Customer Rant

by CodeNinja | Apr 11, 2012 | Customers

Because its healthy to vent the spleen!

Now I’m sure I have Blogged about this customer before, but for the life of me I can not remember what name I gave him (Maybe I should keep track of the names I assign people). Anyway today we shall refer to the Customer/Company/Person as Gillid*

Heres an extract of a Phone conversation that just happened.

Gillid: “Hi, I was told that since TheArchivist* no longer works there you may be able to help me!“

CN: “I may be able to, whats your problem?”

Gillid: “I have a website where I upload loads of data to it every few months, and our CMS that RedBack* made does not work so TheArchivist normally does it for me!“

CN: “No problem. If you email me the data, and let me know what is what in it, I’m sure I can sort it out for you but getting your CMS fixed may be a good idea. Now I’m not sure what you’ve been charged for the data entry in past…….”

Gillid: “Oh TheArchivist did it all for free!“

CN: “Well we won’t be doing that, you’ll have to pay for our time doing it“

Gillid: “OH. can you give me TheArchivist’s personal email address or phone number?“

CN: “No. I’m not giving out peoples personal info!“

Gillid: “ok. I’ll upload it myself!!!!” *Hangs UP*

Thirty minutes after that phone conversation the Support Department get a ticket from Gillid asking for TheArchivists contact details. They guy is seriously trying to get hold of one of our x-employees in the hope that the guy will do work for him for free while no longer being associated to the Asylum?

And after all that If it was just a quick data import into a mySQL DB I’d have probably only charged him £15 or some nominal price.

 As normal Names changed to protect me from lawsuits… err I mean to protect the innocent.

People are Stupid.

by CodeNinja | Feb 9, 2012 | Customers

Well technically I guess that should be “Customers are Stupid“. You do not believe me? Well here are two examples that happened this week.

Example 1:

I was being nice and answered the phone to help out the support guys, and the conversation went a bit like this :-

CN: “Good afternoon How may I help you?“

Customer: “Hi, Yes. I can’t send or receive any emails. its broke!“

CN: “OK. What error are you actually getting?“

Customer: “can not connect to server“

CN: “Ok, are you actually on the Internet?“

Customer: “YES. I am on the Internet doing things, the Internet is fine, it’s just my emails that is broken“

Customer: *noise of many people talking in background* ‘Yes. I’m on the phone to them now. Yes I have email issues. Ok I’ll pass them over to you when my mails sorted‘

CN: “You got other issues there?“

Customer: “Yes, they say we have lost the Internet. So Whats the issue with my emails?“

She honestly thought the fact they were not connected to the Internet had no connection with her problems in sending and receiving emails.

Example 2:

Now this was a ticket the Systems department had. A Customer had not been receiving any email conformation from their website for the last 3 months. And they knew from the orders that they should have had a fair few.

We had been looking into it on and off for a while since a grep of the site showed that it was not set up to actually send emails to the address they insisted received them.

So after many attempts I finally got them to check the header of an old email and give me the actual email address that the emails go to before being forwarded or downloaded to the end account.

So I have the real email address and decide to test it simply to start with. So I log into the account, and there sat in the INBOX are 50+ unread emails from the website.

Turns out they had forgotten to actually download the emails for the last few months.

Seriously, people get an IQ=IQ-100 as soon as they decide to contact our support department.