Please advice on a small question¶

This request we often hear from customers who doesn't want to sign technical support contract.
And who get angry, when we decline to perform consulting of this kind.
Therefore we'll try to clarify politics regarding this question and reasons that stay behind this.
The possibility to work for our company is based on:

• signing contracts
• well-timed and qualitative work execution for these contracts
• payments by customers for these contracts

According to signed contracts we plan human resources in our company, or vice versa, we take new contracts according to human resources we have currently.
In case if we loose our contracts, especially long-term, due to poor quality or bad response timing, we may close our company.
Therefore performing tasks for the contracts with a best possible quality and with the best timing - is our main aim.
Serving questions from customers, with whom we doesn't have contracts, introduces risk of failure to comply already sighed contracts with other customers, in case if human resources will be distributed not the way it was planned to fulfill contracts.

Consulting customers, with whom there is no contract, also has several drawbacks:

• It's impossible to estimate, how many such customers should want to ask a question a day.
  Therefore, rational resource planning is impossible for such customers.
• We don't watch for software version for such customer, we don't monitor their servers and don't know what happened on them.
  When critical vulnerabilities are published, contract customers urgently get patches for operating system.
  Approximately once in 2 years contract customers get full operating system update to the most recent version.
  Customers without contract often have outdated OS, to which different vulnerabilities may be known, therefore more chances for hacking and related issues..
  Thus, when customer appeals with question, it's hard to understand the source of problem, without performing full diagnostics.
  Therefore, even the small question, according to customer's opinion, could lead to several hours diagnostics.
• Often such customers have outdated Smartswitch version.
  The issues of which are likely already fixed in more recent versions and have been forgotten.
  And features are likely to be configured in a different way in recent versions.
  Consulting on outdated software often requires digging old outdated source code, without which it's impossible to recall how a feature worked.
  This consulting on such software takes more time and effort than for more recent versions.
• Often the issue is not in software, but in other place (error, typo in configuration, hardware issues, temporary network issues in interconnection with partner, inattention when configuring according to instruction).
  However taking into account all above customer often appeals in ultimate form "Your system doesn't work! Fix immediately" without any attempt to investigate the issue by himself, carefully read instructions in Wiki, or attract independent specialists. For contract customers such things are considered OK, because they are included in paid price. But for customers without contracts there is no motivation to perform diagnostics when a question is raised this way. Thus, for HDD diagnostics or internet issues we waste our human resources which are then left unpaid.
• Often customer has SSH access and tries to perform something inside a system by himself without full understanding of consequences. When his actions break some internals of Smartswitch, customer can't remember what he did or thinks it was not related. This is the hardest case for our specialists to deal with.

At the moment we don't have dedicated specialists, who could serve technical questions from customers, with whom we have no contract.
To permanently employ such specialists we need finances which should be included into price which is paid by contract customers.
This would significantly decrease competitiveness and will be unfair for contract customers.
Therefore questions from customers without contract and answered after performing works for other contract customers, during free time of technical specialists.

Exceptions:
1. Сrisp question, which has short answer and doesn't require diagnostics and clarifications.
2. In case if question in already answered in this Wiki, for example:

• description of logic of functioning of a subsystem
• debugging instruction
• answer to frequently asked question

Other question we recommend to gather in Technical request document.
Then, when there is enough of questions, negotiate and sign 1-month contract for technical support with work on these questions.
Or sign contract for long-term support (Service-level agreement).
See also Differences between long-term SLA support and 1-month technical support according to Technical request

We hope for understanding in this question.

Русский перевод