Church of the Customer Blog
« Technical support is missing | Main | Creating student evangelists »
January 15, 2004
Technical support is missing
I emailed my most excellent friend Matthew Lindenburg, who's a techie's techie, about a cool new gadget from Sound Blaster, and he replied with this yarn...
Did I tell you I bought one of Gateway's connected DVD players? You can connect to a server on your desktop and stream MP3, WMA and various video formats. I got the wireless version and was very excited because finally I could access all of my media from the living room.
The DVD player part worked great. Excellent picture, good features. But the wireless media part worked just so-so. It often hiccoughed when it started to play the first track of a playlist or album and sometimes would just lose the connection to the network altogether.
I talked to tech support and they suggested it might be the network card I was using (which they provided). So they said they would contact me about get a replacement. I waited two weeks to hear back from them. No callback, no follow-up email, nothing.
One day when I was on the Gateway site I noticed that they had released a firmware upgrade for the unit. I thought, cool, maybe this will help. So followed the instructions, confirmed that I had the right unit for the upgrade, downloaded the files, burned them on the CD and followed the install instructions. When I rebooted the unit, it was hosed. The UI froze every time I tried to configure the network.
So, I called them back and said, hey, your upgrade broke my DVD player. Of course, the tech accused me of installing it incorrectly. I said, hey, I'm no novice. I did it right. The tech said try it again. I said I tried it 5 times already, including re-burning the CD from different machines in my house. He said, Oh. I said, can you help me restore the old firmware. He said, no, there's NOTHING WE CAN DO. So I asked for a supervisor.
When the supervisor got on the phone, he said my favorite thing: "How can I help you?" I love this from supervisors because:
a) It's really the opposite of what they mean. What they're thinking is, how can I get you to go away and stop being a customer right now?
b) They're pretending like the last person I talked to hadn't just spent the last five minutes explaining the situation.
But I walked the supervisor through the situation again. When I was done he said: "Well, you probably installed it wrong."
Grrrr.
This guy tells me that the only thing he can do is have me send the unit in to the lab in Sioux Falls (he pronounced it, swear to god, SOO-IX Falls). I said, shit, it's almost Christmas (it was December 9) and we're going to want to watch DVDs. He said, oh, it probably won't want take that long. I said, okay. So I sent the unit in. They received it on December 12. I called around the 15th to see if they could provide any status.
Tech support said that I needed to talk customer support and transferred me. Customer support said they had no record of the service request and transferred me back to tech support. Tech support had the record but confirmed that only customer support could provide status. Oy, said I. I gave the service request number that I got from tech support to customer support and they said, oh, well, it doesn't look we've received the DVD player yet. I gave them the UPS tracking number and said that they had, in fact, received the unit. I was put on hold. When the CSR came back she said, yes, they had received it (she just went to the UPS site and checked the tracking number). I said I know.
What's the status? She said that she couldn't provide status because there was not way to reach the technical support center.
"No way?" I said.
"No way."
"They don't have phones?"
"We're not allowed to have the number."
"Aren't they in your building?"
"I'm not sure."
"Could you check?"
Hold.
"Sir?"
"Yes?"
"We're not sure where they are."
And so began this dance with the customer and tech support departments of Gateway. I was promised a call back with a status the first time I called. That didn't happen. So I've called back since, roughly once per week. Just to, I don't know, get my heart-pumping. Every time it's the same process. Talk to customer service, talk to tech support, can't get a status, we'll call you back.
Now, stop me if I'm getting this wrong but isn't Gateway the company that claims to have the highest rating of customer satisfaction in phone support? Isn't it?
So, anyway, yeah. I think the Creative wireless unit looks very cool.
Other blogs that reference Technical support is missing:
» All I Can Say is "WOW" from Ensight - Jeremy C. Wright
Talk about bad technical support and customer service. Check out Ben's experience with Gateway.... [Read More]
