Is the Sun Setting On WatchGuard

In a bad situation, bad customer service and unresponsive technical support simply makes things worse. In a recent article, What’s In a Checkbox: Part 2?, I expressed my frustration with how a simple checkbox corrected an issue many very intelligent people could not figure out.

As an update to that article, 2 days later the issue returned. While this was extremely frustrating, this was not nearly as irritating as the lack of responsiveness by our current firewall vendor, WatchGuard.

Several months ago, I wrote a wonderful review about how responsive and caring WatchGuard’s technical support was, and how much it had improved. Sadly, this is no longer the case.

When the incident was first opened, many of us did not understand the issue and all of us were scrambling to understand the issue. In this phase, the WatchGuard technical staff worked very hard to help us, but could not effectively resolve the issue.

As time progressed, they became much more distance and checked in less often. After requesting escalation to their higher level technical support, follow-up became almost non-existent. It wasn’t like the individuals were rude – not by any means. They were just unavailable and distant – and certainly did not offer any resolution.

After some time, we finally cut them out of the loop altogether and installed a Cisco router, established a BOVPN tunnel, and adjusted some small DNS settings. This instantly solved the issue – and none of which could be accomplished with the WatchGuard appliance – for unknown reasons.

This had to be done, and it was a sad statement of things to know that after 4 weeks of hard work, many people could not solve the issue directly, instead sidestepping it with an alternate solution.

However, what was most sad was that I strongly encouraged WatchGuard to replicate this setting in their laboratory, and they simply closed the case. That simply tells me that they are done trying to learn, grow, and improve; that tells me that it is time to move on to another company that cares.

In this present business climate, customer service is surely one thing that can help you survive. But customer service isn’t just defined as service with a smile – it has to be defined as continuously seeking improvement for the benefit of yourself and your customers to deliver the best experience for the most competitive price.

I encourage anyone to take note of this experience, and also welcome any and all comments. I will gladly post any rebuttals or refutations.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.