RMA Procedure and 'premium' support experience. Is this usual?

Question

Is there a standardised advanced RMA procedure for premium support clients? 
 Today was the first time in a long time that I've been unfortunate enough to have to contact support. 
 UTM 135 appliance stops responding or passing any traffic. at 4am. Come in this morning and reboot it, contact support to see if they can find what might have caused the lockups. 
 47 minute call at 8:55 and remote connection to gather 3 logs. During that call the unit locks up again. I hard power cycle again, and begin building a software appliance as a temporary measure. 
 The unit then continues to lock up twice more. 
 I'm contacted via email at 11:20 to say that they couldn't find any error and can we monitor for 24 hours!! 
 I reply stating that the unit has failed twice more since the call and please could I have a temporary key for software appliance so I can get back up and running. I appreciate email responses take some time so decide to call support back. 
 Explain the situation to the helpdesk, I didn't feel this would be too unusual request, this call took 30 minutes of explaining the situation in every way I could. Eventually issued a temporary key. I then install the software appliance, which is working fine. 
 Contact online support to request an advanced RMA to try and avoid a 30 minute phone call. the chat user disconnects me after 10 minutes with no useful response. 
 Contact online support again, and i'm told that I need to contact my account manager to get an RMA unit shipped. 
 Attempt to contact our account manager. Am informed that he is unavailable and they will take me details and get back to me. 
 If I was not more hands on and technical, I would now be in the situation of a client's internet and VPN access dropping every 45 minutes, requiring physical intervention. I've spent the last 4+ hours dealing with this, and I'm still no closer to knowing if an RMA appliance is being shipped, or if it will be shipped. 
 
 Is this a normal experience? Is there an easier way to expedite an RMA request? Otherwise we'd be much better served by purchasing spare hardware rather than paying for support, or using an alternative product. 
 Cheers.

BAlfson · Answer

Hi Neil and welcome to the UTM Community! 
 I always recommend submitting tickets via MyUTM. It will get a faster response and take less of your time than using the phone. I don't recommend Premium Support as all it buys you is the ability to open a ticket yourself instead of going through your Sophos reseller. The reseller has more experience working with Sophos Support and knows better how to work with them. 
 These Break/Fix problems are rare, so we just include opening tickets for our clients as a free service. Occasionally, when it's a known problem with a simple solution, I'll just fix it instead of taking more time to open the ticket. The average customer has less than one such incident during a three-year subscription. 
 That said, I also recommend having a second appliance in Hot-Standby. It reduces the impact of Up2Dating, provides failover in about 1/100th of a second and prevents you from having to run unprotected or put together a temporary solution while you wait a day or two for a replacement to arrive. 
 Cheers - Bob