I agree with your larger point that a competent retirement model is by its nature complicated and they are all different in layout, input locations, formats, selections, capabilities, defaults, etc., so they take time and effort to learn. I do like to encourage folks to spend the time or hire someone, I think there is real money to be made by doing some analysis and examining the tradeoffs. Retirement is our largest lifetime financial decision and many people blunder into it without having made a plan.That's a valid point, although coming from the viewpoint of someone with experience with software customer service generally but not having any specific knowledge of Pralana, I'll stand by my contention that almost nobody would have contacted support with a question like that. Some of us might be aware that Pralana isn't a typical software provider, but most people don't research every company they download a fairly inexpensive app from, and most of us have enough experience with software customer support to make some reasonable assumptions of when it's likely to be productive to contact support and when it's not. That doesn't mean there aren't exceptions, and it's valuable that Pralana was able to help a customer in this case.Actually, once she went to the Pralana forum and sent the data to the proprietor, he was able to help her quickly, it was just a couple of data entry errors. The trouble with using this forum is we can't see what the user did to help spot the mistakes, so there was a lot of blind guessing.I would have done what DebiT did because I wouldn't have expected to get support for a question like "another app gives a different answer than yours; why?" - at least not unless I already knew which one was "correct."
An example, falling back on tax apps again: I've done tax returns on FreeTax and HRB, with different results. There's no way I'd contact HRB and ask why, because I'd "know" it would be a waste of time. I'd put myself in the place of a rep at HRB and imagine how I'd react when somebody contacted support not to help resolve an actual problem, but merely because they wanted me to explain why some other product produced a different result.
Statistics: Posted by Exchme — Sun Dec 03, 2023 9:31 pm — Replies 32 — Views 1930