Well delivered apology = good customer service

The difference between good and bad customer service is a well-delivered apology. When somebody calls your company because he has a problem, it’s just good customer service to give a well-delivered, well-timed apology. It might not be you or your company’s fault that this customer is having a problem, but your customer is somehow not having the best experience with your service or product and you should be sorry about that. Whether you really are sorry is another matter, but honestly, saying it right from the beginning will make helping them a lot easier and a lot more pleasant, especially if it really is your fault. Then, when you do fix it, your customer will be that much more grateful (or at least won’t be as pissed because you apologized for it right from the start). And if you can’t fix it, your customer is more likely to write it off to “c’est la vie” (although he could just go crazy too– c’est la vie).

Case in point: about a month ago, my Dell laptop started doing strange things. Basically, it would just shut off if I happened to move it around slightly. You could imagine how annoying that would be. Now, first, let me point out that this problem was basically caused by wear and tear on the computer and I will admit that I am rougher on my computer than most people are– of course, most people probably don’t carry around and use their computer as much as me either. So, this little Dell has really been around, but I’ve never done anything horribly wrong to it– dropped it hard, stepped on it, etc. In any case, I called Dell, explained to them what was going on, and they said that they would send someone out the next day (our department always gets the full three years of onsite labor and parts). Well, the customer service person I talked to told me that I would get a call between 10 am and 12 pm about when he would be coming by. By 1 pm, I still hadn’t gotten a phone call and when I spoke to a different customer service rep, I had the following converation:

ME: I was supposed to get a call from a third-party technician about a repair scheduled for today. I was told he would call between 10 and 12 and it’s past 1 now and he hasn’t called.

DELL: Well, the repair request was sent out yesterday and we have to ship the parts to him, so he won’t call until he gets the part.

ME: What part? Nobody ever told me a part needed to be replaced.

DELL: The motherboard. The repair request was to replace the motherboard. And the technician has to wait until he receives the part from us before he can call you. And that will most likely be tomorrow.

ME: Well, I was never told that anybody was waiting for a part to be delivered and you said that he was supposed to call me this morning between 10 and 12.

DELL: I didn’t say that.

ME: Well, no, that’s obviously not what I meant. When I say “you,” I mean “Dell.”

DELL: Well, he should call you tomorrow once he gets the part in.

Me: Fine.

Okay, granted, he actually did call while I was on the phone with the bad customer service rep and in the end, despite the fact that he never actually made it onto campus and we had to reschedule for the following day and that the problem returned a few weeks later and was only fully resolved with another 2 on-site service appointments, everything got resolved.

A few days after that first service appointment, I got a customer satisfaction survey from Dell. Oh, they picked the wrong time to ask me for my opinion. I gave them a lengthy review of what had happened and the fact that outside of a delay here and there, the real problem I had was just the attitude I got from the customer service rep. Simply put, it was just bad customer service.

Let me contrast this with an example of a great customer service experience. Now, I have expressed my love for my new Blackberry profusely when I first got it and I still love it, but like anything you love at first sight, you learn while it may not make you love it any less, nothing is perfect. The Saturday after I got it, the data services stopped working around 2 pm. At first, I figured the network might be down for a little while. But by 7 pm, it still wasn’t working and I was annoyed. I went to request a new service book to register the device with the network, but there was no option anymore to do that. I called T-Mobile technical support and they said that my data service had been suspended for some reason. So, they turned it back on, enabling me to request a service book. I waited for a little while, but still hadn’t received a service book and was starting to get really annoyed, but I had my own birthday party to go to, so I got off the phone.

Fast forward 5 hours later– I’m slightly drunk, full of Asian fusion cuisine, and am determined to get data service working again after my co-birthday party guest of honor started calling me “Miss T-Mobile pre-pay only” when I had told everyone about how T-Mobile had cut me off (said co-guest of honor had been trying to send me PIN messages all afternoon with no success). In any case, so I’m on the line with what I’m sure is customer service through prison workers or Indian outsource workers at 2 am. In the end, it turns out it was completely their fault– I guess where you turn on data for this new device is somewhere different than for the previous Blackberry and my account got screwed up. Minutes later, the data was flowing in as if we were in the land of digital milk and honey.

While I was tired and drunk and really just wanted to go to sleep, I didn’t get angry at the T-Mobile people because they consistently apologized for my inconvenience. They didn’t know if it was their fault or how it happened, but obviously, I’m a good customer and hell, I did just spend $300 on a new device from them, so they were sure to apologize for my experience not being as lovely as it could be. In the end, they were the ones who fucked up, although I give them a little leeway since it was a brand new device out on the market, but it didn’t get me mad at them. Maybe if getting data service back was a lot more critical (if I didn’t have email access otherwise) or I was in a rush, I might still be annoyed, but from a customer service perspective, T-Mobile hit all the sweet spots.

