Comment by fludlight | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fludlight | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

About seven or eight years ago, I tried to migrate my small employer to Microsoft cloud Exchange (email). I forget what they were calling it back then. We were an Outlook shop so MS seemed like the logical choice.

I spent a few days setting everything up and testing it. I flipped the switch and...silence. No incoming email for a few hours in the middle of a Friday night. CEO calls me at 2am asking why our prospective Hong Kong client's emails are bouncing back. Ooops...flip the DNS back to the old email server.

Call tech support. It's an Indian call center reading the tech support web site. After 20 minutes they escalate.

Wait 24 hours. "We're looking into it." Wait another 24 hours. "We've found the problem and are fixing it." Wait 48 hours.

"There is weird edge case bug with the code that manages the online signups. This affects you and a few dozen other SMBs. Since you are an SMB you are dealing with a third party customer service company. We cannot contact the division that has authorization to fix this part of the codebase. We have tried speaking to our Microsoft contacts but they are not allowed to contact the engineering team behind their product. Speaking from experience, this will only be fixed if someone with 10k seats has the same issue. You should close your account now. Sorry."

Never again.

You still can't actually change your billing country in Office 365 without starting over with a new account. Even support can't do it.

https://office365.uservoice.com/forums/273493-office-365-adm...

It was bleeding edge tech; that happens.

Well, sure it was bleeding edge. That's not the point. Bleeding edge doesn't mean that your support has to be completely broken like this.

I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”. You can argue it took too long, or that having to give that advice for the reason given is stupid, or that the customer didn’t want to get that advice, but in the example the customer managed to get through to customer support and got clear, actionable advice.

I frequently read worse on HN about Google, where even reaching tech support can be ‘challenging”, and Apple, where app reviews report issues that developers can’t make heads or tails of.

I have interacted with Apple’s app reviewers for years and never experienced what you’re describing.

It really isn't difficult to search online for stories of people struggling with Apple app reviewers. Just because it hasn't happened to you doesn't mean it doesn't happen.

There are people who have a bad experience and they complain about it on the internet. Nothing wrong with that. I'm just adding the opposite data point.

Sure, "close your account" is actionable, but it's funny to think that it's not a clear sign that their customer support is completely broken. I mean, when you inform a company of a problem and their customer support admits that it's a bug on the company's side, but they can't fix it because they don't have any way to inform the developers from the company in question, how is that not being broken? Customer support should be a filter to the developers, but instead they're a fake door. Despite being a 3rd party, the customer support represents the company. From the customer's side, the company apparently can't communicate with itself. That's completely broken in my book.

> I frequently read worse on HN

Right, that's why it's funny. The bar is very low here, and that's why you can count it as not being completely broken.

> I wouldn’t call that “completely broken”.

The intent of customer services is to retain a customer in the event of problems. "You should close your account" is therefore broken customer service.

History is that when one one uses bleeding edge; good support and/or reliability is relatively rare. Whether it must be that way or if it's just a bad industry habit can be debated. But, if one looks at the history of most very-new tech, it quite often is not reliable regardless of cause. Therefore, you should probably not assume the newest incarnation will not have this problem. I don't have any solid study, but watching the industry for many decades has shown me this pattern. Here is a common saying that I didn't invent: "Never buy version 1.0". (Wow, I got a -3 above. That hurts.)

Email circa 2010 was not bleeding edge technology.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com