[j-nsp] Juniper support vs. Cisco TAC - experiences?

[Richard A Steenbergen]

On Wed, Jul 09, 2008 at 10:56:22AM -0600, David Ball wrote:
>   I agree with Stefan on the knowledge of the initial ticket handlers.
>  I've had great support for the most part, but far too often the
> ticket (and attachments) aren't read thoroughly, and as such I need to
> explain myself several times.  Once that's done though, things seem to
> go pretty well, especially if the ticket is escalated (which happens a
> lot).

There are two JTAC groups, regular JTAC and advanced JTAC. You can tell 
"regular" JTAC (which seems to really be "outsourced JTAC") by their 
e-mail addresses, which are always @jtac.juniper.net, vs advanced JTAC 
which has regular @juniper.net e-mails.

In my experience, regular JTAC is poorly trained, not particularly 
familiar with Juniper products, has extremely poor reading comprehension 
(exactly as you described, I end up repeating myself or explaining things 
that have already been explained several times), and generally returns 
wrong answers about 90% of the time. Of course, I don't open cases that 
they have any hope of figurig out, so my experience is probably somewhat 
biased.

I'm sure they serve some useful function (like blocking RTFM questions), 
but the real issue with regular JTAC isn't when they don't know an answer, 
it's when they don't KNOW they don't know an answer. If you don't insist 
on an escalation, they will HAPPILY sit on a case for months, popping up 
only often enough to ask completely irrelevent question which make the 
customer do a lot of legwork, returning completely wrong answers, and not 
escalating the case even when it is absurdly clear that it is beyond their 
experience and abilities. Once you get to advanced JTAC they have some 
excellent people who really know their stuff (and some less experienced 
people too), but having to go through regular JTAC adds days or weeks of 
frustrations for anyone who is a experienced network operator.

I'm not sure if this is actually the case, but it seems to me that regular 
JTAC's performance metrics are based entirely on statistics like "how long 
did the case sit before they answered it and reset the ticket state to 
waiting for customer", rather than how helpful they were in resolving the 
problem correctly. They will respond to a case in seconds, but only to ask 
a completely irrelevent question which takes hours to gather the data and 
answer. As soon as you're done answering that question, they'll come up 
with a completely incorrect answer and if that does't make you go away 
they'll ask another irrelevent question. Anything to keep that ticket 
state set to "waiting for customer response", and to not escalate unless 
the customer asks.

One other thing that I find interesting, I have NEVER received a JTAC 
survey for a case that had to be escalated (which is 99% of my cases). If 
I had, I would have been happily pointing out the many countless ways in 
which regular JTAC failed me before the case got escalated to somebody who 
knew what they were talking about. If anyone from Juniper is reading this, 
and wants to get this fixed, I'm sure your customers will happily give you 
a better understanding of the level of service we're seeing from regular 
JTAC if given the opportunity.

-- 
Richard A Steenbergen <ras at e-gerbil.net>       http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras
GPG Key ID: 0xF8B12CBC (7535 7F59 8204 ED1F CC1C 53AF 4C41 5ECA F8B1 2CBC)