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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

#31

Post by em-bee »

spudlyo wrote: post #11
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

that comment should be added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights except, since the hightlights are sorted by the time of the comment it's not going to be seen by anyone unless they read all comments to the end...

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

#32

Post by hypercube33 »

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.

I did something similar after sitting two days on the phone trying to get support for backup exec. this was a million years ago and I ended up looping through everyone there. they offshored support and no one could help me but not because they didn't try.

I documented everything and my frustrations with their software not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.

later got a call asking if they could show it to the board because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...

Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no errors meant nothing ran.

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

#33

Post by moribvndvs »

pegasus wrote: post #25
Xiol wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.

Nobody likes to be left hanging.

Currently looking up emails for jsiepkes’ board to walk them through my frustrating experience with their comment.

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

#34

Post by Legend2440 »

ilamont wrote: post #16
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?

If they had responded, he would have mentioned it in his comment.

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

#35

Post by jonway »

ErroneousBosh wrote: post #6
breppp wrote: post #4

the blog is full of other ways to trick your support cases while not showing at all you deem yourself superior https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

When I worked for an IBM helpdesk looking after point-of-sale systems, we used to ask them to check if the power cable had a black or a blue bit of plastic surrounding the pins. "It's black? Okay, it's not that then, I was hoping it would be easy. Right, plug it back in again and... oh it's working now? Cool, ring me back if there's anything else then!"

This is really brilliant.

Once thing I've noticed whe dealing with support cases in a variety of industry is, while there are different types of customer needs/comlaints (ex. a customer who is afraid of losing their warranty service via chicanery versus a customer who is dissatisfied with the results of the warranty service) customers sometimes really need to first feel like they are being heard.

Sometimes the emotional response of a person is literally "Can i speak to your manager?". It comes off rude, and it sure and shit is rude, but maybe they need to feel acknowledged, like maybe someone farther down the line was a jerk to them and they just feel blown off, or could just be a bad day. You sometimes do indeed need to perform emotional labor in order to achieve the best customer service.

I like this approach because it acknowledges the customer intrinsically and they feel like the maze has ended. The process has now become pro-active: There is light at the end of the tunnel.

This is not easy to bang out @work 9-5!

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

#36

Post by Dilettante_ »

spudlyo wrote: post #24
Dilettante_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)

Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's han…

My obvious guess is that it was under low load because a lot of people were there watching instead of at their desks using it?

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

#37

Post by jsiepkes »

ilamont wrote: post #16
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?

I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I might have been able to base a lawsuit on. But I didn't really feel like going to court over 250 Euro (or really 75 Euro with the new offer) with a multi billion dollar company...

The issue was that their line of thought was; Well according to Dutch standards a vacuum cleaner has a life expectancy of 5 years. So if you want to replace something in it after 5 years (even if it is a customer replaceable part like a HEPA filter), it's not a replacement part / consumable, it's a spare part (which are usually more expansive). Which is also why I asked them; "Does that mean it is the official stance that you shouldn't expect your vacuum cleaners to last much longer then 5 years? Because that HEPA filter certainly needs replacement after 5 years.". Obviously they never answered that.

BTW We are talking about a premium house hold appliance brand here. The vacuum cleaner now costs well over 500 Euro. But when I bought it, it was about 240 Euro's or something. Sells for 700 dollars at Walmart it seems.

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

#38

Post by ilamont »

jsiepkes wrote: post #37
ilamont wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the response?

I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I mi…

Thank you for responding. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to bypass standard “customer service“ channels to get results.
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