Anyone else noticing Commvault support going downhill?

I concur.  I have been using Commvault for over 20 years.  It has slipped a lot since the old days.

Hey folks,

I’m saddened to hear that your recent interactions are below expectation. ​@Nikramak I believe some folks have attempted to reach you to discuss specifics and get your perspective of where we could improve.

​@Farmer92 - I’d like to offer you the same. Let me know if you would be OK with that?

Definitely agree.

I was fortunate enough to be introduced to Commvault during the golden era of the Sydney-based Support Team. Commvault’s reputation locally is off the back of that team.

Yup, absolutely decline “SHIFT” in quality. Been with CV for about 7 years and have gone through many iterations of the software as well as hours with support that were US based and knew exactly what they were doing/supporting and if not, they were quick to navigate and find workarounds to solve issues.

I could be wrong, but believe support has moved to India (article) and the people getting the tickets are not anywhere near knowledgeable as the “old” engineers. That`s unfortunate but I understand, gotta make the investors happy and customers miserable.

But hey stock is up more than double since January, I guess that is “Good right” !? 😀

+1

Time to get a valuable answer to raised case is at last doubled compering what we get used to few years back. I am afraid that this may be the “market standard” this days. 

CV support has changed for sure. Now the most simple tickets takes several days to resolve. I have talked with former colleagues of mine that use commvault and they all agree that it’s changed for the worse.

One thing i notice all the time is that when you create a ticket in the morning, you wont get an answer until late in the afternoon where the first answer is “thank you for your ticket, i will review the logs” and there goes another day.

I dont feel any difference in the criticality level either, it’s the same for medium, high and critical.

I noticed on reddit that there’s been massive changes at the us team as well: 

https://www.reddit.com/r/CommVault/comments/1g4e6kh/cv_support_changes/

​@Erase4ndReuseMedia,
   That brings me back.  So many late nights on the phone with Sydney based support.   They were so amazing.  Very knowledgeable and helpful.

 Cheers!

Unfortunately we are experiencing the same and it is having an impact on the duration and the efforts that we have to put into our support tickets. We moved all our cells to CPR2024E and the amount of tickets quadrupled, so you can imagine we are spending a lot of time in their systems currently. I'm happy with the shift the company is making, but I'm not happy with the how they execute this and how they set the priorities.

​@Onno van den Berg May i ask what’s going on after you upgraded? I am curious to know if this have something to do with the upgrade of mssql server to 2022

a little bit OT but still :)

​@Kim Andre no, none of the issues is related to the upgrade to SQL Server 2022. 

I must agree, all tier one US support has been let go, all tier one support is in India now, most of them are on IST, so if you need a call back before noon in EST it’s not going to happen. The expertise is not there, they also got rid of the entire Australia Team, that is very sad they were the best. We are wondering if they are having financial problems, it seems they are trying to save a dollar. This usually a sign of financial problems. We upgraded to ESP hoping to get better support as of yet we having seen much difference, hoping that will change. I will update in a few months.

Actually the contrary is the case, just look at their share price and results. The only reason I can think off is that someone is pushing hard to reach the 1 billion revenue, so they are optimize the workforce by relocating support and by adding more AI. 

But at the customers expense, like I said they are trying to save a dollar. When you lose your customers is it worth it. The same thing happened to HPE outsourced everything and lost a lot of customers and are still losing them. Not saying we are leaving but you can’t tell me that the service is getting better, its not it just keeps declining little by little.

You say optimize the workforce by relocating support, by doing that you mean fire Australia and fire all the tier one US support. I pretty sure the none of the US or Australia team relocated to India.

Our customers’ satisfaction and trust are paramount to us. We understand you have experienced challenges recently with our customer support as we scale and modernize our customer service team and operations. We assure you that we are taking significant steps forward to make sure we have the capacity and expertise aligned to our growing, global customer base and channels. Let me share those steps with you.

1. We are investing in AI and automation to streamline our processes, reducing response times and ensuring faster resolution of routine issues.
2. Our team is expanding and investing in the development of our global cohort of engineers. We are working on upgrading our internal tools and trainings to improve efficiency and accuracy in resolving your cases.
3. We are setting clear benchmarks and regularly monitoring our performance to ensure continuous and measurable improvement.

During this transition, if you find that your case is not moving as quickly as you expect, we strongly recommend requesting management review your case via the Support Portal (see image below). This will ensure that your concerns are escalated to our global leadership team, which is available 24/7 to address your needs.

