While I see where you're coming from, in my experience ESPECIALLY Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...
I know nothing about the reasoning behind the original decision from Synology, nor the internal politics at play, but typically the customer support tail is not wagging the dog of the rest of the company. Might be bias/anecdata from the places I've worked, but product usually drives everything, and the support staff has to deal with the consequences.
Yes, but it's not support wagging the dog,
If they sell a NAS, the customer adds drives to it and already runs into issues requiring support, it creates cost which becomes part of a product problem.
In B2C that's a legal warranty-issue in many countries, because if the product didn't provide the advertised core-functionality the customer has the right for a full refund of the purchase price (within the EU for a period of 24 months!)
> Customer-Support is usually happy to have a clear-cut criteria to reject
> support-requests as "officially out-of-scope".
All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
“We only support Synology-branded drives” would have gone over a lot better, because we could have used non-symbology drives without support. Instead they actively prevented non-Synology drives from working.
It would have been way better than what they did, I agree. However, it would've been pretty shitty from a user perspective still. I'd be pretty angry as a customer if customer support just refuses to help me with anything unless I buy Synology-branded drives.
Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components. It's not realistic for them to support those components. The standard approach is to support the aspects they can control, and the customer is on their own for problems that involve the third-party component. Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours. It works with ours? OK, our job is done, go talk to the company that made your charger.
> Plenty of companies support products that work with third-party components.
Exactly. And they typically help you with issues even if you do use third-party components.
> Your phone won't charge? Is that our charger? No? Try one of ours.
That's not really how it works. If I have tried 5 third-party USB-C chargers of different brands, and they all charge all other USB-C devices perfectly but not my phone, my phone vendor will hopefully be more helpful than "sorry, can't help you, you've only tried with third-party chargers".
That really depends on the company. Comcast would tell me to reboot my computer even after it was clear their modem wasn't getting a signal. Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example. But if your phone only fails on one charger made by somebody else, and works otherwise, they're not going to help you fix the charger.
> Any decent company will help you out if you've made a good case that the problem is on their side, as in your example.
Not if they follow yason's guidance of:
> All they needed was criteria at which point they can tell their customers "Please test if this reproduces with genuine Synology drives, and if they do we'll file an internal bug to fix your issue."
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Whenever there's a reason to suspect a drive issue, Synology's support should obviously ask you to verify that your drives are good. Maybe provide a drive testing feature in the Synology software which tests for common failure modes. Maybe ask you to try connecting the drives to other machines. Maybe try to put in another drive. That's fine.
But a blanket policy of "we won't help you unless you test with our branded drives" is what I'm arguing against.
2. Support provided: Somewhat decent tested models that meet x features
3. Unsupported but works: list of drives
4. Does not work: list of drives.
There is no shortage of models of drives that do crappy crap that totally suck completely. Like lie about things going wrong in the drive. Or take a long break when dealing with failed sectors. Putting down a list of well supported drives is a must in that market. This said, only supporting branded drives sucks.
There's a lot of difference between "we don't officially support X" and "we will programmatically prevent you from using X". Even "using X will void your warranty" is actually significantly better for the user than just straight up preventing the use of non matching proprietary drives.
That's true, but there's a pretty big difference between 'ban' and 'unsupported'. It's entirely possible to do the latter without doing the former. Synology actively and painfully punished its customers who didn't use its own drives, deliberately degrading their experience in order to try and force them to buy more of Synology's own drives.
Cutting support can be an understandable, if unwelcome, business decision. But Synology's ban was a deliberate attack on their own customers, for Synology's own profit.
There's a misunderstanding, I don't defend Synology's decision.
I'm just stating that from my experience it is unlikely that especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision, it would more likely be R&D, Product or Sales.
Not to throw shades at Customer support at all. They are the ones dealing with the pressure of fast resolution time per case vs. large complexity to identify root-causes across different HDD-vendors, it's reasonable that they highlighted the difficulty here and someone thought he found the "silver bullet"...
>especially Customer Support would step up and complain about such a decision
As a life long customer support person I disagree.
Customer support would 100% complain about this as they get to deal with pissed customers that have a completely good, decent manufacture drive that won't work and you are the anvil of which they will beat their hammer upon. R&D/Product are much more separated from the pissed customers. Support is the first group that gets beat by issues like this, followed by sales.
They could also oppose the change simply out of a belief in what's best for the customers, and an ethos of hardware compatibility. It would represent no change to their burden to continue the company's long-standing policy.
It's a little bit trickier though, if you're selling hardware with a one off cost and not a subscription. Because your installed base grows even with flat revenue. The lifetime cost of CS (including the calls from people who need to be turned down) needs to be baked into the sales price, but that's a bet.
My experience is with enterprise software, where most products were born as shrinkwrap and slowly moved to other models, and I agree, it's not an easy problem to solve. Even if you size lifetime costs correctly (and very few people can), it is quite hard to scale a support org; even if one can see the storm coming, one might not be fast enough to be prepared for it for a number of reasons (geography, capital investment, training times, churn, brain drain, etc etc).
That's why some big names have literally declared support bankruptcy and just don't provide almost any support (google, amazon...).
Customer support who are happy to leave customers high and dry and rinse their hands of the problem are basically soulless already; they care more about their own immediate convienence (while still on the clock!) than they do about the human being on the other end of the phone line.
Now, it's probably inevitable that many of them will be this way, but what I'm saying is keeping these customer service reps satisfied with easy dismissals isn't actually the lifeblood of the company. Happy engineers who derive satisfaction from the quality of their work on the other hand are extremely important to the long term viability of the company. If you tell the engineers that you're compromising the utility of the product they worked so hard on, to screw over paying customers, for the convienence of the soulless customer service reps who just want to play solitaire on their computers instead of helping people, the company has a real problem.
I’ve worked in tech support at all levels. At most companies it doesn’t matter what customer service is happy or sad about, their job is to deploy the policy given. Customer support as an organization’s opinion isn’t generally valued at most companies.
Even when I worked tech support for some high end equipment I would have to explain to high ranking sales teams “It doesn’t matter what I think. If I break the policy it gets me in trouble even if you make a big sale because of it. If you can get my boss or someone up the chain to tell me to do what you’re asking then I’d be happy to do what you’re asking.”
That's why I can imagine someone just calculated support-costs per unit sold to get an actual profit-number, was unhappy with the result, asked CS for justification for their effort and one thing they came back with was a metric of support-cost related to HDD issues.
Maybe the high Synology HDD price is even calculated to include THOSE support-costs. So they are not better than other HDDs, but the price already includes possible support to get them set up in a Synology NAS.
Could be one of those "management ideas", because in B2C they cannot charge for support required to just provide the advertised core function of the product...
The cost of providing customer support is clear and easy to measure, while the benefit is nebulous. This leads to incentive structures centered around controlling costs. That means rewards for handling more calls, and thus punishment for taking too long on a call regardless of the merits. In such an environment, it is inevitable that the reps will care about their call times instead of the customer. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
If you empower customer service to actually provide service, they will. Shitty service isn't because of shitty reps, it's shitty incentive structures. They're not trying to cut down on support effort because they want to play solitaire, they're doing it because serving too many customers with difficult problems will literally impoverish them.
I wouldn't be surprised if the decision was made BECAUSE Customer Support highlighted the support-effort to debug all these unique customer-setups within warranty, and then someone stepped in and proposed to kill two birds with one stone and only support own HDD's...