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Stratford provides the best support in the healthcare software
industry
- Support is delivered by trained technical support personnel,
only. We do not have any "clerical" or other non-technical
personnel doing support.
- Our support team is also our product development team.
Therefore, providing technical support directly impacts our
product development as well as all the other necessary elements of
delivering quality support.
- Our support policies are designed to give equal quality to
every customer. Specifically, we try hard to prevent a handful of
customers from monopolizing our support/development team. Each one
of our customers believes that his/her problem is just as
important as any other customer. We also believe that each
customer's problem is very important. We probably could do some
triage, but we would not make any friends and there would be
complaints. Very few customers have a problem that isn't solved
quickly.
- Technical support is provided to licensed users of Stratford
software only. We usually do not have the "people resources" to
return calls from people who do not have pre-paid support.
- Technical support is designed to help you overcome some
problem you are having while you are using the Stratford program.
Technical support is not a replacement for the documentation.
Technical support is not the same as training and cannot be used
for training.
It is very difficult or impossible to deliver quality support
to more than one person at a single site. Please assign your least
"computer challenged" person to be our contact person and you will
receive the best support we can give. If we determine that the
support call is taking an excessive amount of time due to
difficult "communication", we may need to call your office back
when we have fewer calls. We must not penalize all customers
because a particular customer requires excessive time.
If your office staff changes, you must not increase the number
of support calls to substitute for having the new staff trained
properly. Please let us know if you need additional training.
If you get a new modem, Stratford is not the best source for
support to help you get the new modem working properly. The modem
must operate correctly with Windows before you try to make it work
with the Stratford program.
If you get a new workstation on your network, you must get
qualified hardware support people to get the workstation connected
to the rest of your network. An additional workstation is set up
the same as an existing workstation. If necessary, you or your
hardware people may be able to make a telephone appointment with
Stratford to help get the networking functions of the Stratford
program working properly.
- There are several methods for obtaining support. If you wish
to sign up for support, fax the request to
206.984.3846 . We have
a standard form that we will fax back to you for payment and other
information. Support is paid month to month and is due in advance. Support can usually be started in minutes.
If you do not now have support and you want to start, there is a start up fee in
addition to the monthly support. This is supposed to encourage you to pay for
support every month instead of starting and stopping. People who only take
support now and then are much more difficult to support.
You must supply your 6 digit account number when requesting
support. If you purchase the minimum support and then use more than the minimum
support for one or more months, you will be billed an additional
amount for that additional support.
From best/fastest to worst/slowest, the support options are:
- email to
support@stratfordsoftware.com
- fax to 206.984.3846 . The more information you provide, the
faster you will receive a return call
- call our answering service 24/7. Look on the back page of
the newsletter for the 800 number.
- write a letter (definitely not recommended - it means that you do not really
need support)
Fax support requests are responded to in the order in which the
requests are received. Calling multiple times will probably result
in loss of your place in the queue on busy days. Your call will
likely be moved to the bottom of the callback list. Please provide
as much information as possible in your original faxed request for
support. The more complete the question, the more knowledgeable
the answer.
- Some of our customers have expressed amazement when we offer
to develop a connection to a small clearinghouse for them at no
charge. This is in keeping with our company policy, however, as
you must realize, there are many limitations to this. The
clearinghouse must use a standard EDI format or the CMS 1500
print image. We must have the development resources available. We
must believe that developing the interface will cause more people
to consider the purchase of Stratford software. We have a company
policy against developing non-standard interfaces of any type. We
have a company policy against doing any development work that is
for a single customer, in other words, we do not create "custom"
software. Our software does not have any "strange little
characteristics" that were created for a single customer as most
other competing packages have. Remember that
the clearinghouse may charge you for transmitting claims. You must
check with them to learn about any such charges. Stratford has no
control over whether the clearinghouse/payer charges you for
transmitting claims.
- Stratford does not provide free support, free updates or any
other free products or services. When you purchase the software,
support may be included for a period of time (30 days), however,
this is not free. The purchase price includes the cost of that
much support. The purchase price includes the cost of training - but remember we
must pay the trainer and that cost is not discounted and cannot be taken back
from the trainer or refunded to you for any reason. In fact, almost all the
income we receive when you purchase is expensed to labor and we cannot recover
those costs or refund them. You can receive a full-function trial version that
you can use to determine whether the software meets your specific needs. Please
do that before you purchase. Support does not include postage, shipping or any
other expense which is an out-of-pocket cost to us. If the
shipping company damages the shipment, we cannot absorb those
costs. We always reserve the right to bill you for the actual
"phone company" cost of calls especially if we are billed a large
amount for calls to you.
In the future, we would like to offer a lower cost support
option. This would include only the email support and Internet
download now offered to our regular support
subscribers. We want very much to have most of our support done by
Internet newsgroup/email as many software tool manufacturers are
doing now. This is almost a perfect model, where users can help
users and the cost is very low.
Whether we will ever offer this depends on how successful we
believe it will be based on our present operations. At this time, we
believe that few of our customers would truly benefit from this and
we believe that there would be no real savings to our company. At
this time, and for the foreseeable future, there is only one support
option available. We welcome your comments.
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![[Stratford Software, Inc.]](images/Stratford_logo.gif){kind=logo}
