Customer comments about Stata Technical Services

It is really fantastic that Stata offers such great customer service! I was somewhat grudgingly prodded into converting to Stata this year and I am now absolutely a Stata fan. The program is great but your help and guidance take it to the next level. The time you took to explain things carefully and thoroughly (and all by email) is really impressive.

Jordan Feld, MD, MPH, Liver Diseases Branch, NIDDK, NIH

I am very impressed with StataCorp's customer service from the initial email for assistance to the final resolution of my request. Your support has been the most comprehensive and pleasant experience when dealing with this type of highly technical information.

Stephen Kiser, Regional Economist, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation

May in technical support has been helping me along so far and has been the greatest! She has really helped me understand quite a bit!

Noelle Hartwick, RN, MPH, Cardiovascular, Diabetes, Nutrition, & Physical Activity Section, Washington State Department of Health

I want to take just a moment of your time to recognize Pete Huckelba for the exceptional customer service he provided. Pete took the time to thoroughly research the possible reasons for my difficultly in accessing the Stata web site and provided a complete "layman" overview of what he found.

He also made suggestions as to other possible explanations, gave me solutions to try, and initiated a means to track future problems. He was kind, reassuring, and willing to be available for any future questions or concerns. I am very impressed with him and hope that he will be recognized for his “extra mile” efforts!!!!

Shawn Regan, STEPS to a Healthier US, Project Manager, Chelan/Douglas Health District

Once again I would like to point out that the tech support is absolutely great in responding to the questions!

Altay Mussurov, School of Management and Business, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wales, United Kingdom

The Stata support team are the best. I keep saying Stata’s support service must one of the best managed services around, ever.

Nancy Hammond Dumenic, Department of Economics, University of Chicago

I am writing to you today to offer my highest praise for the help I recently received from your consultant, May. I wrote to Stata technical support last week regarding how to obtain and plot weighted Schoenfeld residuals using Stata. A complication was that previous versions of Stata had taken advantage of a collection of user-written ado-files. I confess that I use Stata only infrequently, typically for modeling tasks using the xt commands, so I felt very out of my element with the query that I posted to your Technical Support group regarding plotting residuals from Cox proportional hazards models.

May handled my question promptly and with great aplomb. I was pleased that she did not dismiss my questions because I was using another user's user-written ado-files. To the contrary, she diagnosed the functionality of those files and showed me a much more efficient mechanism to obtain their functionality by using new features in Stata 8. Most impressively, she went beyond answering the questions I'd posed. Anticipating the context under which I was posing my questions, she provided terrific commentary not only on the Stata syntax, but also on the purpose of the analysis and in her note she walked through an example of the code she provided, not only explaining the code itself but also how to interpret the results. I was ecstatic that May provided such a thoughtful, detailed response because while the code alone would have been very useful to me, the code coupled with the interpretation of the example data May used was far more useful to me as I can now apply the code with confidence to my own data. Clearly, May is very gifted at identifying a user's level of expertise (or lack thereof, as was the case for me) with a particular problem area and adapting her response to match the user's level of sophistication in any given area.

I hope this note conveys both the gratitude I feel toward May for her outstanding responses over the past week and the esteem in which I hold your Technical Support group. This experience will definitely prompt me to recommend Stata to my colleagues and will encourage me to use Stata for more of my modeling tasks than I do at present.

Tor Neilands, University of California, San Francisco

I continue to be impressed by the high level of technical support that y'all provide. It's fabulous!

Lindsey Jeanne Leininger, PhD student, University of Chicago, Harris School of Public Policy Studies

I am writing this message to express my great thanks to your support. Brian P. Poi, your support statistician, is extremely excellent. He always gives most proper answers to my questions, which makes me get over all problems I encounter in programming Stata. I have never had such a good user support as his. I would like to express my sincere thanks to your support and hope that you will keep this high-quality user support in the future.

Nobutaka Fukuda, PhD, Department of Sociology, Musashi University, Tokyo, Japan

Thank you for your quick reply ... your customer support is legendary and I now understand why.

Jonathan Gage, World Trade Institute, Berne, Switzerland

I had been having trouble with upgrading ado-files ... after considerable effort, I received, quite unexpectedly, a phone call from Kevin Crow at Stata Technical support who had decided that since we were not getting anywhere after many repeated email attempts, he would contact me personally to help. I must say I was tremendously impressed to get that phone call. I had been cautious in using up Stata Technical support time in that I had used both email (extensively) and the Statalist first, but my experiences with other tech support providers make me aware that it is very very impressive to get that kind help and concern about resolving my problem. My thanks, and kudos, both to Kevin, and to Stata for providing that kind of support. Sure makes buying the upgrades a great value!

Buzz Burhans, Department of Animal Science, Cornell University

Thanks for the quick response. Excellent tech support is one of many reasons I love Stata.

