Yeah, I think, it’s important to name and shame, because they actively avoid providing the service that they advertise, but I do also expect this to be a common pattern in the industry. If you actually solved problems and did so permanently, you’d be out of business very quickly. External support providers have an inherent interest for things to work as badly as possible, so long as it does not get their contract cancelled.
Then you get other side-effects, like them ignoring or infinitely delaying tickets that are harder to solve. It’s a somewhat universal rule of capitalism: As soon as there is a metric for success, the goal is to game that metric as much as possible, because that maximizes the supposed success while minimizing costs.
You can try to define multiple metrics to make this more difficult. And you can set a higher target value than necessary, so that even with the gaming, it’s still within an acceptable margin.
But IMHO it’s still better to just treat it as a cost of doing business than to invest lots of money to try to make it measurable in an attempt to reduce the money spent.
Yeah, I think, it’s important to name and shame, because they actively avoid providing the service that they advertise, but I do also expect this to be a common pattern in the industry. If you actually solved problems and did so permanently, you’d be out of business very quickly. External support providers have an inherent interest for things to work as badly as possible, so long as it does not get their contract cancelled.
Naw, PEBKAC and ID10T issues provide an unlimited supply of tickets. Support is a gravy train even when done effectively.
Well, yeah, you might just get pushed out by competitors who supposedly have much lower cost per solved ticket…
Require condition of solved for payment, in the contract?
Then you get other side-effects, like them ignoring or infinitely delaying tickets that are harder to solve. It’s a somewhat universal rule of capitalism: As soon as there is a metric for success, the goal is to game that metric as much as possible, because that maximizes the supposed success while minimizing costs.
You can try to define multiple metrics to make this more difficult. And you can set a higher target value than necessary, so that even with the gaming, it’s still within an acceptable margin.
But IMHO it’s still better to just treat it as a cost of doing business than to invest lots of money to try to make it measurable in an attempt to reduce the money spent.