If you open OSS messages (or “incidents” as they call it lately) you’re probably used to the following “Positive call closure survey” that appears after you click on “close”. Within this document I just wanted to write down the questions that we are asked to answer, and make a few comments that may help understand what we need to answer, or help improve/rephrase a few questions. And as this is a collaborative document, any additional comment is of course definitely welcome. This is no final version.

Call closure survey questions

• Processing times for this message – How satisfied are you…

  • … with the initial reaction from SAP?

I don’t know if it’s just me, but usually time to solve the issue is about 1 to 3 months so there is really no way I can remember if initial reaction was fast enough. Plus, first response is ALWAYS to ask me to open the system even when it’s already opened (and I always mention it already in the steps to reproduce the issue). So I really don’t see what this question is for: is initial reaction time so important for many customers that we need to keep it as first question? In my opinion a question like “How satisfied are you with the value added by the first reaction” would give more accurate results. Even more important: when someone read my message, please set the status to “in processing by SAP” so I can see there is something going on even when no reply is coming. It’s very frustrating to wait for weeks with a message “Sent to SAP”, and then have it returned back 10 minutes after clicking the “Request to close” button (that’s my trick to speed up the processing of a message: request to close, and when the message comes back reply “oops… sorry wrong button: what’s up with this message by the way?”).

• … with the time used by SAP to solve this issue?

I understand the question, but most often the issue is not solved (they just remove a functionality instead of fixing it, or publish a KBA with “limitation of the system”, or “missing functionality”, etc.). So what should I fill-in in this case when nothing was solved at all? Maybe a question like “How satisfied are your with the overall time to process your incident” would be less misleading if you just want my opinion about the time between open/close of incident.

• SAP employee how solved the issue – How satisfied are you…

  • … with his/her experience and knowledge?

First of: are we talking about the last processor of the message only? Because most of the messages that result in the creation of an oss note to fix a bug, start with MANY back-and-forth (or ping-pong) between me and someone from first level support that will try to convince me this is the standard behavior because he can reproduce the bug on its own systems as well (so his conclusion is usually that it is not a bug but the intended behavior). So I’d really like to rate this guy too that made me waste so much time in sending links to help.sap.com, official documentations, improvement requests, etc. etc. Could it be that we can rate each processors of the message separately? And what about a question like “Would you like your next incidents to be processed by the same SAP employee?”

• … with his/her friendliness and behavior?

As far as I’m concerned I don’t care its friendliness if my problem is solved… so I just click the “no answer” button.

• Support for this message – How satisfied are you…

  • … overall with the support you received concerning this message?

Top priority question. Should be the second one after “Has your problem been solved”.

• Product satisfaction – How satisfied are you…

  • with the product <xxx>?

I don’t know how to answer this question either… I’m sorry. Sometimes <xxx> is the name of a component area that I’m not even aware of (this can happen when my incident was sent from team to team). Sometimes it’s just that even if I’m satisfied with the product, I’m not satisfied with how my message was processed so there is really no way I’m gonna give a good rating here.

• Has your problem been solved?

Top priority question. Yes or No: simple and smart. We need this one on top. And what about creating two buttons to close an incident in order to fill in this question automatically? Something like: “Close – Solved” or “Close – NOT solved” (instead of one single button “Close”). This way, SAP would probably benefit from lots of additional feedbacks on this question from all people that just give up on trying to convince someone from Support that there is a bug they need to fix… Plus I think it would make sense to have different surveys depending on whether problem was solved or not. Just my opinion.

• Further comments?

I tend to express my frustration in this free text area, explaining each and every reason why you cannot call it support. But who will be able to read those comments: the last processor of the message? His/Her manager? People within another service in SAP organization? How do you use those comments that cannot be processed by a machine, hence need some human intelligence to understand what it’s about and most of the time a good understanding of how the system is supposed to work? And for your information I’ve been giving my email address within this comment area for the last two months, asking someone to drop me an email so that I could be sure that I didn’t write everything for nothing when filling-in this comment area… But I didn’t receive any feedback yet. So I guess you read those comments with more than 2 months delay?

General comments

Here are some more general questions that I’d like to ask to people in charge of creating/processing this survey:

1. Why do we need to fill-in EVERY question? I’d prefer to answer the questions I like and leave the others blank instead of forcing me to answer every question before I can send the results. Not to mention that when I don’t know how to answer a question I have to click the “no answer” radio button… which is so typical of SAP user-friendliness.
2. Why do you call it “Positive” call closure survey? That’s very annoying to see “positive” in the popup when your incident was handled very badly.
3. When are you planning to change the “message” word by “incident” in this survey? It’s a minor improvement, but again it’s typical of SAP inconsistency across applications…
4. What actions do you take after collecting those answers? because I’ve been filling it for years (almost 10) and I don’t see any change.
5. Why is it that I’m not asked to fill-in this survey sometimes?