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For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

blog.tomayac.com

171–178 of 178 posts

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#171
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% Customer support representatives, with very few exceptions, are just going to tell you whatever they think will get you off the phone. In I.T., this is generally accomplished by blaming whatever adjacent equipment/services they can plausibly pin the issue on.

Huge competitive opportunity here. All you have to do is hire customer support who is empowered, knowledgeable and actually cares. Source: support is a competitive differentiator for $CURJOB.

I suspect it depends on the industry and type of product.

In the PLC market, I've worked with Schneider-Electric, Wago, and Emerson support. All three were excellent. They're excellent because they know we're going to choose which vendor to use for our next project based on our experience with the current project.

For protocol bridges, I've dealt with Digi and Real Time Automation. Digi's support was halfhearted at best. RTA spent hours talking on the phone and even dug through a closet to find documentation for an ancient version of one of their products in order to help me figure out how to interface with it. Guess who we used for the next project?

Price is important but my time is expensive. Good support for a more expensive product wins over poor support for a cheap one.

But all this only works because of the nature of our industry. For consumer goods, good support will lose to price nearly every time.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#172
post #133
post #41

> Electrolux washing machine I had to buy one a couple of years ago. Snarkily I asked the floor salesman if I could get the washer “without all the smart features”. He said “let me check”, which had me puzzled. He came back to inform me that they still had last year’s model which was before the “smart” features were rolled out. He said they can sell it on the same warranty, & since it was older I would get a signific…

Try the Spectre TVs. They are normal oled TVS, not smart. Been using one for a few years now, am very glad they exist.

That brand isn’t for sale in my country

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#173
post #149
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's probably a safer bet to have barely-existing support and lower the sticker price. Depends on the product and the size of the company selling. Sure, in certain circumstances it makes sense to skimp on customer support. In others, it absolutely does not.

For instance, one of the reasons Amazon was so successful when introduced in Europe was its great customer support. Years earlier, IBM had similar success stories.

And one of the biggest complaints around Google.

However Google still seems to be able to sell services with barely any support.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#174
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get why people care about about whether a TV is "Smart". I have a "Smart" TV and never use the features, and it doesn't bother me. I have a PiHole in case it tries to do anything funny, and that's good enough for me.

5G is in large part designed to fix this. Eventually these devices will only ask for wifi as a formality.

That will last until the TV manufacturers get the phone bill...

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#176

For all that's holy, can you just say use instead of leverage, please?

[Author here] Hah, our tech writers make me replace this word every single time with "using" in our company blog posts. But this is my blog, my rules ;-)

Your tech writers are correct. Almost never see this word used properly.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#177
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sticker will get lost, peel off, get scratched until it's unreadable and then the user has no way to get that information. Maybe if they are really on top of things they will take a picture of the sticker when they first get the machine and save it somewhere that they will remember 5 years later when they need it, but most people will not do that. And if you aren't the first owner of the machine, well then, you'r…

Absolute garbage. I have node.js code < 6 months old that won't work anymore because some ding dong removed backwards compatibility or the infrastructure needed to run it.

Skill issue.

Hosting a product manual doesn't need to be some whizbang React SPA with the framework of the month. It can be plain HTML that will work for 30 years.

Re: For all that's holy, can you just leverage the web, please?

#178
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5G is in large part designed to fix this. Eventually these devices will only ask for wifi as a formality.

That will last until the TV manufacturers get the phone bill...

They'll more than make up for it by selling user data and serving ads.
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