When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates | Hacker News Reader

When irate product support customers demand to speak to Bill Gates

devblogs.microsoft.com

79 pointsmagnat35 comments

What I did once is lookup the financial report of the company, find all the board members and C level execs l, figured out what their email structure looks like (pete.whatever@company.com) and just walked them through my support experience. Then I asked if replacing the HEPA filter in my 5 year old vacuum cleaner should cost 250 Euro, which was more expensive than the vacuum cleaner at the time.

What was the response?

Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.

Nobody likes to be left hanging.

Currently looking up emails for jsiepkes’ board to walk them through my frustrating experience with their comment.

If they had responded, he would have mentioned it in his comment.

I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I might have been able to base a lawsuit on. But I didn't really feel like going to court over 250 Euro (or really 75 Euro with the new offer) with a multi billion dollar company...

The issue was that their line of thought was; Well according to Dutch standards a vacuum cleaner has a life expectancy of 5 years. So if you want to replace something in it after 5 years (even if it is a customer replaceable part like a HEPA filter), it's not a replacement part / consumable, it's a spare part (which are usually more expansive). Which is also why I asked them; "Does that mean it is the official stance that you shouldn't expect your vacuum cleaners to last much longer then 5 years? Because that HEPA filter certainly needs replacement after 5 years.". Obviously they never answered that.

BTW We are talking about a premium house hold appliance brand here. The vacuum cleaner now costs well over 500 Euro. But when I bought it, it was about 240 Euro's or something. Sells for 700 dollars at Walmart it seems.

Thank you for responding. Sometimes it is absolutely necessary to bypass standard “customer service“ channels to get results.

I did something similar after sitting two days on the phone trying to get support for backup exec. this was a million years ago and I ended up looping through everyone there. they offshored support and no one could help me but not because they didn't try.

I documented everything and my frustrations with their software not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.

later got a call asking if they could show it to the board because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...

Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no errors meant nothing ran.

Flip side is the well-known story of when billg actually answered a customer service call: https://www.entrepreneur.com/leadership/that-time-bill-gates...

That is such utter bs it's amazing that Microsoft PR thought that somehow that shows anything of benefit to the suffering users.

I was involved in that particular incident, and wrote about it on HN when the story was making headlines.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=957936#958365

Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)

Yeah, it was certainly performative rather than actually serving the customer. My hope at the time was that the STARS knowledgebase would show itself to be slow and overloaded and Bill would realize that it was necessary to invest in upgrading it. Strangely it was faster than I had ever seen it, and it just happened to immediately come up with a plausible answer to Bill's query -- almost like it knew its master's hands were on the keyboard.

My obvious guess is that it was under low load because a lot of people were there watching instead of at their desks using it?

that comment should be added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights except, since the hightlights are sorted by the time of the comment it's not going to be seen by anyone unless they read all comments to the end...

This thing isn't uncommon. You email a CEO and get put into "executive escalation" if you don't seem like a crackpot. I've done that once before and it was useful to cut through the armies of outsourced CSRs that read from a script and refuse to deviate and send you in circles.

It does help if you start your email with your value to the company (i.e., I spent $X over $Y time period at your company)

I think the post is about the ones who _do_ seem like crackpots

Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so frustrated they express themselves that way.

And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has people who deal with it for him when he needs something from another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to have a segment of people that will both get angry and have edge problems.

Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting disconnected?

Does anyone at the company (in a position to order improvements) ever do this?

(This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)

I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies) has caused people over the years.

LOL, I worked for a Microsoft outsourcer in the late 90's doing Word and then VBA support. I would get this a lot! My stock answer was, " I'll tell him the next time we have lunch, but you know the cheap bastard always makes me pay."

the blog is full of other ways to trick your support cases while not showing at all you deem yourself superior

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...

When I worked for an IBM helpdesk looking after point-of-sale systems, we used to ask them to check if the power cable had a black or a blue bit of plastic surrounding the pins.

"It's black? Okay, it's not that then, I was hoping it would be easy. Right, plug it back in again and... oh it's working now? Cool, ring me back if there's anything else then!"

This is really brilliant.

Once thing I've noticed whe dealing with support cases in a variety of industry is, while there are different types of customer needs/comlaints (ex. a customer who is afraid of losing their warranty service via chicanery versus a customer who is dissatisfied with the results of the warranty service) customers sometimes really need to first feel like they are being heard.

Sometimes the emotional response of a person is literally "Can i speak to your manager?". It comes off rude, and it sure and shit is rude, but maybe they need to feel acknowledged, like maybe someone farther down the line was a jerk to them and they just feel blown off, or could just be a bad day. You sometimes do indeed need to perform emotional labor in order to achieve the best customer service.

I like this approach because it acknowledges the customer intrinsically and they feel like the maze has ended. The process has now become pro-active: There is light at the end of the tunnel.

This is not easy to bang out @work 9-5!

> Corollary: Instead of asking “Are you sure it’s turned on?”, ask them to turn it off and back on.

This is a two-for-one: sometimes it is turned on, and sometimes restarting it actually does resolve the problem (at least temporarily) anyway.

https://youtu.be/5UT8RkSmN4k

Dang that way of helping folks fix their problems without loosing face is such a cool approach!

On the contrary, Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs were very customer focused - they listened to customers more so than other big tech companies. You could actually have emailed them and gotten a response (in the case of Bezos a legendary ‘?’ forward to the team).

Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.

Jobs responded to email back when he ran a tiny company in an overall much smaller industry with far fewer customers. I'm not sure he was responding so much by the time he had resurrected Apple and the iPhone launched.

I once emailed Tim Cook and sure enough, he responded. Seemed like it was him, too.

One can only think if all the customer complaints really went to Bill Gates, how much different Microsoft would be today. They still operate in a world where they think once they build something, people would just use it. CoPilot is the latest example.

Why must we lie to customers?

They let them speak with Gill Bates instead

Don’t they have phone service in Little Saint James?

Now they can just put them through to BillGPT.

> Of course, the information was never actually passed along to Bill.

HOW DARE YOU!!!

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