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When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#11

Post by spudlyo »

moioci wrote: post #7

Flip side is the well-known story of when billg actually answered a customer service call: https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/that-time-bill-gates...

I was involved in that particular incident, and wrote about it on HN when the story was making headlines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365

Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#14

Post by jsiepkes »

What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.

Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#16

Post by ilamont »

jsiepkes wrote: post #14

What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.

What was the response?

Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#17

Post by seshagiric »

One can only think if all the customer complaints really went to Bill Gates, how much different Microsoft would be today. They still operate in a world where they think once they build something, people would just use it. CoPilot is the latest example.

Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#19

Post by textlapse »

On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team).

Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.

Re: When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

#20

Post by hackingonempty »

textlapse wrote: post #19

On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team). Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.

Jobs responded to email back when he ran a tiny company in an overall much smaller industry with far fewer customers. I'm not sure he was responding so much by the time he had resurrected Apple and the iPhone launched.
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