[Today’s run: 4 miles]<\/p>\n
Large companies stink at customer support.<\/p>\n
Or at least that is the conclusion you come to working with places like Oracle, IBM, HP.<\/p>\n
Take HP.\u00a0 Every year I wrestle with their support contract people.\u00a0 They never explain anything to me, they don’t know what the products are on my support contract.\u00a0 And they aren’t very responsive.<\/p>\n
This past summer HP rolled out a new customer support website.\u00a0 It’s just like the old website except it uses fancy graphics.\u00a0 The real problem is that you have to “convert” your support account to use the new website.\u00a0 They are a computer company, why are they asking me to do their data conversion?\u00a0 And there are all sorts of links to the old site all over the internet.\u00a0 But there is no attempt to resolve those links to the same content on the new site.\u00a0 It just throws you to a stupid page from which you have to search again.\u00a0 That stinks.<\/p>\n
I’ll give you an example.\u00a0 You might see a link that says\u00a0 “GO HERE FOR AN IMPORTANT DOCUMENT ABOUT HOW TO FIX YOUR PROBLEM”.\u00a0 That might even be on the new website somewhere.\u00a0 You go there and you get a search box.\u00a0 I’ll bet you a donut that you won’t find the document you are looking for just by puttting\u00a0 the “GO HERE FOR AN IMPORTANT…” in the search box.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0 to do with the trail of breadcrumbs you were following.\u00a0 It completely breaks the path.<\/p>\n
Whoever built that obviously doesn’t do much web searching.<\/p>\n
Again, they are a computer company.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
So HP web support was almost tolerable but now it stinks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[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.\u00a0 Every year I wrestle with their support contract people.\u00a0 They never explain anything to me, they don’t know what the products are on my support contract.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1753"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1755,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1753\/revisions\/1755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w0ep.us\/OM\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}