What is the average reply time for Steinberg support?

I’ve often noted crazy delays in anyone getting back from Steinberg Support - like weeks and months - but just looking to see what you guys are experiencing in terms of time for someone to get back? In most paid software and services I expect someone to get back to me within 2 - 3 days at most. Whats the point of taking time to fill in the support form and attach crash dumps etc if there’s no reply - a black hole. How many support personnel does Steinberg have on Cubase or their products? Can it be THAT busy to take weeks or months to reply to a long term customer - or sometimes no reply at all!

I think it really depends on what country you’re in. Here in the USA I have received human replies within three days or so, sometimes sooner.

Agree.

I believe the way it works is you take the name of the country where you are in German and count the number of characters in the name. Let’s call that N. Next you divide N by the version (V) of Cubase involved. Then if you multiply by pi you get the approximate number of days for an initial response.

So:
~Days to 1st response = (N / V) * pi

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Dang. Now I’m hungry. :hungary:

I think there might be other criteria that influences the amount of time it takes to get a reply, but from here it’s hard to say. Forum posts about it probably skew negative since people are more likely to post when they’re pissed off. I would also speculate that the topic of the ticket might have something to do with it.

Isn’t it also a question of different companies (resellers with exclusive territorial deals) being responsible for support in different countries?

This does seem to crop up in a lot of tales of the worst support.

So @mart where are you?

And one of the issues getting in the way of what is possible (and also what’s cost effective) is that some territorial distribution agreements may be based on a pre-Internet world. Steinberg may contractually not be able to sell directly into some geographies (even if some consumers find ways around it). And part of a reseller having the exclusive right to sell, may also include the obligation to provide product support. – And therefore support requests from some geographies should really go to the regional distributor with the obligation to provide support.

Before the Internet, people would generally not even think about calling Steinberg head office for support (back when country-to-country calls were still very expensive), but of course now anyone can fill in a web support form from anywhere, regardless whether that’s the right support avenue for them or not.

I have no info about Steinberg inner workings, but they might be ignoring support requests from individuals who are not from a place where Steinberg is responsible (or even authorized) for support and/or have purchased via a distributor that’s responsible for support. And if the local distributor absolutely sucks at support, Steinberg and the customer may not have a lot of ways to get around that.

That may be why some customers go out of their way to purchase (and obtain support) via a different avenue than the default for their geography.

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Hi Steve,

In Ireland. If its anything like the Vaccine’s here it may be sometime next year for a reply then :wink:

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I’m not a contact support type user but have been able to use WinDbg to find causal plugins that are causing a project to die in the past. Only its pointing to Cubase.exe mostly at the moment so …

Ireland is on the list of countries for Steinberg direct support - so my theories around some geographies and distribution and support agreements don’t seem to apply here. :man_shrugging:

see your topic about that.

I’ve been using Cubase since 2010, and have filed quite a few requests. Rarely, Steinberg replies within days, but mostly it’s months, so sometimes I’m sitting in the backyard with a cold beer, and then pling a mail comes in and I’m wondering what they’re talking about … oh, it’s that crash I asked about when we were snowed in!
This is Germany, and of course we get support directly from Steinberg who are based out of Hamburg. From what I read in this thread, next time I’ll buy my Cubase update in the US of A! :slight_smile:

If I find a mail 2 months old in my inbox I’d be embarrassed about sending a reply… let alone that its a support persons only job to reply to users … most support requests are rarely relevant 3 months down the line!