PhotoDude.com

Sun. Oct 05, 2003

The Fiction of Customer Service

That’s the subtitle of an article in Creative Loafing from Cliff Bostock. The actual title, “Calling Michele Tanner,” is a punchline well worth getting to, but he summarizes: “Honestly, ‘customer service’ is now a euphemism for torture—a poisonous piece of cheese in a maze consumers run through in our hunt for the next best thing.”

I don’t know what causes customer service and tech support to become such a nightmare with many vendors. Is a function of the size of a customer base that numbers in the millions, or a result of outsourcing to the lowest bidder? I don’t know, and like most consumers, I don’t care. I just have to deal with the aftermath.

And, of course, I have a couple of recent personal examples. Friday night before I went to bed, DSL became problematic, with trouble connecting to the server and authenticating. When the problem still existed Saturday morning, I went online via dialup and filled out a trouble connection report. It’s my understanding that these reports are monitored as trends in the Network Operations Center, so that was my only goal … contribute evidence of a problem to the only people who could fix it.

Sure enough, less than an hour later there is a new item on their Network Status page, indicating this problem exists for many DSL customers in Georgia, and they are working on it. By late last night, all was normal again.

Today, 24 hours after filling out that trouble report and 12 hours after the problem was fixed, I get a response from Earthlink tech support: “We understand that you are experiencing problems over your DSL connection due to PPPoE. What I would suggest at this point is completely removing all of the components that are required to connect, then in the following order, re-add them.”

They then instruct me how to remove WinPoet (a PPPoE program I don’t use), the Windows TCP/IP stack, and the drivers for my Ethernet card, then reinstall the whole mess. I responded:

Before you send me a boilerplate reply suggesting I reinstall software that I never mentioned and don’t use, MAYBE you should check the Network Status page.

There, you will find that Atlanta and other Georgia cities were suffering from connection and authentication troubles for DSL customers (since resolved). The troubles I reported. From Atlanta. I found this out about two hours after I filled out the trouble reporting form. Why can’t tech support find it, 24 hours later?

But thanks for suggesting I spend my afternoon doing irrelevant things to my computer, rather than taking one moment to check your own network status page.

Surprisingly, I actually got a response to that: “Thank you for contacting us. We are not able to understand your issue.”

And I’m not able to understand yours, either, so I guess we’re even. Thank you for turning what should be a standard transaction into some bizarre ritual.

You see, this is not my first encounter with Earthlink support in the past week. You might remember my nightmare of moving to a new web host. The old one was Earthlink, and last Tuesday I finally called them to shut down my account at the end of the billing cycle, that night (the 30th). I confirmed that the site would be accessible via FTP through the rest of the day, and proceeded to start one last insurance backup of everything on the server.

About 30 minutes in, the FTP connection dies. On trying to reconnect, I find the login is gone. They’ve shut down my space, less than an hour after my call, during which they’d promised it would be up until midnight (as I’d paid for already). I went ballistic, especially since I was also in the middle of writing a calm and heartfelt explanation of why I was leaving the only web host I’d known in over seven years. In addition to firing off a furious e-mail to web hosting support, I tagged it on the end of my otherwise calm reflection on why I felt Earthlink had become non-competitive in web hosting.

In addition to the usual generic addresses, I carpet bombed the addresses of individuals I’d once known who worked within Mindspring before it was swallowed by Earthlink. To give credit where it is due, one of them rose to the occasion, and my account was reconnected later that day so I could finish my final backup.

But it wasn’t because of standard tech support, it was because I knew an individual to contact. Tech support finally got around to replying to my flamebroiled complaint 24 hours later, with this helpful tidbit: “We would like to inform you that your account is still active and we were able to access your web space. The problem seems to be a intermittent one.”

Not anymore. It’s permanent, as in, I’m gone.