Bad customer service

My personal take is that customer service is viewed by corporations as a public relations program, as opposed to an actual business operation. They have a customer service department because that makes them look good, not because they understand the concept of building and maintaining a customer base.

Heh. About 10 years ago I sent an e-mail to MICRON asking about some specs on one of their SIMMs (MICRON is one of the largest memory makers in the world) so I could upgrade my PC's memory by comparing teh specs to what was available on the shelves at stores.

About a week later I got a box full of books with all of the detailed engineering specs on every chip they made.

Well, yeah fishin'. Twelve years ago I called WordPerfect because of the way print was appearing on the page. Free support, toll free number, and they gave detailed instructions on how to set the dip switches on the Tandy dot matrix printer. You don't get much of that anymore.

So, fishin'... you send that on company letterhead?

Nope! I sent it as an e-mail from my personal e-mail account to their Customer Service Dept.

It was just very weird. lol I guess someone just read what I wrote to mean something a lot more than what it was.

Back in '88, '89? when windows was debuted, you could call MS anytime, and without an unreasonable wait, speak to a tech who would answer your questions. At that time, there were a host of desktop programs available, and ol' Bill didn't have the market cornered yet. What really frosts my . . . . about the whole damned thing is that he and Ms very cynically dropped the whole good customer service thing as soon as his OS (shamelessly ripped off from Apple) had become dominant. When '98 came out, i had supervisors fer chrissake, at MS, quietly pick up the phone and hang it up rather than speak to me. Those sobs were charging for customer service on a $300+ product which was definitely not performing as advertised . . .

There are some good customer service operations left, but damned few, and usually from small businesses. One of the things that i assure for my company is that the customer at the very least gets a prompt response to know that we know they are out there, and that they want our help. Customer service is a major, if not the major reason for the continuing success of the company i work for.

Setanta, I share your sentiment regarding Microsoft. I think a lot of what they have done has been, as you've said, a shameless rip-off. Take Netscape for instance. It was around before Internet Explorer. I think they just ripped off Netscape. If you look at Opera, it has more differences between it and Netscape than when IE had from Netscape when IE first came out. And their e-mail programs have changed over the years too, mainly because they have sucked so bad they've been forced to change and revise.

Ever notice how a lot of the viruses/worms/malicious programs out there target Windows and other MS products, but usually not other operating systems?

Sure, that's where the money is, so to speak. Ol' Bill has the market so wrapped up, the hacker wishing to make a name for him/herself, or to rip off e-mail addresses targets outlook express, inbox and msn because the overwhelming majority of potential victims will be using those programs. I immunize my computer--i don't run any of those programs, and i keep not e-mail addresses, not even any copies of e-mail, in my box.

As a person that used to do computer technical support, I can tell you that they don't always hire the smartest people. Sometimes all that's requires is that the representative knows how to look up information and then they just read a pre-written solution to you. The ones that actually know what they are doing get promoted to programming or become managers and they never go on the phones...

I'm not one of those people that hates Microsoft though. Personally I like Windows and the fact that most of the products out there are designed to work with windows. It makes installation easier and I like the fact that I don't have to learn 20 different opperating systems when I go from one computer to the next because Windows is on most everything. It does everything I've ever needed so what do I have to complain about.

I had to buy a subscription to the mac helpline because my computer was broken. They told me that the problem was that I didn't have the newest operating system (even though every single program I own is for OS 9). When I learned a bit more about my computer, I found out the problem - a few months earlier when I took it in for repairs they had installed the system folder - without deleting the old one. The computer didn't know which was controling what or where to put stuff, and I ended up having to replace my hard drive and trash my firewire - the disks wouldn't re-format. I merged the two system folders into one and re-installed some stuff, and now it works.

[side note: they also told me my entire computer had been deleted - when it was really hidden in a folder along with my old system folder. So every program, song, etc. was installed twice.]

So, I had paid money so that they could mess up my machine even more badly, and so that they could (after having waited 2 hours for paid service) sell me things.

I should have used that one when I was doing tech support. ha ha