On Customer Service

What the hell has happend to the notion of customer service in today's business environment? In the 20+ years I've been in the IT industry, I've always done my best to ensure that my clients are pleased with the service they've received from myself or my team, becuase I've occasionally received poor treatment from other agencies, and I've never wanted to have anything like that kind of reputation. The more I deal with larger companies, though, the more I think that the focus on customer service has simply been done away with.

Today's example comes from a worldwide shipping organization. I recently had a package shipped in from out of the country, and today I received a notice in the mail that I had an unpaid invoice to that shipper. I called to inquire about the unpaid invoice (since I'd never received an invoice and had no clue what I could have had shipped that I didn't already pay for) and the first agent I deal with faxed the invoice over to me. Looking it over, it still didn't make any sense. So I called back a second time to get clarification.

Boy, was that a mistake. After the phone agent explained what the charge was for, I expressed concern that there was nothing in the packaging that indicated that I'd be accepting any additional shipping charges by accepting delivery of the package, and that I had not received any invoice or communication of any kind about additional charges. Before I could say that I'd be sending a payment off for the charges, the floodgates opened. The phone agent immediately went into yelling mode and accused me of attacking the company. She said that they expect people to know that there are customs charges for packages coming in from out of the country. When I cut her off to explain that I wasn't trying to "attack" anyone but was trying to get clarification on the unexpected charges, she cut me off and started yelling louder that they normally waive these charges for someone that doesn't understand about customs charges and that my account was clear. Then she repeated that she cleared the charges because it wasn't cost effective to have these conversations, gave her name, and hung up.

If you've been reading my recent posts on the fun with Dell, you know that I generally try to give a company an option to improve it's product when I see an issue, because that's what I'd want to do. So you might expect that, since I have the phone agent's name, I'd call the shipper, speak to a manager, and discuss the phone call in more detail, giving the manger an opportunity to discuss handling customers with the phone agent, and why yelling at customers is generall not a good idea.

Not this time. This time, I'm speaking with my dollars. I'm no longer using that shipper for sending packages (not that I do a lot of this, but they've lost all future outbound shipments from me). I'm also going to request any vendor I deal with to use a different shipping option, including the US Postal service where applicable, instead of this particular shipping company, because I don't want them to make any more money on shipments that have anything to do with me or my company. I recognize that I can't completely circumvent this shipping company in all likelihood, but I'm going to do everything I can. Because I don't want to get into a discussion of how much billable time I lost tracking down this particular shipment because they didn't attempt redelivery during the window they indicated, and I had to travel to their holding facility to pick it up myself. I'm not going to give them example after example after example of how they could make simple changes to improve their customer satisfaction on their product.

All because the agent lost her cool and started yelling at me.

You yell at me, you lose my business. I'd expect the same from anyone who got yelled at by me or one of my employees. Fire me if one of us yells at you. Because that's just unprofessional. And if you can't treat me professionally, much less as a human being, you're not getting my business.

And even if I had "attacked" the company (whatever that means), that's still not an excuse to lose control and shout at a customer. That's where I draw the line, and that's why I will never voluntarily use the services of this shipping company again.

On Feedback

In previous posts, I’ve lamented about the issues I’ve had with the PERC 5/i controller in Dell servers that I have rolled out to clients and put in my own office. Today, I had a conference call with Dell support and someone from the NOS group about the design of the card. The bottom line at the end of the call is that right now, Dell has no solution for being able to provide any automated notification for an array problem or failure, either through software or hardware. They have heard my feedback and are escalating the issue through the engineering group, but they have no answer for me at this time.

I don’t have a problem with this. In the three weeks I’ve been working with Dell on this problem, they’ve been very responsive and proactive about communicating with me when they have updates on the issue. Personally, I think that the argument I’ve presented is solid enough, and while everyone I have spoken with agrees with me, I’m just not sure that it’s a case of one person really making a difference.

So, at the recommendation of the Dell folks, I have posted the issue to their feedback site, Ideastorm. This is a site Dell has set up to accept direct feedback from their customers, and the engineering group, among others, takes the feedback given on the site seriously.

Well, as seriously as they can. Honestly, after looking through a few posts, there are some garbage posts up there, just like you’d expect from any unmoderated public-facing site that asks for thoughts and opinions. Still, they asked, and I complied.

This is where I want to get assistance from the community, and this request is two-fold. I have spoken with several VARs in the small business space who were totally unaware that there was not audible alarm on the PERC 5/i controller, and most were really quite surprised. So, first, if you interact with other VARs who you know sell or support Dell equipment, please let them know that the PERC 5/i has no audible alarm on it. They may not care, but they should at least know. Second, if you want to see this design changed back to having an audible alarm, or at the very least some automated notification tools running on the server directly (no, IT Assistant will not run on an SBS server, nor will it run on a 64-bit OS), check out my post at Ideastorm and comment or vote on it. If engineering sees a large number of VARs are not happy with the state of the hardware, there will likely be more impetus to take action quickly. The squeaky wheel getting the grease and all that. You will have to register on the site to make a comment and vote, but if you are concerned about this situation, please take the time to do so. Alternately, contact your Dell support or account rep and discuss the situation with them.

On SP2 and Avoidance

For what it's worth, I now have an official stance on Windows Server 2003 SP2:

Don't install it. At least not yet.

I keep running into folks who have issues with their servers following the installation of SP2. the majority of issues seem to be cause by the enabling of Receive Side Scaling in SP2. This is more than just my experience, too. The Official SBS Blog also notes that RSS may be at the core of a number of problems seen in the SBS community following the installation of SP2. MS has posted KB927695 which gives a registry hack to disable RSS on the server, but the description of the problem in the KB doesn't correlate to the behaviors we're seeing in the field, so the average bloke trying to figure out why he suddenly can't get to external FTP sites or the iTunes Music Store isn't going to find this KB directly.

Though the KB tells the reader to disable RSS in the registry, I've been able to get resolution in all cases I've handled thus far by going into the Configuration properties of the NICs on the server and setting Recive Side Scaling to Disabled. This is a far more palatable resolution for most people than going in and modifying the registry. 

Another common thread we've seen in blogs and newsgroup posts is that ISA is also a factor in the mix. My recent experiences have not had ISA involved, which is why I'm looking at RSS as the core culprit. It's the common thread that leads to the core resolution - disabling RSS seems to take care of a vast majority of issues.

Plus, I have yet to see a real business case for pushing ahead with the installation of SP2, especially in the small business arena. In fact, of the Top Ten Reasons to install SP2 listed at the TechNet site, I see exactly one reason, ironically listed as #1 in the list, that I might want to install SP2, but that's only for sites that I haven't been keeping up to date with Microsoft Updates - SP2 does offer a single rollup for all the updates that have been released since SP1, and if a bunch haven't been installed, then yeah, it could be easier to install SP2 than to singly install all the updates. But given that reason #3 is causing a lot of grief out in the community and that the other "reason" just really seem more like marketing spin than actual technical/business benefits, I cannot in good conscience install this product on my client's servers, nor can I recommend that anyone take the plunge right now and see what's happening. That stance will change once we get a better grip on the breadth of the problems that are being caused by SP2 and quick access to the resolutions for them, but I'm nowehere near that point yet.

One request from you, the gentle reader. If you have encountered a problem followin the install of SP2 that was resolved by disabling Receive Side Scaling, please take a moment and either drop me a note with a brief description of what the problem was, or just leave a comment here on the blog. I'd really like to get an idea of what's out there that's really getting hit, because I don't think all of the possible scenarios have bubbled up to the top just yet.