[geeks] Awesome Technical Support

[Rick Hamell]

On 1/16/12 11:51 AM, Joshua Boyd wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 16, 2012 at 01:07:48PM -0600, Jonathan Patschke wrote:
>> My experience with technical support (even pre-sales) over the past few
>> years has conditioned me to expect a pattern of questions receiving canned
>> answers until those questions are escalated to someone who gives me
>> incomplete or wrong information unless I have a paid support contract.
>>
>> Granted, Coriolis Systems is a small company, but I was pleasantly
>> surprised to discover that interactions like this still happen:
>>
>>    http://jonathan.celestrion.net/stuff/awesome-technical-support.html
>
> That's impressive.

It's disappointing that we now have to celebrate good, even competent 
customer service.

I asked the guys over at QuickerTek a question about their products, 
looking for more details about their product before purchasing. Their 
answer back was "Yes." They did this to me three separate times, and one 
question has an either/or answer! I ended up purchasing their product 
anyways, but have been extremely unhappy with it and ended up 
decommissioning it.

The guys over Enable-It on the other hand not only replaced two of my 
six dead units no questions asked, and answered every single technical 
question I tossed at them in pretty great detail. And when I made the 
suggestion for a lock to keep the power and Ethernet cables from coming 
loose, they not only designed one, but sent a copy to me for free for 
testing. Three weeks after I made the suggestion!

I used to work the help desk at my current place of employment. Since 
then the help desk has changed hands three or four times and is now 
outsourced to Mexico and the Philippines. You're lucky if you get anyone 
who can speak clearly enough to understand in the first place, and half 
the time they don't know how to fix the problem and end up sending it to 
Desktop guys anyways. On top of that, the concept of SLAs have been 
totally removed, even a "server is down, multiple groups are affected, 
presentation in two hours," can take a week to fix. And don't even 
bother asking for something outside of the core competencies. I've 
pretty much become the defacto helpdesk person for my division because I 
can at least do the basic troubleshooting.

-- 
Rick Hamell

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