.

I had what turned out to be a simple thing to fix. Basically one of the exception settings never worked before, but it looks like that functionality was corrected a few versions back (19.0.0), thereby breaking my application. I messaged them a few different times this year through their paid help. Someone acknowledged me the first time, stating that "yes it is broken". Then I couldn't get in touch with them after that. Anyhow recently I fixed it on my own by trying various library exceptions, one at a time. It was one of those things that was changed, but not documented, and nobody got back to me.

Hi Justin,

I'm going to respond to several points in this.

Justin Klein wrote:

About 2 months ago, I purchased a one year license. My impression
was that one of the big benefits to this was that they would offer
direct ticket support - i.e. they proudly advertise here
(https://www.codeweavers.com/store/licensing): [i]"Kick-ass support

• Paying customers can submit problems to our elite Ninja support
  team. As of September 2015, their average response time was 2.5
  hours per email."[/i]

You've submitted 8 tickets to us, and all but one of them took more than a day. However, each of your queries has been complex, and thoughtful, and really looking to push Wine hard. We've had to have developers involved in some of the questions; none of them have been easy. At the very least, support techs have had to install your software, run through it, and then go on further to explore our FAQs and bug history to try to get you information.

In contrast, most customers submit queries that are easy to resolve (e.g. 'can I have an invoice?' 'can you change my email to x?'). So, yes, that average is misleading, if you are likely to ask complex questions. However, I challenge you to find another company that will give you as much thoughtful support as we've given you for $38.97.

In an interesting side note, I argued to the support techs that they should always reply right away to a customer. That it would help the customer to know that they were heard. As a side effect, it would pad their statistics, and make us look more responsive. To a person, they felt strongly that they didn't like to give empty replies; they really preferred to reply when they had a solution. I believe in trusting my staff, so that is how we respond.

Justin Klein wrote:

I submitted a ticket now 8 days ago, and have not gotten a reply. I
followed up after 6 days, but it too was ignored. I fully
understand that it'd be impossible to always be available at the
drop of a pin, and sometimes delays are unavoidable. However, this
is definitely a pattern: since purchasing I have submitted multiple
tickets and I've never heard back until many days later -
often, more than a week. I'm fairly certain I've never gotten any
reply within 24 hours.

When they do reply, they're great: thorough & thoughtful. However,
it does seem very disingenuous, if not outright dishonest, to claim
a 2.5hr response time for paid customers when they cannot even
manage to reply within 8 days. 8 days is 75 times longer than
advertised - and this is a pattern, not an isolated incident. And
note that I'm still waiting for their response - who knows if 8 days
will really be 10 or 12.

We have a staff member that is struggling with a challenging medical condition. Our internal controls are not really set up to cope with that situation, and our normal controls are not working due to the pandemic. (i.e. if I don't show up for work for a few days, in normal times, someone would notice...) We clearly need to be more vigilant during the pandemic. Not excusing our lack of response, and indeed, acknowledging it, but simply trying to explain.

Justin Klein wrote:

Hopefully they don't remove/censor this post - I just wanted to make
other potential buyers aware that the "2.5 hour average" they list
in their "Truth in Advertising" section...does not appear to be the
truth.

I don't believe we have an official 'censorship' policy. Mostly, we're deeply and morally opposed to censorship. Of course, there are exceptions; spam bots, anyone posting information that is illegal, even if it's illegal under misguided laws. But with Wine being such a long time, challenging work in progress, we'd have an empty web site if we deleted every post that didn't paint a perfectly rosy picture 😊.

I appreciate you holding us to a very high standard; I'm sorry that we didn't measure up in this instance. I do appreciate you being fair minded enough to point out the ways we did get it right for you.

Cheers,

Jeremy White
CEO

Wow, a response from the CEO! Now that I didn't expect.

I challenge you to find another company that will give you as much thoughtful support as we've given you for $38.97.

I fully agree that many of the responses have been great & thoughtful :) No argument there at all. However, I definitely have - in fact, I've even ended up getting bounties for extensive contact with support for testing & bug-finding (aka negative cost?). Don't get my wrong, I absolutely don't mean to imply that I'm doing you any favors by asking questions - unquestionably you're the one providing the service. And WINE is a bit of a unique case as I understand that it's a challenging uphill battle for you guys to keep up with Microsoft APIs evolving & continuing to break things, so unlike a "normal" commercial software, you can pretty much never expect to get to a point where there are no more bugs to be found. Just to point out that in-depth testing & bug-finding does have some inherent value too. Thus, "tester" is a job/profession ;)

In an interesting side note, I argued to the support techs that they should always reply right away to a customer. That it would help the customer to know that they were heard. [...] they felt strongly that they didn't like to give empty replies; they really preferred to reply when they had a solution. I believe in trusting my staff, so that is how we respond.

As a customer, I actually strongly agree with your view & disagree with theirs. Part of my frustration was precisely that it seemed like my submissions hadn't even been seen, like I was waiting days for the e-mail just to be opened. A short blurb like "We got your message, this will require a bit of investigation. I'll replicate it & do my best to get back to you within a week" is MUCH clearer communication than just wondering if anyone even saw it. It gives me some idea what to expect. Especially considering how some companies have support channels that they may never respond to, I found myself just wondering if I'm waiting for nothing. Should I keep waiting? Should I be trying other venues? A response that communicates status is definitely not pointless - status is valuable information, too. This experience was a perfect example of that: if tickets usually get that initial "this will take a few days, we'll get back to you," but this one didn't (because the employee to whom it was assigned was out sick), I would know right away that something wasn't right. But because there aren't usually such replies, I had no idea. In the end, it seems the first 8 days of waiting weren't really accomplishing anything. Thus, initial non-solution responses would have been valuable.

We have a staff member that is struggling with a challenging medical condition.

I'm sorry to hear that. The agent who ultimately replied mentioned it. Certainly understandable.

we'd have an empty web site if we deleted every post that didn't paint a perfectly rosy picture 😊.

Hehe agreed. Perhaps I'm too much of a pessimist, I should be careful not to assume. But you might be surprised at the kinds of things I've seen happening on support forums now & then. Glad to hear this is one of the good ones :)