That is pretty smart. It is like saying we just give support to the ones that pay for it - period. If you then keep the general service level really low it gets even easier to sell “Premium Support” even if it might not entirely live up to the concept. The situation is well timed too since I guess people have never had so much trouble with Photolab as just now.
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I somehow missed this whole thread. I only found it while searching “premium support” after receiving an email that explained offers including it.
I don’t see a big problem with the concept of premium support. As someone else said, most companies do it. The problem I do see is the low bar they are offering improvements on.
Yes, my latest support request was addressed in a reasonable time. Even though the outcome was “expected behaviour, we’d like to fix it some day”. But we have no idea what they are working on fixing.
It is understandable not to publish a roadmap of features (though some companies do), but surely it’s not commercially sensitive to say what they are working on fixing. They did with the recent macOS regression issue. “We are working with Apple” they said. Great. Thanks for the communication.
The biggest problem in tech, and indeed in many other areas of life… lack of communication.
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@zkarj And have you seen the offers that bundle an element of (free) Premium Support in the price Welcome to the DxO shop
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If I were to start out now, as I did when I first bought the PL+FP+VP bundle with PL1, it would cost me €391,97 instead of the individual prices, which amount to €489,97. A 20% reduction and, because the combined price is more than €200, I would also get 1 year’s free Premium Support.
To my mind, that’s not too shabby and amounts to a whopping 32% discount on an all in total of €579,99 if everything were bought individually.
No, I am not paid, or even recompensed by DxO, just pointing out what could be, for a new user, quite a bargain.
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Well, I’m a new user. On Mac. I’ve seen some bugs but on the whole I’m getting real joy out of PL 9, going back and reprocessing a lot of D700 photos. The software itself, wow, I can’t argue with results on my architecture stuff (portrait and skin tones are less clear-cut on Nikon RAW).
The “Premium Support” I’ve accessed so far has been heavily gatekept – had to record a video, send NEFs and DOPs, run diagnostics, send a ZIP – and at the other side I appear to have hit an AI agent. All the classic ChatGPT tells are there – suddenly talking about Hasselblad X2D when my query has nothing to do with it, apologising and saying I’m right to push back when I point that out.
My request has been open since the 18th. I don’t know how many humans I’ve spoken to. Might be zero? I’m lucky I’m not relying on this one for work, frankly. I already pay for ChatGPT and have already asked it about my DxO problem. Having a bunch of emails effectively replicate those conversations (except with extra hoops to jump through) is not filling me with hope that Premium Support is anything effective yet.
So basicly the same as basic usless support not the promised support hyped
I’ve done this for regular support.
Honestly, and this is not a dig directly at DxO, an AI agent isn’t much worse than some human support people I’ve had to deal with. Basically, anyone put in 1st level is often trained to a script and does not have deep knowledge.
I have had some responses from DxO recently that could have been AI, given they missed the point of the issue. BUT… 30 years of calling IT help desks has been quite similar!
If you’re a pro, you already know your way around a computer, and using your raw processor of choice should be second nature. You certainly don’t need support to tell you to reboot or uninstall/reinstall the software.
Then we get into software bugs. Well, I doubt very much the Dxo team would fix those while on a support call.
So I fail entirely to see the point of that. 
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Indeed. I’m unsure what a premium support service can do for you that a regular one doesn’t already do, just… faster.
Hell, if you’re looking for advice like “try reinstalling” you can probably get even faster support by posting that you have a problem here on this forum.
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Why should we pay for support for a product we purchased that is so buggy it does not perform as advertised?
It is DxO’s duty to provide a working product that works as advertised and on the hardware that they say is supported. If the product is buggy then they must fix it!
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