Technical support has been a key part of our success at NI. Sure, some of our customers who are gurus and have used our products for many years, have expressed concern about the experience level of some of our front line support engineers. But the point is, support is important to us – ever since customers started ripping open a PC for the first time or tried to install a Windows driver, we realized we need to be on this support thing.
However, the word “support” is one of the more overloaded terms out there. We (NI) and our customers use that term to mean many different things. Recently, we realized that we don’t really have a documented support policy somewhere that outlines all of these types of “support” and what you should expect. We are working on that now, and I wanted to get some opinions from the outside world. So far, I have compiled the following aspects of our business practices that would fall under the term “support”. Weigh in if I have missed something:
For a given version of LabVIEW (a version is the development environment and all associated modules and toolkits for that particular version release):
- Providing maintenance releases
- Providing patches for specific customer issues on an as-needed basis
- Testing and validating new hardware that comes out after LabVIEW
- Having technical support engineers who answer questions over the phone or through email
- Developing and maintaining technical content specific to this version on ni.com
This list outlines what we do. What is not clear is FOR HOW LONG? So the real question we are attempting to answer is to set some guidelines for timeframes for each of these items. For example, how far into the future should we test new hardware drivers with LabVIEW 8.6? Is it reasonable for you, as a LabVIEW user, to expect that any new hardware that comes out next year should work with LabVIEW 8.6? Of course. What about 3 years from now? How about 4? Same thing for maintenance releases – is it reasonable for us to ship a LV 8.6.2 three years from now? Probably not. However, we might create a patch for a specific customer who has hit a critical problem with no workaround.
Am I missing anything from this list?
Do you have any comments on timeframes for each of these?
I will be posting our proposal soon, but I thought I would throw this out there now to see if anyone has something else to add. (Of course, there are related issues to this – like what is the process for upgrading to new versions, and how long will we support specific operating systems – but that’s a different post)
Posted by pasquarette 
