The case creation page requires a selection of a category (eg. "Technical", "PI Developers Club License", "Customer Portal"), but at the moment, we are finding a non-negligible quantity of cases are submitted to the incorrect category.

This category selection is what allows the system to route the case to the right team, and incorrect selections can result in delays with the case.

The page does not clearly convey what each category is meant for, unless you know to hover over the categories to see the tooltips. However, this is not intuitive, and leads to incorrect selections.

Having spoken with several Portal users, there seems to be a general feeling that the selection wasn't all that important, and in general the category names were a bit vague.

Currently, myOSIsoft is set up to minimize the time that a customer needs to wait before receiving a response after they create a case. However, this means that if a customer creates a case outside of their regular working hours (e.g. overtime, irregular part-time), then the tech support engineer might not even be in a similar time zone as the customer. The initial response from OSIsoft will be fast, but subsequent communications will be delayed and difficult, and remote sessions would be cumbersome to schedule. In many cases, the case is not urgent and a smoother overall experience is worth the delayed initial response.

It would be rude of the customer to request a different engineer based on location. It could feel or come across as racist or unprofessional, and so many customers won't go there, and plus a new engineer would have to relearn the context of the case, which duplicates effort across the engineers.

Also, in my experience, the tech support cases that are handled by engineers outside of North America are generally handled more poorly than those that are handled by engineers in North America. When the case is complex, the developers may need to be involved for the best solution, but they are not working when the tech support engineer is working, and so either communication between them is delayed or the engineer opts to try their best alone, which usually results in the engineer giving up a bit earlier in the troubleshooting/investigation than an engineer in North America.

Lastly, there can be a language barrier when the engineer is not in the same time zone as the customer. Sometimes, the response is hard to read due to it being written in slightly broken English, or the engineer does not grasp the details of the issue and offers KB articles or copy-paste "solutions" that address a closely related problem but not the problem at hand, or, if a remote session is scheduled, the engineer's accent can be difficult to understand due to it being unfamiliar.

It would be a burden on the customer for them to wait to create the case during their normal working hours to avoid these issues. I feel that it is best to design the system to fit the customer and not for the customer to work around the system. Please give us the option to choose the preferred time zone or location of the tech support engineer that handles the case. Let the default selection be the current behaviour (i.e. minimize waiting time for an initial response).