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This post continues regarding Chris’ support issues. I’ve removed anything vendor/customer specific. Chris is very frustrated for a number of reasons. The support contract is vendor specific and it’s negotiated through a service provider who have no influence over the vendor (just like Chris, he’s one of the many thousands of **** server owners). (Saving the organization money) Secondly, the support process he felt was unhelpful.

It’s a difficult needle to thread support, you have to protect yourself from ‘end user problems’, whilst managing genuine issues and resolving their calls. Being helpful and saying sorry, not our issue ever so politely.

The vendor support team have set processes to follow, they must not identify one organization from another (and often can’t), Chris is one of their many thousands of customers through which his company purchases servers.

From a branding standpoint however, the following disruption has resulted in:

Chris now quotes this vendor and it’s associated products as:

A) Pants.

B) Providing rubbish support.

Chris now suggest any other vendor other than this one for new products.

The project manager is ‘unimpressed’ that they had a support engineer on site for one business day swapping components out and there was an additional man day cost to be absorbed into the project costs. Also why didn’t IT have spare parts in stock? Didn’t they have a relationship with the vendor to bypass all this stuff?

In effect, for the sake of £3000 (the billable price of components and engineer’s time) or so, (give or take), the vendor has de-branded itself to a position of negativity, which requires additional effort and incentives when it comes around to purchase agreements.

It’s an issue which is multifacited and all the vendors have different support services, have different ways of dealing with customers. Key is managing your relationship, managing expectations and working with the customer to highlight what is achievable.

Getting a DOA product is not a world changing event, it’s an inconvenient, a disappointment you might say, but it’s part of life and we all have to move on.

Chris has been successfully rebooted at a cost of £2.65 (Starbucks coffee) and reminded that it’s part of support, of delivery, and that life really is too short. So next time, follow process, escalate where necessary, but maintain the civility, maintain the relationships and accept that failure is not anyones fault per say, we need to address issues, comment on ways of improving delivery and communication, accentuate the positive, never the negative.

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