X3 Poor Customer Support

I feel it only reasonable that I report my negative experience upgrading to X3. After being bombarded with email ads, I decided to take the upgrade plunge. I went to the Cakewalk site, compared specs, verified that I was eligible for an upgrade, and put X3 Studio into my cart. Checkout did not work. I needed to contact customer service. A lengthy wait time later, I paid and was issued a D/L link. After a lengthy download, I ran the install program. I input the provided password and received a "password invalid" error. After multiple retries and serious frustration, I called customer service only to discover that the wait times were so long that all I got was a busy signal! I then fired off an email requesting help - last Tuesday! It has now been eight days and I have had no response. Granted one holiday and 2 weekend days should not count but what about the other 5 days? Is anyone at home?
 
Needless to say I am NOT impressed with the situation. The wait continues!

Thanks for the input. I read the troubleshooting guide which suggested that the problem might occur when the install is not run by an administrator. I retried in admin mode but nothing changed. I copied and pasted directly from my account page at Cakewalk.com so the serial number is correct.

PeeBus
Thanks for the input. I read the troubleshooting guide which suggested that the problem might occur when the install is not run by an administrator. I retried in admin mode but nothing changed. I copied and pasted directly from my account page at Cakewalk.com so the serial number is correct.

Please forgive my question, but your wording was a little unclear in my read.
 
You indicated 'retried in admin mode'.  Did that mean you were signed on to a user account that has administrator privileges, or did you explicitly right-click on the Sonar launch icon and click on 'Run As Administrator'?
 
I ask, because the above are 2 different things.  You want to do the second option, explicitly right-clicking on the Sonar launch icon and then clicking on 'Run As Administrator'.  This will give you more privileges than simply logging on to an account that is an administrator type.  (It has to do with a higher level of privileges granted in an 'execution token' that is created with the 'Run As Administrator' mode of execution.)
 
So, IF you hadn't done the above, and tried the above, and it didn't work, then perhaps you could try one more thing: copy and paste the serial number and/or registration code into Notepad, and then copy it back into the clipboard from there and paste it into the appropriate spot in Sonar.  I have seen in the past where some flakiness with formatting prevented proper evaluation of serial numbers and such, when copied from a web page, and using the Notepad trick stripped off the weirdness and then it worked fine when pasted in after running it through Notepad.
 
I hope any of the above gets you up and going.
 
Bob Bone
 

Guitarmech111
For issues like this, you can open up trouble tickets online. That may get faster attention since these get triaged.  Go to the problem reporter section of the support page and  that should get quicker attention. Not e-mail, but actually create a trouble ticket explaining your problem, frustration and lack of support in the body of the ticket.

Please don't advise people to misuse the systems we have in place. This type of activity is partially what cause things to be backed up. They are not the same systems and are not managed by the same people. Doing this causes everything at Cakewalk to slow down, including response times from TS and CS as well as bug resolution from Development. 
 
PeeBus has an open case with us. The best thing to do would simply be to reply to the staff member that sent an email to him last week. This would have notified our guy immediately.
 
If people are not hearing back, I'd recommend calling in or sending me a Private Message on the forum. I'm always more then happy to investigate as well.
 

chuckebaby
holidays are always busy ;-)
I would call direct. staff has said the wait times are down to about 14 minutes on good days.
 

FYI, that was a bad day. Average hold times are less then 2 minutes for Technical Support and Customer Service.
 
 

PeeBus
I feel it only reasonable that I report my negative experience upgrading to X3. After being bombarded with email ads, I decided to take the upgrade plunge. I went to the Cakewalk site, compared specs, verified that I was eligible for an upgrade, and put X3 Studio into my cart. Checkout did not work. I needed to contact customer service. A lengthy wait time later, I paid and was issued a D/L link. After a lengthy download, I ran the install program. I input the provided password and received a "password invalid" error. After multiple retries and serious frustration, I called customer service only to discover that the wait times were so long that all I got was a busy signal! I then fired off an email requesting help - last Tuesday! It has now been eight days and I have had no response. Granted one holiday and 2 weekend days should not count but what about the other 5 days? Is anyone at home?
 
Needless to say I am NOT impressed with the situation. The wait continues!

PeeBus, I see what happened here, and it was a mistake on our agent's part. Your Serial Number does not match your installers. I will send you an email right now with proper instructions. I'm very sorry about this :/
 
I'll notify our guy internally of the mistake.

Conley, I've already discussed this with you, but this case was easily addressed by the OP replying to an open case. Your suggestion was not necessary and only complicating the process. You're stepping into threads to try to point out flaws with our system, which you know very little about.

I didn't ask you to not post... but advising people to use the Problem Report form for Customer Service is not helpful. It is the exact opposite. Please stop doing it. I'm not trying to have an argument with you, I'm trying to help customers and move on.
 
I understand your intentions are good, I'm just asking you to work with us versus against us.

They made a mistake, and acknowledged it.
 
Cakewalk is a bit strapped to do this, but they have made a strategic planning decision to maintain FREE technical support, where a lot of other companies charge.
 
