How To Drive Customers Away 101

Peter was pretty frustrated as he has been fighting (almost literally) with Acer over his still-in-warranty Tablet PC. It went to smoke city several weeks ago, and trying to get support out of the local (U.K.) office was like Osama bin Laden trying to get a pardon from George Bush. When Peter called, he was kept interminably on hold—until they said they were "closed for lunch." He repeatedly tried email, but they suggested calling the support line (on his dime) or simply ignored him. He has tried to escalate the issue with management but to no avail. I expect Acer has lost a loyal customer and is likely to meet his solicitors.

The IBM Approach

When I got back to the United States, I also had some issues to resolve with my IBM laptop's hard drive. I went to the IBM site and discovered that they wanted me to fill out a service request form online. Within an hour, I revisited the site and noticed that the hard drive repair request had been "closed." I added a comment to the request asking why it was closed and waited. In the next day or so, I received a new hard drive but no instructions as to what to do with the old drive. I spent a few hours moving the data over and voila, my system started working better. To determine what to do with the old drive, I called IBM and got an American tech who assured me that the return instructions would arrive in the next few days. They did. Cool.

I also had to talk to another IBM tech support person last month. In this case, the experience was not as good. The person (clearly in India) was relatively clueless and simply wasted my time. Apparently, even IBM has felt the need to farm out some of its support to the third world.

Symantec & Its "Support" Staff

Because I was already distracted trying to get my laptop back up to fighting speed, I decided to buy a 7,500rpm drive for it. The problem arose when I tried to use PartitionMagic to resize the system image. It would not activate. For the next four days I spent too many hours on the phone with people at the Symantec support center somewhere in the hinterlands of India.

The folks there were courteous but clueless. They read questions from a script and each time I had to phonetically spell almost every answer. Yankee Echo Sierra: I have the current version. The biggest problem is that they lied to get rid of me. They lied when they told me they knew what was wrong and that they would email me a known solution to my problem. (No mail arrived.) They lied when they said they would send me a replacement CD. (Nothing came.) They lied when they said they would transfer me to their supervisor. (They hung up.)

I finally got frustrated and dug up the corporate office numbers and was connected (after several hours) with a Utah-ite who was as frustrated with the Indian support team as I was. It seems his staff has been decimated by exporting the support role overseas. He said he would send me a new CD. Should I believe him? At least I have his direct number (and he's only a long day's drive away) if he does not follow through.

Remember Your Customers

Every employee in your organization could be facing the same problems if they have to fend for themselves to support their own systems. Sure, the best IT organizations hire, train, and retrain their own support staff to minimize the countless wasted hours spent talking across the ocean to people who don't really care if your systems ever work. However, there are millions of people like me who do need to call the people who sold them the broken or defective hardware and software. These calls are expensive for both parties, but when it comes to choosing which company is going to supply my next piece of software or hardware, I'll vividly remember how hard (or easy) it was to get my problems solved. If you face these same issues, make sure the corporate office knows about it. Don't bother telling the folks in Bangalore. They aren't listening.