What a convoluted mess Magix has made out of trying to reach technical support. Here's a suggestion. Design a webpage link that says "Technical Support" that actually takes you to a technical support page. And then — within that page — list a link that says "Select Your Product" and then "Tell Us About Your Problem" and finally a submit button and your email address. I design websites and I would never put customers through such gymnastics to reach technical support. Why? Because it pisses them off enough they may just say goodbye forever. It's easier to keep a customer than to try and get new ones. Just my thoughts . . . Rick S.

@Richard-Saldana

Hi Rick,

I hope you realize that probably 99% of the problems that people want support from Magix for, are either under under the FAQ's or have been resolved on the forum. A simple search would suffice.

Furthermore, I would say that many of these people don't even know the name of the software they purchased, or their computer specs (posted recently, "I have an expensive computer, so it can't be a hardware problem") and OS details. We see this almost every day on the forum and we have to play 20 questions.

Here is one of the more inane examples. A guy on this forum complained that he raised a ticket and Magix was not very polite in their reply.

What was the question?

"I told Magix that I had installed the program and I asked what to do next."

What did they say?

"Read the manual and watch the tutorials."

Most impolite! The guy was expecting a private course by telephone.

There are many examples of people not even bothering to look at recent threads, on the first page, that have exactly the same question and they ask again or want to ask Magix. They don't even attempt to do a Search, they just ask the question or ask how to get support. Vegas users are the most obvious offenders who don't look at the screen because if they did, they would see the stickies telling them that this is not the Vegas forum.

That reminds, although we like to say that there are no stupid questions, well, there are. Top on my list are those who post something like, "How do I get help?" No details are given, not even the name of the program. There was one of these yesterday.

Would you like to pay double or triple the price for Magix to hire people to reply to the same questions over and over again for all of these people? Not me.

The system is set up as a filter so that user will look first under the FAQ's where their answer is probably staring them in the face. They get an immediate answer. Next, they can put in a search term. Do they even look at the results? If they don't find a reasonable answer, then either post the question or simply select the appropriate link to ask Magix a question. This is not rocket science. Just follow the thing through, do what is asked, and scroll down (there are many who complain because they did not bother to scroll down the page to see what to do next). It takes me about 15 seconds to get to the message screen, only because I type in a reasonable search term that becomes the subject of the ticket.

Under some of the products, there is even a FAQ that is a Support 'help sheet' on how to contact Support and raise a ticket here.

Creating a rational message to Magix takes much more time. How many bother to take the time to give sufficient detail of their problem? Take a good look at the posts in various forum areas to get an idea as to the type of questions that Magix likely gets asked. One needs a good crystal ball, mine is rather cloudy.

Bottom line, if you have a problem, look at the FAQ's under Magix Help Center, search the forum, then post a question with details as indicated in the Post message screen. Then, if the problem can't be resolved, ask Magix; it's not that hard to do.

I think you get the point.

John CB

I have felt your pain.

For many years, I worked in technical support for a company in Utah. We too had far too many customers whose support requests had all ready been asked and answered in our help pages. We solved that issue by providing a direct link to our technical support webpage where the customer could choose to pay for help or search for the answer themselves in our help pages.

It worked like a charm, our support requests dropped by 60% and the money generated by the paid requests allowed us to hire additional tech support staff. We did, however, provide a free 30-day support window for new customers who were having installation and other technical issues. The company no longer exists, but I learned a lot about customer tech support and the beauty in keeping things simple — whenever possible.