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| Installing means NOTHING to Microsoft |
This blog post is going to need a bit of background before its completely understood, but here's a fairly long story shortened. At the time of writing this post I'm trying to install Microsoft Office 2010 (Professional Plus Edition!) on my laptop via the use of downloading through a computer. Upon completion of this 2 1/2 hour download, I launched the wizard and was confronted by the little bit of joy that you can see to your right. And so begins my epic quest of trying to install Word 2010 on my laptop, this is being written while in progress, so this is being written live.
So, naturally I decided that Microsoft Support, but that in itself took much longer than it should have. I started out by calling the old reference number, seeing that I was having problems getting the download to start in the first place, (yeah, I know, I'm pretty lazy) I went through the options to go to "download help" because I wasn’t having any luck launching the download. After 5 minutes of soft, classical music, I was greeted by the sound of my new helper, who I will code name as "Jessica." From there, and after giving my own name, phone number and prior number for assistance, I got the unfortunate news that I needed to be re-directed, and so my journey was sent off into a new perilous land, with a 10 minute wait.
I landed in Microsoft's land of Technical support, in other words, Jessica didn't want to help me because even though pushing "3" on my phone was supposed to be for downloads, I was patched through to sales. I gave my information, and now a case number to my new friend, "Bob." bob had a very heavy accent, and after about 10 minutes of going back and forth, we decided that it may be in my best interest to go to the installation part of Microsoft's help desk, because we know what'd happen if we had experts who could help customers in more than 1 field.
After another 5 minute wait period, I was patched through to my last helper, who I call "Frafrin." Telling me that my internet connection (which just so happens to be wireless when I’m using the laptop) is no good, and that I would need to spend another couple hours downloading the 650 megabytes again at my fantastic download speed at 150 kb/s (and that’s fast for me, folks) I tried to stay calm, which leads me to the point of what I started this post about.
I’ve heard that customer support is a pretty bad job to have, putting in the notion that you have to put up with idiots who don’t understand why their computer won’t turn on (and then will blame the person who they called to help them when it doesn’t work) and I can understand the customer. Americans can be stupidly independent, and I can say that as I am one. We don’t want to call support until we’ve tried every method we can think of and we’ve got veins popping out of our necks that we’re so mad. But, my biggest problem is that customer support isn’t good at helping. It would be one thing if they employed people with accents that weren’t thicker than Jell-O pudding, but in some cases, that isn’t always true. I try my best to be patient, and when I get the feeling that I’m not getting anywhere, then I may just ask to talk to a manager, or perhaps go cry myself to sleep.
If big companies could grasp the fact that people heavily prefer to talk to people (I’m talking about you, automated systems) and to people who don’t have a heavy accent (if I live in America, I’d like to talk to an American. It’s easier, (this isn’t knocking on foreigners, if they set up a customer support center in the UK or Australia, it would be just as stupid.) What always floors me is the wait time. I can understand that big corporations are greedy and don’t want to put in money to buying better support, but that’s a fundamental thing to capitalism and all, but if you release a product with flaws, or to the general public (who will find flaws, and get lost in said product) then you have to expect that they’ll need help, otherwise, companies miss the point of selling a product.
--Santa
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