We are currently using Invision Cloud and while we like the forum software a lot, we have not been pleased with the reliability and support. Out forum is not a money making venture, it's something we've done to help out other people in our industry, and to the greatest degree possible we just need it to work. That's why we went with the cloud option. In other words it's not like something we make money from where we have time to keep devoting to it. We need it to be reliable and as painless as possible and if we have a support issue, we need to trust it's going to be handled. Questions:
1. How good is VB support over all? Are they dedicated to offering a high level of support and quickly resolving customer issues? Or is it all marketing speak?
2. VB advertises telephone support for Gold cloud customers. How easy is it to access when that's needed? Can VB tell me there is a strong commitment to that staying and that we won't sign up and suddenly find out in 3 months that they decided offering phone support is not cost efficient?
3. Is the forum considered a support mechanism or is it mainly peer to peer? Not that I have anything against peer to peer, I just want to know if vBulletin makes an effort to answer questions in the forum, or if the answer to everything is "submit a ticket"?
4. How good is reliability for the VB Cloud product? Not just up-time, but forum features working with very minimal bugs. Some examples of issues we've encountered with Invision include users not being able to get into their settings, notifications stopping working on two difference occasions, users getting error messages when going to chat, as well as data being lost during an outage. Issues happen with any software, but we always had to report these issues and spend time trying to get them resolved, whereas I'm used to cloud companies realizing there are issues across all customers and fixing them proactively. Obviously that must not be the way Invisions platform works, not sure if it is with VB's or not. In the end none of these issues were the end of the world....if we could just pick up a phone and reach someone when email was not solving things and an issue was urgent.
5. How are cloud upgrades handled? Do we just get a notification that they'll be done and they happen in the middle of the night (good for us)? Or perhaps a notification that we need to give authorization that they'll be handled and then they do it (good for us)? Or do we just discover they exist when we log into our admin panel, and then have to go and submit a support request to get them done? Again, the key here is we don't want to be dealing with this stuff, that's the entire reason we want to use a cloud product, we need to deal with a company that knows how to do things in the cloud.
6. Does VB offer consulting packages or hourly rates for ongoing work we might need done?
7. Is there any way to convert an Invision cloud forum to a VB cloud forum?
I know that's a lot of questions but I don't want to switch over and discover that we're still in the same boat.
Thanks
1. How good is VB support over all? Are they dedicated to offering a high level of support and quickly resolving customer issues? Or is it all marketing speak?
2. VB advertises telephone support for Gold cloud customers. How easy is it to access when that's needed? Can VB tell me there is a strong commitment to that staying and that we won't sign up and suddenly find out in 3 months that they decided offering phone support is not cost efficient?
3. Is the forum considered a support mechanism or is it mainly peer to peer? Not that I have anything against peer to peer, I just want to know if vBulletin makes an effort to answer questions in the forum, or if the answer to everything is "submit a ticket"?
4. How good is reliability for the VB Cloud product? Not just up-time, but forum features working with very minimal bugs. Some examples of issues we've encountered with Invision include users not being able to get into their settings, notifications stopping working on two difference occasions, users getting error messages when going to chat, as well as data being lost during an outage. Issues happen with any software, but we always had to report these issues and spend time trying to get them resolved, whereas I'm used to cloud companies realizing there are issues across all customers and fixing them proactively. Obviously that must not be the way Invisions platform works, not sure if it is with VB's or not. In the end none of these issues were the end of the world....if we could just pick up a phone and reach someone when email was not solving things and an issue was urgent.
5. How are cloud upgrades handled? Do we just get a notification that they'll be done and they happen in the middle of the night (good for us)? Or perhaps a notification that we need to give authorization that they'll be handled and then they do it (good for us)? Or do we just discover they exist when we log into our admin panel, and then have to go and submit a support request to get them done? Again, the key here is we don't want to be dealing with this stuff, that's the entire reason we want to use a cloud product, we need to deal with a company that knows how to do things in the cloud.
6. Does VB offer consulting packages or hourly rates for ongoing work we might need done?
7. Is there any way to convert an Invision cloud forum to a VB cloud forum?
I know that's a lot of questions but I don't want to switch over and discover that we're still in the same boat.
Thanks
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