[Today’s run: 4 miles]
Large companies stink at customer support.
Or at least that is the conclusion you come to working with places like Oracle, IBM, HP.
Take HP. Every year I wrestle with their support contract people. They never explain anything to me, they don’t know what the products are on my support contract. And they aren’t very responsive.
This past summer HP rolled out a new customer support website. It’s just like the old website except it uses fancy graphics. The real problem is that you have to “convert” your support account to use the new website. They are a computer company, why are they asking me to do their data conversion? And there are all sorts of links to the old site all over the internet. But there is no attempt to resolve those links to the same content on the new site. It just throws you to a stupid page from which you have to search again. That stinks.
I’ll give you an example. You might see a link that says “GO HERE FOR AN IMPORTANT DOCUMENT ABOUT HOW TO FIX YOUR PROBLEM”. That might even be on the new website somewhere. You go there and you get a search box. I’ll bet you a donut that you won’t find the document you are looking for just by puttting the “GO HERE FOR AN IMPORTANT…” in the search box. So if you were following a conversation about shared memory and the link said “get this shared memory whitepaper”; you get the stupid search page and you search for shared memory and you have a list of hits that may or may not have anything to do with the trail of breadcrumbs you were following. It completely breaks the path.
Whoever built that obviously doesn’t do much web searching.
Again, they are a computer company. How hard would it have been to index their old site and have the new content cross indexed so a person could actually find the old stuff when they needed it. It’s like they hired some half-baked web design company to rebuild their site so that they could show me little sales-movie-graphic-things.
So HP web support was almost tolerable but now it stinks.