I’m posting this here to ask you all what the average time of response is from the Steinberg support team? I emailed them with a question on February 17 and only have gotten the automated response that they receved my email but that if a response might be delayed due to namm and frankfurter musikmesse (which is in itself a quite outdated email… )
I emailed them about a plugin question and sent the same question to Waves who answered in under 5 hours…
This is the very first time I have asked a question to support in the 10+ years that I am a paying customer of Steinberg … not a good way to treat your customers
I have been waiting for a week so far. I have waited over a month in the past. I think Steinberg should spend more money in this area given the issues that have surfaced with C8.
In my experience, sometimes they respond immediately, and some other times it takes them awhile. Thankfully, the times I needed help the most, they responded immediately, sometimes with a phone call and a connection to my session.
One thing to be sure of on your end is that the email account that is associated with your my Steinberg account is the one you’re checking for a response. Some users here, including myself, found that the email that was associated with the account was not the one we were checking and thought that our request was not being answered.
The message says “We will take care of your request and get back to you as soon as possible. Please note that due to bank holidays and large trade shows (e.g. Musikmesse in Frankfurt and NAMM shows) the response might be delayed.” So those two trade shows are only examples.
It is frustrating for the support team and me personally to see that we are not able to respond at least within 48 hours.
The reason for the current backlog has been the Cubase Pro 8 release in combination with many unplanned absences within the team over the last couple of months.
In addition, we had one support agent moving on to Yamaha/Line 6 and two others are currently taking a parental leave.
It is not easy to compensate for this and to find temporary workers or new full time employees that have the product knowledge as well as the needed language skills.
We are currently looking for new full time support agents and recently hired three part time 1st level agents to cope with the backlog.
The above is not supposed to be any kind of excuse, I merely wanted to give an insight into the reasons for this.
I am also very much aware that this is not the first time I write something similar here.
We have to improve the situation to meet your and our own demands and I am really sorry because we do care.
Suggestion: There are a handful of posters here that are knowledgeable enough to answer 90-95% of the tech support questions you get, I would guess. Although they are probably the busiest of the posters as well, I wonder if any arrangement could be made where they could help Steinberg with their tech support on a part time basis, remotely? Just a thought, until you fill your stables again, and possibly even beyond that on an ad hoc basis.
If it only was that easy… it sounds tempting but there is so much to consider. It would have to include contracts, they would need to have access to all customer data and other internal resources. In addition, many inquiries are not even on the programs themselves but on everything surrounding it and the company. Also, I can only speak for the countries, Steinberg HQ is supporting directly which is only parts of Europe. In all other countries, Yamaha or other local distributors offer support.
It might be a good idea to look at the model a few other companies have adopted where you can log in and see the progress of your support request and add extra information as you discover more about the issue. If you register all you computer specifications are already logged together with ancillary equipment and plugins. It would make for a more efficient database.
Indeed, there are many options to not only improve the response times but everything around it as well. More and better self-service options would also help. We are currently evaluating several options in this regard.
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