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A couple of weeks ago, I had the most infuriating customer in my ten years of doing enterprise tech support.
Customer needs help upgrading his equipment. In all fairness, the upgrade process from the supplier was never tested, and did not, in fact, actually work. We (the customer's vendor) provided him with our own procedure, which did in fact work.
My co-worker makes the mistake of providing the customer with the proactive support case we have open with the supplier. So, instead of asking us questions, he starts peppering the supplier directly. This is a big no-no, and we have to tell the customer to cut that out. (Our contract with our supplier includes us handling all customer contact.)
The weekend of the big upgrade comes up... I know I'm going to get paged out because the customer is an idiot, and the product lousy. Well, the way it works is that the customer calls level 1, and then if they can't fix the problem, they page me (level 2 out.) I then have an hour to call the customer.
Sure enough, I get a page. I try and call the customer and get no answer. (This is 20 minutes after the page goes out.) It turns out the customer was already on the phone with the supplier directly. How did he get them to agree to talk? He lied and told them he had been waiting 90 mintues for a callback, and hadn't received it yet. Too bad our call tracking system proves this to be a total lie.
I let the supplier handle it because I know that if I get on the phone with this clown, I'm going to tear him to shreds.
My co-worker, who actually owns the case (I was just on call), talks to the customer on Monday. By that point he claims he was waiting for two hours. My co-worker is pretty much spitting nails by this point, and (with the customer's manager on the phone) comes close to cussing him out for calling the supplier directly, after he had been explicitly told not to.
What did all this actually accomplish for the customer? It means that the next time this customer calls for support, he's getting the bare minimum, and by-the-book handling. He'll be lucky if he can get an obviously bad part replaced in less than a month... I'm sure there are all kinds of tests I can think to run before agreeing to the RMA.
SirWired
Customer needs help upgrading his equipment. In all fairness, the upgrade process from the supplier was never tested, and did not, in fact, actually work. We (the customer's vendor) provided him with our own procedure, which did in fact work.
My co-worker makes the mistake of providing the customer with the proactive support case we have open with the supplier. So, instead of asking us questions, he starts peppering the supplier directly. This is a big no-no, and we have to tell the customer to cut that out. (Our contract with our supplier includes us handling all customer contact.)
The weekend of the big upgrade comes up... I know I'm going to get paged out because the customer is an idiot, and the product lousy. Well, the way it works is that the customer calls level 1, and then if they can't fix the problem, they page me (level 2 out.) I then have an hour to call the customer.
Sure enough, I get a page. I try and call the customer and get no answer. (This is 20 minutes after the page goes out.) It turns out the customer was already on the phone with the supplier directly. How did he get them to agree to talk? He lied and told them he had been waiting 90 mintues for a callback, and hadn't received it yet. Too bad our call tracking system proves this to be a total lie.
I let the supplier handle it because I know that if I get on the phone with this clown, I'm going to tear him to shreds.
My co-worker, who actually owns the case (I was just on call), talks to the customer on Monday. By that point he claims he was waiting for two hours. My co-worker is pretty much spitting nails by this point, and (with the customer's manager on the phone) comes close to cussing him out for calling the supplier directly, after he had been explicitly told not to.
What did all this actually accomplish for the customer? It means that the next time this customer calls for support, he's getting the bare minimum, and by-the-book handling. He'll be lucky if he can get an obviously bad part replaced in less than a month... I'm sure there are all kinds of tests I can think to run before agreeing to the RMA.
SirWired
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