drinkypoo's Journal: Whatever happened to service?

Okay, now I know I'm going to come off as a "hey you kids get off of my lawn" old fart here, but what the hell has happened to customer service? Why is it that every time you get a phone monkey on the line they want to argue with you?

Let me just share my latest saga with you. Last names are omitted to protect the stupid.

I am attempting to evaluate a product called Crystal Reports XI Server, which is currently owned by a company called Business Objects (they will erroneously claim that they are the creators of Crystal Reports, but Crystal has belonged to more companies than just about any other software product out there. In fact, here in house we have versions 6 and 9 of Crystal, for Aristocrat OASIS and MASS-90, respectively. Neither one was from Business Objects.

So I visit their webpage and they have a download link for a server trial. I visit this page and download what appears to be the appropriate product; it turns out to actually be an ordinary Crystal Reports Designer product. So I called up a sales rep (Damon) and talked to him. He tells me I should download Crystal Reports Developer, which he claims includes the server product.

After I download it, I contact him again, and he says (in email) "My apologizes the eval Edition of Crystal Reports Developer does not come with the Server component. It will come with the Server component if you purchase the product." How useful! So I try to download again. This time I notice there's a Linux version, so I'm downloading that one too. But for some reason my Ubuntu system unexpectedly hangs to a black screen (first time) during the download. So I fire firefox and vmware back up, and use DownThemAll! to resume my Linux downloads, and use the Business Objects download manager to resume my Windows 2000 VM download.

I still don't have the Linux download (I guess DtA! is pretty slow after all) but the Windows download completes, so I try to extract it. I get some CRC errors and am eventually told that there were errors, please download a fresh copy.

At work, we have only a T1 which I have to share with some 20-odd other users. A cable modem would be faster. I have just spent some four hours downloading and do not look forward to doing it again. So I call up the sales department and tell them my story. Then they say they're going to call the sales rep. I ask if there is anyone more competent I can deal with, and the guy (Neil) actually cuts me off to tell me that Damon has worked there for two years and must therefore be competent.

Anyone who has worked anywhere for any length of time knows people who have worked there for much longer than two years and don't know dick about shit. So this is a specious argument at best. But more to the point, I'm calling the sales department and trying to get an eval (I requested a hardcopy, they do send them out according to the download page) and they're giving me a hard time! This is the department tasked with convincing people to cough up money. It is not the department that is there to give customers a hard time and scare them away so that they evaluate other products, which is what happens if there is any further headache in between me and my product evaluation.

The sheer incompetence of creating a download manager that doesn't do CRC checks during the resume of a download to avoid file corruption, of course, is just icing on this very nasty cake.

This is hardly the only company I've had this kind of experience with. Don't these people want our money any more?

it's stories like this...

[WGFELyL5]

...that make entrepreneurship attractive.

If most companies suck so much, why not see if you can do better?

Re:

[ak3ldama]

that is indeed an interesting question, thankfully where i work still cares about the customer.

Re:

[metlin]

Of course.

You often see small companies giving you excellent customer service while the big ones simply don't give a damn.

I work in the R&D division of a *large* company in the telecom vertical, and ever so often we play around with new technologies. And everytime we've talked to a big company, we've had to jump through hoops to get stuff done. Smaller companies are the exact opposite - they would *love* your business and are more than willing to do anything to get more business.

To paraphrase JWZ, I thi

Re:

[plover]

I think you guys are being a bit too prejudiced.

This very afternoon I was in a meeting with a member of our Vendor Management team. (Yes, our IT division is so big that we have a team to handle vendors.) Earlier this year we had Microsoft bring in a guy on their ACE team to do some consulting. The meeting today was a "performance review" of how the engagement went. Every quarter they pull a handful of vendor engagements out of a hat for some statistical analysis. She came equipped with a 20-question

Re:

[metlin]

Well, generalizations are not always true and there could always be bigger companies that provide good service, too.

But it's just been *my* personal experience that smaller companies treat you better in the long run (willing to accommodate you more, have a quicker turn-around time, less red-tape and procedure etc.) than the bigger ones.

Does this mean the big ones are all necessarily bad? No, of course not.

Of course, it is quite possible that the reason the MS rep. was so good was probably because you are mu

Re:

[plover]

Of course, it is quite possible that the reason the MS rep. was so good was probably because you are much bigger than they are (not saying that that's all there is to it, but that might have something to do with it). Losing you as a client might be a bigger loss for them than you losing them as a vendor.

Up until we took this survey, I wouldn't have seen it this way. We have so many contracts going that any single one of them could have been done poorly and nobody probably would have noticed. But when