We do provide unlimited free Email support. As for phone support, we do charge the $1.29 a minute per call. And since we do provide unlimited free EMail support, we believe this offsets the fact that we do not provide a free introductory support period. (I know many will not agree with that
)
But we based this decision on the type of calls we have recieved in the past 2 years, when we did offer free phone and Email support. As well as research we did on what our competitors were offering.
In our findings on the past 2 years of free phone support 70% of our calls had to do with:
1) Teaching the customer how to use our software, or their computer
2) Debugging the customers computer. (Normally caused by other Recording software, other programs in general, or user error when installing or uninstalling programs in general)
3) Help with other Recording software (Since we offered free support, we would get calls from customers with our competitors software. They would not even have Nero installed or purchased. And yet we still assisted them.)
4) Resolving problems not related to CD Recording. The customer would have a symptom that did not appear till they installed our Nero software, or so they said. So we would have to prove to them that the problem was not with our software. We did this by uninstalling our software, cleaning their system, and then showing them they still had this issue. But then they would like to know our opinion as to what we think could be causing the problem. And since we had helped them in this area, they would call back a week later if they had other issues, even when not related to our software.
And the list goes on...
Since only 30% of our calls were actually related to support issues with our software, we had to change our policy of offering free phone support.
If we could somehow prevent those 70% of unrelated calls, we would be more than happy to offer free phone support again. But that is near impossible.
As of today, our EMail response time is 4 working days. Our average response time is 3 working days, but it does fluctuate between 2 to 6 working days. The holidays, especially Xmas and New Years, tend to put us behind as it did this year. But this time we did not exceed 6 working days, and we are quickly catching up. Within another week, we should be back to 2 to 3 working day response time on our Emails.
Regards,
Craig