Ginger Zhe Jin, Department of Economics, University of Maryland

Thanks for the amazingly quick response! As always, you guys are the best of any of the companies I have to/get to deal with!

Tom Durkin, PhD, Department of Political Science, University of South Carolina

Your user support at Stata is really the best I’ve ever experienced from statistics software companies. SAS and SPSS don’t come anywhere close.

Dr. John P. Haisken-DeNew, DIW-Berlin, German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP)

I think you have a wonderful statistical package, and your company is always very helpful whenever I have questions.

Georg Dranitsaris, Ontario Cancer Institute, Princess Margaret Hospital

Thank you as always for the service. I must say that in the short time I have been dealing with Stata, I have been truly impressed with the high level of service from the company. If only other companies could match this!

Roger Debreceny PhD FCPA CMA , Division of Accounting, Nanyang Technological University

The product you have is first rate, but it can’t compare with the degree of service you guys provide across all levels of expertise.

Elmer Villanueva, MD ScM, Centre for Clinical Effectiveness, Monash Institute of Health Services Research

It is nice to see that after many years Stata remains a wonderful company!

Andrea Ichino, Department of Economics, European University Institute

This kind of responsiveness is what makes Stata a first-class operation.

Al Feiveson, NASA

Stata folks’ input to this listserver is one reason I encourage colleagues to use Stata.

John C. LeBlanc, MD, MSc, FRCPC, Assistant Professor, Pediatrics, Psychiatry, Community Health and Epidemiology, Dalhousie University

In the future, I’ll let people know that the customer service alone is one of the reasons why they should buy Stata—Stata certainly holds an edge on its competitors in this regard.

Stephen Lich-Tyler, Department of Economics, University of Texas at Austin

StataCorp has to be the best, most responsive and technically capable organization of its kind. Over the many years we have been using Stata, we have had nothing but first class service - keep it up!

Martin Kendal-Reed, Sensory Research Institute, Florida State University

Thank you very much for answering my questions to Stata so fast. I was really surprised about the service that exists for your users.

Dagmar Biberger, University of Munich

Three years ago, I started teaching a one week seminar at U Michigan's ICPSR Summer Training Program. Nobody at ICPSR had been using Stata, and StataCorp generously provided copies of the program and documentation. Three years later, Stata is becoming the software of choice in the classes. This year, StataCorp offered a very generous price (the grad pac price) to participants. Several people in my class were feeling a bit pressured to make a decision and I told them not to worry that the folks at Stata are very reasonable. Indeed, when these people called, those answering the phone went to great lengths to work out POs, payment, and all the details. And, the support staff at ICPSR report that the help they receive if they have a problem is absolutely first rate.

I’m always reluctant to recommend software, but I'm pleased to report that everyone who has taken my suggestion to try Stata has been very pleased.

J. Scott Long, Department of Sociology, Indiana University

I want to tell you that we are very satisfied with your support from Stata!

Cecilia Holmberg, IT-section, Ministry of Finance, Sweden

I would like to thank you [Theresa Boswell] from the bottom of my heart. You are truly invaluable, Madam.

Mariusz Mianowany, Academy of Humanities & Economics, Poland

Let me note that through the years I have found the program, but particularly the technical support, absolutely wonderful.

Sheldon L. Messinger, Professor Emeritus, Law and Society Center, University of California, Berkeley

If we were asked to rate vendors, I would definitely rate Stata five stars.

Diane Kaczor, University of North Carolina

Your responsiveness and skill are greatly appreciated. You at StataCorp are setting, I think, a new standard for statistical software, and also a new standard for interactions with your customers.

William Mason, Department of Sociology, UCLA

Stata’s technical support is excellent. It is indicative of a sincere effort to provide a good product. I wish other companies had similar attitudes.

Jon Mormino, Department of Demography, Georgetown University

I have been using Stata for close to 15 years now and think it is just a great package. One thing that makes it great is the terrific support staff who are available to help users.

Daniel Sherman, Senior Economist, Pelavin Research Center

Just a short thank-you note for a putting together a fine product and an amazing group of people. My co-author and I just had a paper published in the Journal of Political Economy. The entire analysis was conducted in Stata. Stata handled the task effortlessly. Over the course of the past year I have received fantastic support—without technical support's help our paper would have been delayed by over a year.

My thanks to everyone at Stata. We teach our undergraduates Stata in the hope that more corporations will see the light.

Amitabh Chandra, Department of Economics, University of Kentucky

I switched virtually all of our analysis work from mainframe SAS to Stata on the PC (and a little bit on UNIX) a few years ago and have never regretted that decision for a second. Most impressive is the fact that you guys find fixes for every problem or question that we have, quickly and efficiently. And little by little, as Stata develops, we are dropping the other programs we use, too. I don't know of any other software company that responds as well to its users' questions, suggestions, and comments.

Great work!

Julien Teitler, Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania