c0d3h4x0r's Journal: How to provide decent customer support

1. Have a real human being answer your phone immediately, instead of making me navigate an automated phone menu and sit on hold for 30 minutes or longer.

2. Do not under any circumstances assume that I'm an idiot, or treat me like one by default, and make me go through a series of asinine basic scripted troubleshooting steps. I wouldn't be calling tech support if I hadn't already tried all those things first.

3. Admit known flaws with your products. Instead of trying to pretend that design flaw with your hardware or bug in your driver doesn't exist, try being forthcoming and apologetic about it. Add my name to a "to be notified" list for that particular issue so that when a BIOS update or driver fix becomes available I'll be the first to know. That way I can go on about my life instead of wasting even more evenings away trying to get your product to behave in a stable manner when it would be impossible for me to do so due to a flaw in its design.

4. Issue lifetime warranties for all of your products, or at least be more reasonable with your warranty periods. If you make a product, and it dies 30 days after the warranty expired, and I call technical support, from an ethical point of view, I still expect you to stand behind your product and provide me with a free replacement. The fact that it died 30 days beyond the warranty period is a minor technicality that you shouldn't be using as an excuse to not stand behind the quality of your products.

5. Hire tech support reps who are actually experts on your own products and who actually know more about them than I do.

6. If your tech support rep says they will have to call me back, and they go to the trouble of taking down my name and telephone number and they say they will call me back tomorrow with more information regarding my case, then make sure they actually call me back by the time they say they are going to.

7. If the only method you provide for customers to contact your company is e-mail, then that address had better not bounce or issue "mailbox is full" errors, you'd better answer the e-mail promptly (say, within 12 hours), and you'd better not just send an unhelpful form letter. Do not under any circumstances treat e-mail as a way to route customer contact straight to /dev/null.

8. Provide 24/7/365 customer service. If you can't afford to do that, and your products or services are directed at home consumers, then provide customer service during the hours when people are typically NOT at work. It's totally unhelpful to me if your customer service is only open 9-5 Mon-Fri, because I'm at work during those hours and don't have time to hassle with you.

9. I should never have to figure out time zones. Don't just say, "we are open 8am-6pm Pacific Time" and make me figure out what that is in my time zone. Do the math for me and list hours for all time zones. Make it convenient for me.

10. You should pick up all costs associated with flaws or problems with your products or services. If you provide phone support, it should be a toll-free number. If you need me to ship a product back to you, you should reimburse me for ALL my shipping costs.

11. Minimize my hassle and downtime by sending out a replacement unit first, and then let me ship the defective one back to you in the same packaging with shipping pre-paid. Some hard drive manufacturers have taken this approach for years now, and it works really well. All companies should offer the same level of support.