Comments
vnewman
1/20/2016 7:44:49 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: BLOCK
@Joe - Oh don't get me wrong, it actually worked really well because the thing was you couldn't bring that index card back and get another one until that person was helped. So it was a truly "customer-experience" oriented way of doing things. But the users, on the other hand, expected high tech solutions from the IT dept so they kind of scoffed at the procedure.
Re: That continuous reboot issue
"Taking the time to admit fault, provide the fix and explain how we would avoid it, restored faith in this long-term customer and saved the day." Pretty much sums up good customer service. Tattoos with the above quote will be required...
anushav
1/20/2016 2:48:36 PM
User Rank Steel
That continuous reboot issue
This happened in my previous life as a pre-sales engineer when I was working for a classic technology vendor. My department was called "customer experience" and we were focussed on doing just that! The customer was a well-known carrier in Canada who used our routers and firewalls in their datacenters for many years. They would promptly test our beta code as they were always looking for new features to deploy.
During the second round of a particular beta test, the network engineer at the carrier stumbled upon a continuous reboot issue. This is the ultimate error that you don't want your customers to see!
At first it was panic (geek pun intended!), but thank God for small mercies - it was a trial lab with beta code and the SLAs were not as strict as tech support issues are in production. I quickly reproduced the issue with the customer configuration in my lab. The configuration CLI statements ran into pages and pages - about 50+ if you print them and 100+ if its single-side only, on A4 size paper! The next thing to do was to narrow down the root cause of the issue amidst the pages of config. What changed since round 1 of testing when the issue didn't happen? At what exact point is the reboot triggered? This involves debugging and poring over boot logs. Once the config that caused the issue is narrowed down, turning it off, resolved the issue.
This may seem like a day in the life of a tech support engineer, but what was important is that you don't release "enterprise grade" beta software that reboots continuously when you just upgrade. Crashes , core dumps do happen but not when you just upgrade to the build! Though it was beta code, the customer was livid that the software passed through months of development/feature/performance/regression tests and landed in his hands in this state.
So the reputation of the product was at stake. I saved the day by first admitting that it was a mistake. Then, i provided the quick workaround of turning off the buggy config statement, followed by a subsequent patch from engineering. Well, these are routine, but what made it a "winner", is when I brought in our test lead and explained our commitment to the software development process and how his issue was caused by a corner case, deprecated config which was unnecessary in his 100 page config. We also explained how we would avoid such mistakes going forward. Nevertheless, it was a bug and the config was removed in the patch.
Taking the time to admit fault, provide the fix and explain how we would avoid it, restored faith in this long-term customer and saved the day.
customer service
We live in a rural area, which means we're on our fourth triple play service provider due to buyouts. We've had our fair share of bad customer service, but it was a nice change of pace to have a tech from a large cable company fix several issues that we weren't even aware of when he was here. He was cross-trained, so when he found a problem he fixed it instead of saying that another tech would need to come by.
Re: when customer trying to save using know all relatives... it could cost more at the end
@Ariella: It is surprising to know that the email servers for Hillary Clinton's emails were housed in the bathroom. I am aware of such cases for some start up firms that are initially run out of homes or basement offices. Who knows, this could have started the same way and with this whole email episode it became sensational.
Re: when customer trying to save using know all relatives... it could cost more at the end
My wife handles IT at our house....
@Mike: Wow, All I could say is 'Great' and much appreciate you for that.
It doesn't work that way for most of us, well atleast many of us. No matter how IT savy a wife could be, but still remains to be a back bencher. Ofcourse I can't deny there are cases where wife is considered with confidence. I guess it is mostly 'What ever works' kind of a deal. By the way I have no complains... :)
batye
1/17/2016 1:46:33 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: BLOCK
@vnewman @Joe could not agree more interesting story, low tech in hight tech age :)
Re: when customer trying to save using know all relatives... it could cost more at the end
@Mitch: Ditto for any "professional." Can't count the number of times I've been asked legal questions by friends and acquaintances. Unless it's someone very close or unless I'm feeling charitable, I usually just give them an "it depends" answer and invite them to book an appointment with me if they want something more substantial than that. That usually ends the conversation.
Re: BLOCK
@vnewman: That doesn't sound so bad. It sounds very similar to a Scrum board, actually.
Sometimes low-tech works. K.I.S.S.
vnewman
1/16/2016 11:12:42 PM
User Rank Platinum
Re: BLOCK
@Joe. that is a fantastic story and I did not know where you were going with it first. That was definitely a bad stroke of luck. But your story reminds me about my early days in IT where my IT director had us use the Johnny Carson way of fielding help desk tickets. He used to work on the show and this is how Johnny would schedule his guests and content. He decided anytime a call came into the helpdesk he would write it on an index card, post it on a white board, give it to a tech who would visit the user then bring back the ticket to the desk when the task was completed. This is how we also did all of our project management index cards with every step of a software migration filling an entire conference room. For a tech department it was embarrassing super low tech!
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