Customer (Dis)Service

There’s a formula that is used in the business world. Now, if you’re an MBA and you went to business school, you’ve probably never heard it. You were too busy learning other “valuable” skills like:

1. Chapter 3: Which Doughnuts and Coffee Your Secretary Should Order for the 9:00 Meeting
   
2. Lecture: Proper Etiquette for Public Blackberry Use (No handhelds in the lecture hall, please)
   
3. Advancement 202: How To Simultaneously Pat Someone On, and Stab Them In, the Back
   
4. Symposium (billable and tax deductable): Designing Effective PowerPoint Slide Shows
   
5. Delegation Exercise: Choosing the Right Team of Consultants
   

And you probably spent at least a week learning how to hide the Jamaica “conference” expenses in your operating budget. There just wasn’t enough time to teach you anything useful or relevant.

In case you haven’t been to business school and you don’t have $100K to throw around, I’ll save you the time and money. Here are the answers.

1. Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Dunkin’ Donuts coffee. Never the other way around. That’s just silly. What were you thinking? Fire your secretary immediately.
   
2. There are no rules. You have a Blackberry; that makes you more important than everyone else. Screw them. Text away, whenever you want. If anyone says anything to you, use “The Glare” that you learned in your first semester and go back to your conversation or your email.
   
3. Smile a lot and shake hands. The smile lulls them into a false sense of security, and the handshake holds them so they can’t escape.
   
4. Who cares? Nobody’s watching anyway. Besides, it’s not your problem, because your admin assistant is going to do all the work. Let her figure it out. She’ll have it all tested, edited, and spell-checked before she hands it to you to present to the Board. (Of course, you get to take all the credit.)
   
5. The “right” team is the cheapest team. They’re all equally useless. Consultants are the IT equivalent of MBAs.

Anyway, here’s the formula:
If a customer has a bad customer experience, they will tell 10 people. If they have a good customer experience, they will tell 2 people.
Don’t look at me, I didn’t come up with it. But I’m going to bust the curve right here. I’ve had one very bad customer experience and one very good one in the past couple of weeks, and I’m going to post both of them here. Hopefully at least 10 people will read it. If not, I'm pretty much wasting my time typing all this, aren't I?

First the bad. (Then we can end on a positive note, or maybe just because I want to bitch about someone first.)

I have Comcast cable Internet, and the service comes with McAfee Security Center free. Yeah, that should tip you off right there; free. A few weeks ago I was prompted to upgrade it to the newest version. The installation seemed to go all right, but then I started getting errors a few days later. The automatic update of the virus definitions wasn’t working. I kept getting a popup message telling me to reinstall the whole thing. I tried to reinstall it a few times and it would time out, saying that the site was unavailable.

First I tried the online help for McAfee, no luck there. I tried the online chat and they told me that they don’t support Comcast customers and that I had to contact Comcast. OK, fine. I’m not actually paying for it, so I understand that they don’t want to waste their time on freebies. So I called Comcast. They told me that I’m supposed to call McAfee. Now, I wasn’t born yesterday. This appears to be “the runaround.”

This time I called McAfee on the phone and got transferred to about five different people. Finally I got to the customer service people and they told me that I can’t download the updates because my account had expired in 2006. Ummm, no. Nice try, thanks for playing, but no. Like I said before (and to every person on the phone) I am a Comcast customer and McAfee is free with my Internet service. It doesn’t expire. But they said that I couldn’t do anything until Comcast “renewed” my license. OK, Comcast’s turn. Tag, you’re it.

I called Comcast back again and told them what McAfee had told me. The guy started laughing. I said, yeah, that’s what I said. It doesn’t expire. He said he can’t do anything for me, because I need to deal with McAfee. They pay a special license fee so that Comcast customers have it, but they don’t do support. OK, back to McAfee. Tag, you’re it.

I explained to the McAfee tech that there must be something wrong with McAfee’s download site, because I’m not able to access it either by the Update feature in my software or manually through the link on the website. The tech at Comcast couldn’t access it either. He got the same error I did, so I figured it must be on McAfee’s end. The McAfee tech said that he could access it just fine. I asked him, how are you getting to it? Are you on your own network (LAN) or are you going from an external connection? He said he was on his LAN, so I said maybe that’s the problem. That’s why you haven’t noticed it, because all of you can get to it internally.

