Have you ever gotten one of those messages from a company that, after
you strip the buzzwords away, translates to "In order to better serve
you, we're hosing you?" Don't you hate that? So I'll try to avoid that.
I'm not going to sugar-coat this. Email to support@livingston.com
has been taking longer and longer, and is now unacceptably long, so
we've made some changes to improve things, including adding more
people, attaching a tracking number to every mail that comes in so we
can tell how it's doing, and sending an acknowledgement back to to the
sender to let you know what that tracking number is. We're planning to
soon integrate email with our support database so you'll get an actual
ticket number when you email us, not just a tracking number.
But there's still a big backlog of email that's piled up already,
stretching back several weeks. The fairest thing to do would be to
continue working the email queue first-in, first-out, but that means
(even with our added staff) that the turnaround time for email would
still be weeks, so instead of answering mail from customers who have a
question NOW we'd be spending all our time answering questions for
customers who most likely have already gotten an answer by phone, from
the portmaster-users mailing list, figured it out themselves, or punted
us to the hell of unresponsive vendors.
So instead, we're answering email from Friday 8/15 onwards and will do
whatever it takes to provide next-business-day answers to all email to
the support address. If you sent email earlier than that and haven't
gotten an answer, you're welcome to resend it to support@livingston.com
and we'll now give it a tracking number and answer it.
Eventually we'd like to answer email as fast as it comes in, because
email is more efficient than telephone for many kinds of questions. To
start with we're setting a goal of answering everything by the next
business day, and once we see we're meeting that, we'll set quicker
goals.
-- Carl Rigney cdr@livingston.com