The same holds true for when I brought my Blackberry into work on Monday and realized that the antenna in this new 7100t is even shittier than in the 7230 and I couldn’t get any signal any more in office. I sometimes get phantom signal and somehow manage to suck down a few emails and an occasional voicemail, but otherwise, nothing reliable. I contacted both RIM and T-Mobile for hopes of some type of antenna boosting device or plans for more cell sites near my office. In the end, I didn’t get either, but they were all apologetic (although RIM could stand to be a little more apologetic for how shitty the antenna is on this thing) and T-Mobile even offered to give me 50 free bonus minutes to make up for my drop in coverage. Granted, it’s the equivalent of one post-work bitch session, but it’s something.

Guilty until proven innocent

The folks at Bits of Freedom did a little experiment to see how fast (and how wrongly) copyright complaints are handled (at least in the Netherlands). They signed up with ten service providers and put up Web sites containing public domain material. They then made up an organization that claimed to be the copyright owners and sent (from anonymous Hotmail accounts, no less) copyright complaints to the service providers. Seven out of ten providers promptly complied with the compaint and removed the sites. One didn’t respond to the complaints at all, treating them like junk mail; one responded with a request for verification of the complainant’s identity and claim to copyright ownership. Only one actually bothered to point out (because they had actually bothered confirming the validity of the complaint) that the work had actually expired several years ago.

It would certainly be interesting to conduct a similar experiment here in the United States (although there was one done in 2003 to compare takedown procedures in the US and the UK). Specifically, one targeting universities. Why universities? Because around the country, young college students are somehow becoming the target of the entertainment industry because universities, afraid of liability, have been so easy to comply with these notices, and students, intimidated by the legal forces of the entertainment industry, rush to settle out of court. No matter how rich private universities might be, they cannot possibly compare to the financial and legal powerhouses of the entertainment industry and no matter how many kids with rich parents go to these universities, the entertainment industry simply targets all students (and although this doesn’t justify theft, you might wonder why they’re illegally downloading music in the first place– maybe they can’t afford it?). Aside from the widespread use of file-sharing applications on college campuses (partly out of liberal computing policies to encourage academic freedom, partly because college students are early adopters of new technologies), they are, unfortunately, easy targets.

But on top of the legal problems, the price for students is much greater because of the disciplinary actions more and more schools are taking. If Comcast or AOL or whoever cuts off your network access because of repeat copyright complaints, you can simply choose another ISP. But it is not as easy to choose another college and on most campuses, impossible to choose another ISP. More importantly, more schools are taking steps to restrict access not only to Internet service, but also general online services, like email and Intranet resources, and it would be naive to think that computing resources and network access aren’t essential to academics in this day and age. And because these complaints accuse students of breaking copyright law (although they are still civil complaints), schools take it one step further and take disciplinary action, whether its standing before judicial affairs groups, writing an essay about what they did wrong, or simply just getting suspended or even expelled. So then, the price becomes even greater for these young students that, at least in my mind, universities should be trying to protect– but I guess “in loco parentis” applies to keeping men and women in separate dormitories and regulating dating behavior, but not protecting them from questionable civil complaints.

Well, if that’s what universities want to do, fine. The bigger problem is that there doesn’t seem to be any due process. In the same way that those ISPs took down those Web sites without (presumably) even checking whether the claim was valid, I don’t think most universities are taking the time out to verify the validity of copyright complaints, but are taking the time to punish students for mere accusations. Maybe most students are illegally file-sharing and so many people have participated in illegal file-sharing at least once so its difficult for us to see past our own behavior, but I don’t believe all complaints are valid. The entertainment industry has been known to send false/incorrect takedown notices and because there is no penalty for sending invalid complaints, there’s nothing really stopping me from just spamming DMCA agents all over the country, arbitrarily looking up IP subnets and claiming copyright infringement. As far as I can tell, universities as well as ISPs are not actively verifying that the complaining parties are actually the copyright owners (much less real people). But more insidious than that is they are not verifying that the files are actually being shared up at all by the accused party. We’re just taking the entertainment industry’s word for it and punishing our students.

But what if we were to verify that the files were being shared up and found that they were? Well, that doesn’t automatically mean we should convict either. If you haven’t thought of it yet, think about the sharp increase in computer security vulnerabilities and exploits. Aside from launching DoS attacks and stealing/destroying your personal data, viruses and other exploits also take control of your computer to illegally share up copyrighted materials. So, in these cases, files are being illegally shared, but not by the choice of the computer’s owner. And you might say, “well, that’s the price they pay for not keeping their computers secure.” But if you got a speeding ticket because you had a broken speedometer, would you just pay the ticket and accept the points onto your record? Besides, an exploit for an operating system vulnerability could come out before the patch was available and if you just happen to be that unlucky, you could get infected within hours or even minutes and soon, the DMCA complaints could be rolling in one after another. And you may not even know you’re infected until you get one, two, three or even more DMCA complaints. And the lack of timeliness with which DMCA complaints are often filed only complicates matters– by the time you receive them, you may have already cleaned and patched your machine, making it that much harder to prove that you were infected at some point and that the files were shared without your knowledge.