He said no, that wasn’t it. He said the reason I couldn’t run the update or reinstall the software was because I had to uninstall it first, then reinstall it. Now think about that for a minute. It’s not letting me install the software from the website, and now he wants me to completely uninstall the anti-virus software that is still protecting my computer from hackers and viruses. It’s not up to date, but it is still protecting me at this point. What if I can’t reinstall it? Then I’m wide open to attacks. He said not to worry, I would be able to install it. So, like an idiot, I believed him. You guessed it.

Cut to three days later. By this time, I’m not even talking to anyone. As soon as the first person answers the phone I just ask for a supervisor. I’ve spent the better part of a Thursday and Friday evening and an entire Saturday morning screwing around with this. My computer is disconnected from the Internet because I’m afraid to connect. Finally, finally, I get in touch with someone at Comcast that knows what they are talking about. She puts me in contact with a McAfee tech who is dedicated to the Comcast account. My question is, why wasn’t I given this other phone number three days ago?

It turns out that when I upgraded to the new version, it was supposed to have updated my “hosts” file, which is a Windows system file in a hidden directory (oops, I mean folder). It didn’t update the file on the Comcast version of the software, so it had to be updated manually. Since I am in the IT business and consider myself a professional nerd, I could edit this file and include the IP address of McAfee’s download site. Luckily I know what I’m doing, because it could have been a nightmare if I was computer illiterate as many people I know are. It worked, and I got back online, downloaded the software and reinstalled it.

I have no problem with Comcast, because they were limited on what they could do. But I will never buy anything from McAfee ever again. Since I still get the product for free, I will continue to use it, but they will never see a dime of my money. They could have earned my business very easily. All I had to hear was that one person was going to take ownership of the issue and escalate it and follow through. That didn't happen. Everyone I spoke to gave me the "sorry, not my table" treatment and passed me around to someone else.

My other experience happened at about the same time. My company has some pretty cool perks. Even though I need to go into an office in downtown Chicago every day, I am listed as “home-based.” As such, I get to order office supplies for my home office and other things I need for my commute, like my monthly train pass. Recently I ordered a new laptop case. I have a bicycle now and I can ride it to the train station when the weather is nice. The problem is that my stock Dell bag only has a shoulder strap. I need a backpack to ride my bike or I either choke myself or the bag falls off my shoulder.

I saw exactly what I needed in the Office Max online catalog. It was a combination bag, with a shoulder strap and backpack straps that hide away in a pocket. Pretty cool. And it has more space inside than my old bag, but takes up less space under my seat on the train. It’s exactly what I was looking for. There was only one small problem.

The clips on the over-the-shoulder strap are metal and strong, but the ones for the shoulder (backpack) straps are plastic. The first time I rode to the train station and unclipped them to stow the straps away in their pocket, one of them snapped right off. Bummer.

I went to Kensington’s website to see if they sold spare parts. I couldn’t find any. I saw that the case carried a warranty, but it said you needed a proof of purchase to make a warranty claim. Since I didn’t pay for it myself, I didn’t have a receipt or anything. I emailed the customer service contact anyway and asked if I could buy a set of replacement clips.

Within five minutes I had a response in my inbox. It wasn’t a form email, either. It was a personal response. He asked me for the serial number on the bag. I replied back and within another five minutes he emailed back and asked for my shipping address so they could send me a replacement free of charge. About two weeks later, I had a package with a brand new laptop case. I’m being more careful with this one knowing that those plastic clips can snap easily. But the next time that I’m in the market for a laptop bag, I will go out of my way to look for the Kensington brand.

Two free things, two customer service experiences. Neither of them got any money from me, but one of them will probably get my business in the future, and one never will. There’s your last business lesson for the day: Not all customers are paying customers. But treating the non-paying customers well may bring you more business later. By the same token, treating the non-paying customers like crap will surely guarantee that they will never be paying customers. Questions?