Thank you for being an integral part of the Commvault community. Your insights and feedback have been instrumental in shaping our solutions and services, and we are grateful for your continued support and patience.

We are committed to giving you the best possible experience with Commvault.

Warm regards,

Arun

​@Kim Andre I had a few issues with the upgrade of 2022 when moving to 2024E. Mainly it losing the creds to the built in cv accounts in SQL. The only way to get the creds is by calling support..

Obviously a shameless plug here but as a former Vaulter who moved to Kelyn Technologies for this same reason, I want to extend the olive branch. We’ve seen the uptick in frustration and have turned frustrated users about to abandon the product into decade-long advocates. Our support team has a 24 min avg response and goes way above and beyond break/fix. Configs, migrations, upgrades, architecture/design, our support assists customers with anything they need. Supporting Commvault environments is the only thing our business does. 

​@tcandelaria it's great to hear that Kelyn Technologies is able to turn the experience, but I find it frustrating that Commvault is following the same line as many other companies. It is nice to hear that you can make a living out of it, but imho it is not how it suppose to be. I know Commvault is making efforts to improve the support experience, but nothing can replace skilled support engineers with experience and based on the post of ​@Nikramak it even sounds like premium support is not what it used to be anymore. But in the end it all starts with the foundation because if they can deliver a stable, predictable platform and ease the complexity puzzle than we all need less support. 

I would like to see Commvault making a SHIFT ;-)

Agreed and fair point. It can be frustrating for us as well when we have to escalate a ticket ourselves. Most of the historical pain I’ve seen however is the fact the customer doesn’t dedicate proper resources to enterprise data protection. Contracts turnover and they give a system that touches everything in the data center to a guy who maybe was in networking his whole career, or lowest person on the totem pole. Having a resource on hand that can assist them with any question or task whenever they need it completely turns around the experience for 90%+ of the customers we’ve ever worked with.

For traditional environment this might be the case but just like Commvault evolved by broadening its umbrella, it's customers also evolved by moving workloads to public cloud and adopting different working methodologies. With that I mean it's not only the full time data protection expert who is steering the product and onboarding workloads and performing recoveries anymore these days. We see more companies putting this expertise in a platform team setting leaving the responsibility to the ones who operate the workloads. There are enough cases to defend the use of Commvault in public cloud, but it can be hard to battle against the "cloud native” fans. Even though Commvault brings a lot of features to the table it all drawls back to the recovery and to the ease of consumption. In both these cases there is still much to gain.

Looks like lots of commvault customers experiencing not good support. We noticed since last year that commvault support looks like moved to India. Current support doesn’t have any idea. It will take days or weeks and still not resolved. Not same as before that commvault support will call back and their support is knowledgeable enough to fix the issue quickly.

Customer opens a critical incident categorized as High 2 hour response. Ticket is assigned, when the 2 hour mark is approaching, we get 

"My name is XXXXX and I have taken ownership of this case and will be assisting you with this issue.

Thank you for sharing the logs and the DB.

I will review the logs and get back to you with suitable plan of action.

Kindly reach out to us if you have further questions/concerns." 

And just like that the ticket went from a 2 hour response to a over 12 hour response and when the response comes, most likely will be something that you have already done or not relevant to the issue at all...…support is just madness.

Dude.  I feel your pain.  We get the same thing.  It is very disappointing as compared to the support I used to get from CommVault in the past.

Anybody here has support contract with a third party company that has skilled people in US and actually good support? Please shoot me an DM with the company name please.

I hope this message finds you well. I wanted to share some feedback regarding my experience with Metallic support over the past several months. Unfortunately, it seems that something has changed since June or July of last year.

In the past, I would rarely have a support ticket open for more than a couple of weeks. However, now it seems to take much longer to resolve issues. It's become common for me to have tickets open for two or even three weeks before they are addressed. This is quite a departure from the level of service we used to receive.

I've found myself needing to CC our Senior Customer Success Manager on emails to the engineers because they just don't get back to me in a timely manner. I'm also seeing a lot of responses that start with "Apologies for the delay in responding to your support request, as we are experiencing high call volumes." It's becoming increasingly frustrating to try and get an engineer on the phone after hours.

I also wanted to mention that the engineers in Australia were very good, but it seems like that support location has been closed. Their absence is definitely felt, and it has impacted the quality of support we receive.

I think it might be time for Commvault to reconsider the announcement "we take pride" because, unfortunately, that no longer seems to be the case.

Licensing fees are not cheap, I would expect the prices to go down for support to correlate with the level of support we are now getting. 

Luis