Friday, November 14, 2008

Just When You Thought it Was Safe

Last week I told you that the issues with our OfficeLive account were finally resolved. I actually got a call from a technician and got a general explanation of what went wrong. (see the details here). I thought to myself that the folks in Redmond were starting to grasp the importance of happy customers. There were a couple of things that we wanted to resolve - duplicate entries (LOTS of duplicate entries) in the "synchronized" contact info, and the inability to create new documents in our Workspaces. So I figured I'd get with the support folks once I got caught up from all the time I wasted trying to get them to resolve the main problem.

This morning I got a call from a girl who seemed to have a very tenuous grasp of the English language. She had extreme difficulty reading the script (and even more trouble with my name), but she finally managed to tell me she was welcoming me to OfficeLive and wanted to know if I had any questions or needed any help. So I mentioned my problems. She puts me on hold for a couple of minutes and then comes back to tell me that OfficeLive doesn't support these features. She tells me I need to go to the microsoft.com site for help/

Excuse me? Isn't OfficeLive all about synchronizing contacts and sharing documents? And shouldn't the person calling me to welcome me be a little more familiar with the product?

Maybe I just need to lower my expectations when it comes to customer service. I heard a quote today that perhaps the non-existant Customer Service Manager for OfficeLive could take to heart: If I can't do great things, let me do small things in a great way. They did such a poor job in a big way when this thing tanked last week. I would have hoped a simple welcome call would be handled a little more professionally.

So who has some great sories about support successes? I'd like to see if we can turn this tide around and tell some happy stories. After all, we want to do business with people who get it. Don't we?

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