Quote:
Originally Posted by Por_sha911
Businesses who encourage communication via e-mail but don't reply after a week and then don't understand that a call asking "did you receive my e-mail?" is a polite way of asking "what kind of bass ackward business are you running if you won't serve the customer in a timely manner?"
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I find there's a lot of Culture to this.
Have been doing IT support for 20 odd years. .Not Tech admin work, or end user stuff. But Backend 3rd line stuff for the Software companies.
When I worked at Novell in Holland, we did follow the sun.
But we worked completely different then the US support center.
in the US all engineers were on a desk with Phone, and they log into the queue.. pick up
work a case.. don't hang up till case is resolved. Hang up and invariably phone would ring right away because customers were all in a queue, on hold for hours.
In Europe, all engineers were on a desk with a phone.. and we looked in our ticket system, monitored a queue where cases would be put by the service desk (call center). We would look at the case, work on it, call the customer if needed for urgent cases..
Kept our hands and mind free to actually work on the case.
Customers would call the service desk.. no queue.. state there need for help.. and be back on their way.. wait for call back if it's urgent. And that call back came. quite quickly
When we got a US customer during Europe follows the sun hours.
US customer ends up with Our call center.. they inform them case is created and we would call back...
US customer states, NO , I'll hold for the engineer.
Then customer service calls one of us.. we answer.
Listen to the case.. And then the fun part :
I would tell US customer,"your direct number on file is xxx. xxx.x.x.xx , is that correct ? yes? ok, Here's the thing, I need to look up a few things, test something.
And I'll call you back on that number in 20 minutes.
Customer : no I'll hold..
No worries, : Don't know how this hold thing here works.. i'll call you in 20 minutes, talk to you then..
And hung up while i could hear the NNOOOOOOOOOOoooooooo.....
Then 15 minutes later.. I call him back with the solution.
And the guy is all amazed
Woow, this is amazing, I've never had anybody call me back
And the solution works..
The dude then usually keeps all his calls for the Midnight hour because well , he was so much better off then sitting on hold all day waiting for engineers.
I've had major escalations with us customers, where printing in a fortune 500 was completely f'ed.. Te case came to me with follow the sun handover.. and the Asiapack engineer after 8 hours gave it to me.. after he got it from US end of their working day.
The Customer IT guy on the other end.. had been called out at his 3AM morning.. called our US team at 8...worked his entire day.. then entire Asiapack day..Then ended up with EMEA..
Again I had similar scenario : Sir, we need to take this offline, We have a copy of your config, there's a corruption and we will get that corruption fixed on our end.
That will take a good 4-5 hours, and I can't work as fast while I have this phone up.
Go to sleep, I will call you back in 4 hours
protest.. yeah na, can't do it..
3 hours later, at 5am US local time...
we uploaded his new config over the still open pcanywhere.
turn on his print server and see the queues empty slowly
Rang him at the agreed 4 hours to let him know he can go back to sleep cause the queues are empty
US support can't respond to email because they are hammered by phone
They are hammered by phone because they can't answer their emails.
EU support refuses to stay on the phone so we have time to work
So our phones aren't hammered, and we can respond to emails..
I still see the same in my current job, where US mgmt insists that everybody goes on "bridge calls" at the first sign of some kind of system down...
In Europe we refuse to do that.. and instead we work on the issue, and then call the bridge call if we have questions or have news about the solution...