Improving roon customer support

This is not intended as a critical message. Its a suggestion for a relatively straightforward way to improve roon support and customer satisfaction.

I understand small company resource constraints: I was VP/Engineering head at 3 technical startups. I’m new to roon, and early on (15 April) I posted to roon tech support on the roon website (not in this forum). I got my first reply on 28 April. Obviously roon is overwhelmed: sometimes success is a problem.

When a user requests technical support from roon, as shown at the end of this message, they are asked to fill out a template. This is a start, but not all users are technical, there can easily be erroneous information, and more information may be needed, increasing followup messages. The template is also pretty barebones. I made a suggestion related to improving this in the ROCK forum

That suggestion was specific to ROCK, and I would like to generalize it here. Clearly if 2 approaches were to be acted on , they should be coordinated. The ROCK suggestion is simpler because of the greatly reduced number of system types, and could be a trailblazer for some capability along the lines suggested below.

The roon application should have a way to collect system information into a file that could be uploaded for technical support. The contents of that file should be defined by tech support and the roon team, based upon their knowledge of the software and the most frequent problems. Many companies do this. its not super hard, and has a terrific payoff. Contents of the file would include hardware/SW platform details from OS utilities (CPU, memory size, OS version, disk layout/type/size/current capacity, network connections etc). It would also include key information from the roon app/database (audio devices, number of albums indexed, I dunno enough to define this part). A more advanced version (or an optional additional file generated on roon TS request during troubleshooting) might include dynamic, runtime information on system load, network and disk activity, information from system logs, etc. There might need to be a short user questionairre to cover infomation not easily obtained from utilities and scripts.

The payoff of this should be clear. roon defines the information they need, and the script ensures its collected in an automated, consistent way. support gets expert in using this consistent set of information in resolving problems. There is consistency from one problem to the next. Users get faster resolution and more consistent responses.

In another forum post, I heard the roon COO @danny say that reducing the burden on TS is a important goal for roon, as it should be. A new user has a 2 week trial to decide whether to spend money and resources on roon. Ensuring responsive resolution of problems will result in more customers and a better experience.

As indicated, I left the current support template below, for comparison to my suggestion above.

7 Likes

Looks somewhat more in line with the 21st Century.

2 Likes

Thanks for weighing in and offering some suggestions @jim_hamilton, I really appreciate it! We’ve actually built similar tools to what you’re suggesting already. They’re super helpful for complex technical issues, but it does take time to generate and process diagnostic results. In a high-volume support context, that extra time adds up quickly.

That’s why we ask for a bit of information up front. It saves us a lot of time, and it never hurts to get a description from the customer in their own words.

@kevin, I understand your comment. I left an important part out of my original suggestion. My idea really is that you build in a menu item in the roon app to generate the snapshot, so all support has to do is ask the user to include a copy of the snapshot with their description of the problem. The user could also look at the snapshot themselves, and if technically inclined, might even solve their own problem ("oh, I’m getting disk timeouts - my old disk is failing… " “oops, I meant to be using the other network interface”, etc)

3 Likes

Whatever the current support tools and approach, in my 6 weeks experience as a subscriber, support and communication about support and bugs and recurring issues, do seem way too slow and often resemble what @Chris_Roon calls in another thread:

“extinguishing fires only to find them re-occurring somewhere else”

I am sure the support people and the Roon staff in general are doing the best they can, but an in-depth performance evaluation of current customer support would in my opinion be wise.

2 Likes