Let's keep the good ones

Advice on playing the tech support game from those who have hung in -- and won

A couple of people wrote -- in response to my post "Persistence is an art" -- with interesting insight on managing a customer service relationship.

"Consider that the frontline troops in customer service are for the most part dealing with low-level, well-known glitches," says Jim. "It is the successive levels of management above them that know about the expensive, system-level problems."

To illustrate his point, Jim offers a terrific example from recent history. "Several years ago," he says. "U.S. computer manufacturers like IBM, HP, etc., were victimized by a Far East capacitor manufacturer who hired an engineer from a competitor. This engineer brought with him a proprietary formula used in the fabrication of capacitors. Unfortunately, the engineer got the stolen formula wrong. This was not discovered until it was used in the production of tens of thousands of capacitors, which were installed on motherboards to smooth the AC ripple from a PC's power supply. At first, the capacitors and motherboards passed manufacturing quality control and burn-in testing. After a few years, though, they deteriorated and caused PCs to spontaneously and repeatedly reboot. PC owners were not advised of the capacitor problem by the manufacturers, so most treated the problem as a software issue, devoting thousands of technician hours to trouble shooting, reinstalling operating systems, etc.

"In my case, I finally Googled 'known issues' and my PC model and turned up a chat board that mentioned the capacitor issue. Using that information, I inspected the capacitors and could see that they were deteriorating. It was not something a technician would notice unless they knew what to look for.

"So then began the calls to the IBM help desks. The front line troops knew nothing about the problem, so I went up several levels and eventually was provided an 'escalation number.' (Isn't that cute?) That connected me to a senior manager who immediately acknowledged the problem and asked for equipment serial numbers. To IBM's credit, they came within the week with replacement motherboards which they installed at no cost."

Great story, Jim! And a perfect illustration of how tech support is tiered. When it comes to playing this "escalation," I think we can agree that Jim has game!

Another cheat for playing this game comes from Alex, a former help desk technician. Alex suggests that if a customer service representative does go above the call and gets you a terrific resolution, "Notify the representative's supervisor. Reps rarely get positive feedback, especially from customers. So if someone goes above and beyond, let their supervisor know and, if possible, get an address where you can send kudos in writing. You will make someone's day, week, month, or year. You will also help ensure that in the next round of customer service layoffs, your good rep will have a better chance of surviving the cuts. Let's keep the good ones!"