Sonic.net

I emailed Sonic's support over 2 days ago (Sept 20 at 11:30AM). I immediately received the auto-reply acknowledging my email, but since then I've heard absolutely nothing. Is it really normal & expected to take greater than 2 days to respond to a support request? This seems absolutely ridiculous to me. Are my expectations unrealistic?

I really don't want to have to pick up a phone to deal with them for this issue. My time is valuable, and having to interrupt whatever I'm doing for a phone call is a poor use of my time. Its a simple question about my account, nothing is broken. This seems like the ideal case for email, but if email is being heavily de-prioritized behind phone support, they should at least make that clear somehow.

This is certainly consistent with my experience--and frustration. I don't contact support too often, and when I do, it's usually not something that's time sensitive, but even answers to simple questions are returned somewhere between two days and never following a request. I recently had two open tickets; one garnered a response after six days (the problem had already taken care of itself), the other also took six days for support to tell me that they couldn't complete my request, and that I would have to phone them to take care of my issue anyway.

As you've said, I hope I've got more important things to do than to babysit the phone waiting on hold or for a call back, where I will have inevitably stepped away for just a minute and have to play phone tag for hours or days to complete my request.

Our target is a one minute hold time average, and no more than one hour turnaround for email inquiries.

We are not achieving this, despite working very hard on recruitment efforts as well as process and communication improvements. Because of the popularity of our services, we're in a growth mode that's left us with far too long wait times.

We do have virtual hold, and now offer support via SMS, as we seek ways to make the delays less impactful for members. See http://sonic.com/support

Finally, we certainly appreciate it if you will spread the word that we are hiring to your own social network. http://sonic.com/careers

After waiting 5 days, I finally received a response to my original email.

netllama wrote:I emailed Sonic's support over 2 days ago (Sept 20 at 11:30AM). I immediately received the auto-reply acknowledging my email, but since then I've heard absolutely nothing. Is it really normal & expected to take greater than 2 days to respond to a support request? This seems absolutely ridiculous to me. Are my expectations unrealistic?

Yes, it's a reality of Sonic now. My parents had issues and we had to be on hold for over 2 hours and that was our SECOND call. Sonic costs more than AT&T but their greatest asset was their service; now that seems to be waning.

The calls for "we're trying to hire more people" ring hollow to me. I get that they want to hire CCNA-level people at every turn but that's just not realistic. It's clear they hire experts (I've looked at their recruiting questions - they're tough!) but this is one problem they don't seem to know how to fix.