I agree with this too, but I think the volume of bugs/issues has just increased so much with Kinetic UI that we’re not actually noticing underlying improvements that Support has been making.
I have to agree, and as a paying customer of Odoo ERP in another context, Epicor is way better. Odoo’s support is actually trained to obfuscate and upsell, and takes at least 3 days to respond.
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Agreed, there has been improvement over all and with some teams more than others. I’ve been working in Epicor ERP since Vantage 8.0 days (mid 00’s) so I’ve seen support cycle from good-to-bad a few times.
I also use EpiCare as last resort and use similar steps as @Hally described above.
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The knowledge base has some very good snippets in it a lot more that it did a few years ago. I just wish it was a bit easier to search
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I feel like there has been an improvement as well, but I don’t put too many cases in so it might just be the nature of the cases I’ve put in over the last year or so.
Agreed and AGREED! Searching for a KB, or watching the suggested list change while entering a ticket, are one of my steps.
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Before Epicor, I was the IT Manager for a manufacturing company that purchased software from Epicor (Avante)… way back then, support was backlogged, and sometimes took days/weeks to get things looked at, and there was not really a great escalation process. After going live for over a year, I then came to Epicor and actually worked in Support!
I have found that our support teams HAVE gotten much better over time.
During my 5+ years working in support, I found that there were some people who created great cases and others who simply couldn’t give you a great description of the issue.
BUT ONE THING that I will say is that some people provide way too many specific details, well beyond what is needed. During my time in Support, I wrote, and successfully got fixed, 100s of PRBs with very few rejections.
What was my secret sauce?
- keep it simple… fewer steps to document the problem the better
- take a step back from your actual problem, and analyze what the real issue might be. see if you can simplify it even more.
- try to give an example that does NOT take tons of setup.
- if at all possible make your example something that someone can read (without actually trying it in the DB itself) and be able to visualize it.
Sometimes I would completely rewrite a 20 step problem and have a simple 3-step intro showing something that “obviously” was a problem… then back that up with more details if needed.
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I had one ages ago as well, same gist. Somebody internally told me it was the most voted on idea ever once upon a time. 
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I’m still trying to sort out how to get a response that isn’t a phone call. Every case I file gets the contact phone number changed to “do not call”, a cartoonishly overkill ascii-framed block “do not call” header on top of the case text, and an immediate response message “DO NOT CALL” after posting the case.
With that much effort it’s a 50/50 split between whether someone at the office messages that support called, or whether support digs in their heels and demands to know how we can chat on a phone before they’ll do anything.
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Nothing I can say that doesn’t feel like I am contributing to the pile-on here. I don’t know how to make Epicor understand how poor the support experience is on a daily basis. It is not our fault. It is not that the customers aren’t doing a good job submitting support cases. It is the epicor support team and procedures that need to improve. I used to fill out the surveys. Epicor’s response was to stop allowing me to submit surveys on support cases anymore. Escalating cases sometimes gets you somewhere but mostly does not. My only hope at this point is that Epicor figures out this knowledge assistant thing so it is easier to locate information in the knowledge base.
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Actually the most successful cases for me are when the support reaches out for a call where I can share my screen. Clears up a lot of questions really quickly.
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Totally agree there @timshuwy and yes I will put my hand up I worked in support… But at an Epicor Partner back in early 2000’s.
The best day I had I recall, getting into work early so I could tangle with eFrontoffice undistracted, and this guy walks in… Goes to one of the managers offices and sits down.
A few minutes later he notices me squirreling away, and introduces himself and asks who I am “I’m Simon, I reply, I’m new, I just work here in Support”.
His response “I’m Derek the Owner. Support! It’s the most important part of the business, without that rapport with our customers we would be in a lot of trouble. Welcome aboard.” he exclaims or words to that effect.
I was hoping the floor would open and swallow me up…
Anyway it was a great place to work. Our eFrontOffice module for Aged care got purchased by Epicor, and our whole team moved to Epicor…That seems like such a long time ago now…
We had a big night out to celebrate the deal and on that night Derek went to every person in our team and thanked us individually… He was a really good person.
After 20 years quite a few of us are still at Epicor, others have gone to customers, other software companies, others have become CEOs at particular CRM software companies, and others have joined them.
Apologies for nostalgic overshare.
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I understand and agree that in many ways it is better than it has been in the past and I understand everyone is human but I do have to say that often times it feels like support does not look at the issue, yes I understand they need to verify before just sending me a data fix type thing but as I have said here and in my actual post about my issue we are on prem with SSO setup through Local AD, at what point does a response telling me to login to my Azure AD as Global Admin make sense in terms of resolving a problem?
To add more fuel to my fire on this one the support rep then claimed the issue was resolved in .15 which other users here confirmed is not the case so I asked, letting them know that I had heard from people on epuiusers that it wasn’t resolved and was told it was indeed resolved. I then gave them a support case where the person is on .15 and still has the problem and asked them to review that since it doesn’t seem to be resolved. They have now come back and said it is resolved in .16 when that is available but I can install a hotfix for the issue.
Looking up the hotfix, it does not have anything to do with the issue I have.
Short Description
This Hotfix fixes two issues: KNTC-23451: layers not loading properly when switching from one layer to another. KNTC-23426: Grids not refreshing properly when clicking the refresh button inside overflow menu.
I guess I am just tired of either having the person not read the ticket before responding or being told that features that worked for 15+ years were not considered important enough to move to Kinetic but I can submit an idea to have them add back in functionality that has always been there.
That and Data Fixes having expiries, why, just why?
I don’t mind the call backs, particularly when they are scheduled, not a fan of random ones but a scheduled call to demonstrate the issue has often yielded good results. One of the things I often ask my users for is to show me exactly what is happening since I don’t always trust their description so like I said earlier here, I do understand the trust but verify approach, but I read whatever they sent me before I get to that point.
All that being said, the case I posted yesterday relating to the GL was resolved with as minimal effort as I could possible ever hope for, I described the problem - clearly something that has happened before and had the fix within 2 hours.
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Honestly, this makes sense to me. A fix might be good for one version and if used on a different version it may do more harm than good. Is there a world where a fix is tied to a customer and a version that doesn’t expire? Sure. But there is a land of unintended consequences if data fixes are used inappropriately or shared with other companies where fixes would work differently even for the same version.
That said, if the same company has the same problem on the same version, having some automation to create the fix without human intervention would be welcome.
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I agree about version numbers, that makes sense and most fixes I get are tied to company codes and versions already so why give me a data fix that expires in a month when I’ve requested 3 times already on the same version. Especially when epicor can’t identify why the problem is happening in the first place because it is so random.
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I had created an idea about this too because it drives me insane. If I am on the same version I should not have to re-request the same generic fix over and over again. For example, delete kinetic personalizations, delete sys task, etc. The idea got marked not planning to implement.
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I agree but I wouldn’t want to codify fixes. If there’s a problem in the software, let’s correct it. And you have listed one of those cases: Delete SysTask. This is already an Idea, has 94 votes, and is still gauging interest. That should make it into the product. @Rich hinted at work being done with the System Agent and Epicor may well be addressing this. 
Currently, the Idea system is still fairly one-way with communication coming from users and not as much coming back. When lack of feedback leads to users to imagine nothing is happening, it tends to lead to bitch sessions here.
Again, from Aha.io: 5 Product Experts Explain How to Get Clearer Customer Feedback
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Apologies not necessary. We all have stories, we’ve all taken different random walks to get where we are today. Thank you for oversharing that!
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I am very familiar with this idea 
.
They said it was out of scope, so it went nowhere bahaha.
Is it syncronicity that this started playing for me on Spotify just now?
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