Everyone is so afraid of getting sued that we’ve gone right past one of the most important concepts in our society– that we are innocent until proven guilty– and instead, we are interpreting accusations as actual violations. And instead of placing the burden of proof on the accuser, we simply roll over and let accusation equal guilt. Are these the ideals we want to be holding up in our higher education institutions, in the places from which we draw tomorrow’s leaders? Are these the lessons we want to teach them, the attitude we want them to take and the standard to which we want to hold them?

BigFix followup in The Chronicle

I was interviewed for an article on patch management solutions at universities after a reporter at The Chronicle of Higher Education found my blog entry on BigFix. So, finally, after much anxiety and anticipation, here it is:

Plugging Holes in the Security Dike

Although I wish that somebody actually working for Information Security Services at Stanford was quoted (and not just the director emeritus), it’s interesting to see that we’re not the only ones who were concerned about privacy and liability. Now, if only we would act on those concerns rather than just recognizing that they are an issue and moving on in the name of security at all costs.

Ode to My New Blackberry

When rumors of the new Blackberry 7100t came out, my two partners-in-Blackberry-love kept saying that they would be getting it as soon as it came out. I pooh-poohed their enthusiasm– I was skeptical of the SureType predictive text software and the addition of a high-res screen wasn’t necessarily going to add that much value. The prospect of a better phone on the new device sounded pretty good, but to be honest, I used my Blackberry 7230 as a PDA much more than as a phone and I don’t even really talk for long periods on my cell phone as it is. And of course, it’s only been a little over a year since I’ve had my 7230 and even though I’m out of contract and could get a new phone, I hadn’t really gotten the full value of the $350 that I paid when I first got it (I bought it before it was being offered directly through T-Mobile).

But when T-Mobile, the exclusive dealer for the 7100t in the US, offered very attractive pricing– $199 after $100 rebate with new activation or one-year contract– and I took a look at my friend’s when he got it hours after T-Mobile started offering it, I was drawn in. I thought the new shape and slightly greater thickness would be too great of a footprint, but it wasn’t. The screen was just so bright and shiny (although I could live without the T-Mobile icons– I had to think a little too hard to figure out what some of them stood for). And the predictive text didn’t seem too bad, especially with my smaller fingers able to better use the reduced keyboard.

So, I gave in and went to the store the next day and got it (I would have gotten it that night if it was open). After about two hours with it, I am hooked. All the little things I loved about my old Blackberry are there and all the little things I wished were there with my old Blackberry are now here. As I used it more and kept going back to the manual to learn more tips and tricks, it kept hitting all the right spots in some glorious masturbatory overload. The new shape only adds to the higher quality phone, making it easier and more comfortable to talk (on the 7230, you had to put it up to your ear in just the right way so you could actually hear anything). The SureType software really is good and once I realized that the software predicts the right word/combination of letters depending on the sequence of key taps instead of just what the next letter should be, I could start typing more confidently, knowing that the software would use the right word. I’m almost back to my full typing speed on it now. There’s built-in Bluetooth support now which will be nice if and when I finally decide to get a Bluetooth support. Finally, there’s support for polyphonic ringtones and high-res background graphics– seemingly extraneous, but still lets Blackberry users enjoy all the “fun” eye and ear candy that comes with cell phones today. I’ve already switched my ringtone to Akon’s “Locked Up.” (Although, I don’t really want to pay 99 cents for each new ringtone– I’ve already paid 99 cents for the song on iTunes. Isn’t there some type of converter available? The entertainment industry is nickel and diming me to death.) And I’ll admit it– the high-res screen is just so pretty, especially once I changed to the default theme instead of T-Mobile’s quirky icons (I could hear circus music every time I looked at them).

Really, the only thing that’s missing is a camera, which I thought was a frivolous add-on to phones in the beginning, but with photoblogging taking off with cool services like Flickr, I would really like a camera phone. The only reason I could think of why RIM chose to leave a camera out was that they’re still appealing primarily (rightfully so) to corporate customers and a camera phone is still unclear territory in the corporate world. I hope RIM doesn’t come out with a follow up to the 7100t that has a phone too soon– $199 is a good price, but I still want to get a year’s worth of use out of it before I feel like I’m behind the curve. I would appreciate a camera attachment though– maybe taking advantage of the Bluetooth functionality? And certainly introduction of the camera as an attachment could assuage concerns by corporate customers.

In any case, the momentary thoughts I have every once in a while of getting a secondary phone for better phone functionality are now gone. And my initial misgivings about SureType and a reduced keyboard are also gone. The new Blackberry 7100t is basically the coolest thing ever.