I came across a story today that was humorous and true at the same time. Some guy calls Microsoft for tech support and goes right for the jugular. He doesn’t bother wasting any more time to go through the proper channels, instead he calls direct. Here’s Chris Sells story.
So, I’m sitting in my office pair programming with Geoff Kizer when my phone rings. It says “Microsoft” on the display, so I figure it’s one of my brethren.
“Hello?”
An angry voice replies, “I’m calling you because your technical support sucks and I’m tired of being put on hold!”
“I’m sorry? Are you a Microsoft employee?”
“No! I’m a *customer*! I’m trying to use Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit and it doesn’t work!”
“Oh.” Now I’m reaching way, way back into my distant technical phone support past. First, defuse the anger by empathizing with the customer. “Well, on behalf of the 70,000 Microsoft employees, I’d like to apologize.” That was a little over the top — have to dial it down a bit next time…
Second, try to take things back a step and establish a rapport with the customer. “My name is Chris. What’s yours?”
Calming down a bit, “John.”
“OK, John. I can’t claim to know everything there is to know about Vista, but I’ll answer your questions if I can.”
“How do I get the icons to be smaller on the desktop? No matter what the resolution is, they’re always huge! I want them to be small like on XP!”
“Are you at your computer now?”
“Yes.”
“OK. I know you can change the icon size on the desktop. Let you look around a little.” At this point, I’m opening up the Personalize control panel, finding nothing about desktop icon size. I used the cool narrow-as-you-type Help. Nothing about icon size (although I can change the icons themselves). Now I’m cursing Vista myself. “I don’t see it here,” I admit to John.
You’ll have to head over to his site to read the rest.
Customer service can be a bitch but he seems to handle it pretty smooth. More people should really think about how they act towards customer service representatives especially if they want to get a refund.
Raunchy Taters 