Ryan, and others, when made aware of things that slip through the cracks, or of issues that have been problematic due to a human or system error, have historically done a pretty good job of jumping in to resolve such situations, and he did this here as well.
 
It's not perfect, but what HAS remained steady is their willingness to jump in and address this kind of stuff, so why not lighten up a bit?  He just offered to immediately correct the problem, and to react to direct email/PM for future issues of this nature - where there is a lag in support response, for whatever reason.
 
The guy just explained why using the ticket system causes more slowdowns, and you just pretty much inferred, in effect, that you don't care if other people or the system are impacted - that if your expectations are not met that you will deliberately continue to abuse the system.
 
Bob Bone
 

Ryan Munnis [Cakewalk]
 The best thing to do would simply be to reply to the staff member that sent an email to him last week. This would have notified our guy immediately.
 
If people are not hearing back, I'd recommend calling in or sending me a Private Message on the forum. I'm always more then happy to investigate as well.

I understand your point re how using "incorrect" methods of getting a response may be unhelpful to you, but I also understand the frustrations people feel when trying to get a simple response sometimes. I won't name names here, but a member of your staff has been "looking into" a problem I have with Z3ta+2 for months now and hasn't responded at all to any of my reminder/any progress emails. The same person also asked for PMs from those who didn't get the December session drummer offer in their accounts and whist I can't speak for the others, nothing has been done about this either in my case. The specific thread about this has now been deleted, so I guess that's that ?
 
I'm not saying all this just to be a "troll" or to bash you for the sake of it, but I think you need to appreciate that your company's level of customer service is really quite poor at times and to be a little more understanding when people get fed up of waiting and use non conventional ways to try and resolve their issues.

Ryan Munnis [Cakewalk]

paulo

Ryan Munnis [Cakewalk]
 The best thing to do would simply be to reply to the staff member that sent an email to him last week. This would have notified our guy immediately.

If people are not hearing back, I'd recommend calling in or sending me a Private Message on the forum. I'm always more then happy to investigate as well.

I understand your point re how using "incorrect" methods of getting a response may be unhelpful to you, but I also understand the frustrations people feel when trying to get a simple response sometimes. I won't name names here, but a member of your staff has been "looking into" a problem I have with Z3ta+2 for months now and hasn't responded at all to any of my reminder/any progress emails. The same person also asked for PMs from those who didn't get the December session drummer offer in their accounts and whist I can't speak for the others, nothing has been done about this either in my case. The specific thread about this has now been deleted, so I guess that's that ?
 
I'm not saying all this just to be a "troll" or to bash you for the sake of it, but I think you need to appreciate that your company's level of customer service is really quite poor at times and to be a little more understanding when people get fed up of waiting and use non conventional ways to try and resolve their issues.

Paulo, with all due respect there's more to this conversation then you're aware of. I just had a conversation about support with Conley a few days prior to this thread. Sorry to have our conversation out in the open like that, but it was already discussed and I didn't want to beat a dead horse. I think both Conley and myself (maybe I'm assuming) have an appreciation already for where each of us are coming from.
 
Believe it or not, I think you're actually inadvertently proving my point. Our Customer Service/Technical Support system only has three cases (87957, 121219, 120864) from your email address, all of which are resolved. It sounds like whoever is looking into your issue is outside of the support umbrella, thus myself and my staff have nothing to notify us you're waiting on something.
 
If you want to PM me the details, I'll look into it. I have a few other PMs from forumites today that I need to look into as well.
 
Everyone, please just keep working with us. I mentioned elsewhere, but Cakewalk is going through a lot of changes (for the better) currently. I hear everyone loud and clear and understand where you're coming from.

 
Thanks for your response Ryan.

FYI and with due respect to you, the reason for my Z3ta issue being dealt with "outside of the umbrella" is because one of your colleagues on this forum PM'd me and asked me to email the details to the person in question so that they could deal with it, not because I was trying to bypass the system, so no, in this case it doesn't really prove your point at all.
 
As far as that goes, it appears that X3 has "fixed" whatever the problem was, though it still happens every single time in 8.5PE, so don't ask me what is different, but as long as I'm using X3 and not 8.5 the problem seems to be resolved so it's not such a big deal for me right now The fact remains though that after some initial interest this has been basically ignored for a long time despite several reminders / follow up enquiries directly to the person who was supposed to be dealing with it, which is why I made the point.
 
The other issue was the December Session Drummer freebie for X3 customers that didn't appear in my account. The specific CW issued thread that related to this asked those who didn't have it in their accounts to PM their details to the OP so that it could be sorted, which I duly did. Weeks later, still nothing in my account and now the thread is deleted.
 
FYI my account has for some reason never shown my registration of 8.5PE, which was done a time of launch and still doesn't show my registration of X3 Producer, although the accompanying Gobbler offer is there. I'm not worried about this particularly as I have boxed sets of the software and keep careful note of auth codes etc, but I mention it as it may help to ascertain why things are not appearing in my account that should be there.

Thanks.Sorry to have caused a ruckus. Can you please explain what I should have done as your explanation was not clear. Did you mean contact the individual who sent the original download links?