Successes and failures

[elizilla]

Last weekend I checked the valves in the TDM. They were all within spec, so I don't have to hunt for shims, pull the cams, etc. Yay!

Chuck Firment's Sabre, Grey Wolf, suffered catastrophic failure, night before last. He sent me email about it, and followed up with a phone call, and I was able to diagnose the problem correctly. The drive splines were stripped. I told him how to take the read wheel and the final drive off. Sure enough, he found what I had predicted. He came by this evening and I gave him the parts from my Sabre, Spring Wind. (Spring Wind is the Sabre with the bad noise in the transmission, and the bad starter clutch. I'm never going to fix it, and I guess I've come to terms with that, so it's good that I was able to give Chuck the parts he needed.) Chuck could be riding Grey Wolf again tomorrow, since from here it's a 15 minute job.

Today at work I closed a case that had been open for six months. The support people who had this case before me, and the customer who had the problem, had all resigned themselves to suffering forever because no one could figure it out. I solved it within 24 hours of getting the customer's information. Yay!

I was feeling pretty cheerful, but then I got slammed. A case I couldn't solve, and which escalations wouldn't take, was dumped back in my lap. The customer is even more annoyed, and escalations is even less willing to help. They think I have not been sufficiently firm with the customer. I think the customer has some pretty serious problems and is not telling me the whole truth, but I've been unable to get to the bottom of it. This case is never going to go away; it'll be here, unresolved, eating hours and days and weeks of my time, until I finally develop the skill set to solve it unaided and without useful documentation or decent answers from the customer. It's hard to pin down customers who are evasive and don't understand the software, when their problem is in an area you don't know very well yourself.

I made my third trip to CompUSA in three days. I'm trying to upgrade the memory in this computer. Today I finally gave up imagining that I might make the current trip my last, and I paid for two different kinds, so I could try them both. One of them finally worked, but I'll have to make a fourth trip tomorrow to return the other one.

One of my new test servers is working. The application runs and everything. Finally! This is something I've been struggling with for about 18 months now. Unfortunately, version 5 was released to manufacturing today, and the one I finally have working is version 4. The other new test server is for version 5, but before I can start installing it, I will need to figure out why the second new server doesn't think it has a CD drive.

Comments

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yay on the fix. Boo on the return of the evil customer. I hate when the customer doesn't tell you what you need to know...

[elizilla]

I hate it when customers don't tell me what I need to know, but in this case I think half the problem is that I don't know what to ask him that would elicit solid factual information. And as the support person, it's my responsibility to ask good questions that will lead to a resolution. If the customer knew more, he wouldn't be calling me. I wish I had some decent documentation, or barring that, that someone on my own team was willing to help me. But they're not. Sigh.

[dagibbs.livejournal.com]

Yes, knowing the right questions to ask and/or the right information to collect to diagnose the problem is often more than half the battle.

I am continually amazed at how disfunctional sounding your company, or at least, the support side of it where you work, sounds.

[elizilla]

It amazes me too, especially considering that they have a third party company auditing us by surveying random customers, and we always score well in the surveys, month after month.

I suppose it's because 99 percent of the cases don't go this way, they get closed in the first day or two. It's the ones that hang around unclosed for months at a time that make my life hell and generate these horror stories. They're a small percentage of the overall caseload, but they generate the lion's share of the grief.

[pi3832.livejournal.com]

Would visiting the customer from hell in person help at all? I've always found it's much easier to communicate with someone on the phone after I've met them in person. I get a better sense of their personality. And an in-house visit always impresses customers.

But let me guess--your company would charge them extra for that, wouldn't they?

Ah, customer service, where have you gone?