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Symantec CEO Says Bad Service Fix Only Temporary
Lucas123 writes "Symantec's CEO John Thompson says the company is still struggling with its consolidated ERP system and that it has only thrown bodies and not technology at the post-Veritas buyout issues that created poor customer service. 'I've kind of lost track where we are timing-wise...but we threw an awful lot of head count at this wait-time problem. Wait times from their peak of well over an hour are down to now under two minutes,' he said."
We bought a new tape drive a while back, and it stopped using hardware compression for some reason. I was fairly sure it was a Backup Exec problem, so I called support (this is around 4-6 weeks ago). 75 minutes on hold and the person who picked up literally did not know the software. At all. He kept looking things up and asking me to wait.
Hang up after an hour and a half that's accomplished absolutely nothing. Call Quantum. On hold less than a minute. Guy picks up, I tell him what's going on, and even though it's not even his friggin software he gives me a few ideas to try. His second guess was right. 5 minutes on the phone and 10 minutes of testing, problem solved.
We've dumped Symantec's virus protection because it was overly expensive, bloated, and slow. We dumped Brightmail, their anti spam service, because of the exact same reasons. Backup Exec will be on the way out in next year's budget.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
One time, a local TV station decided to air some cheesy old 3-D flick for the 8 O'Clock Movie in actual 3-D, using a new 3-D process for television. The station struck a deal with 7-11 to distribute the 3-D glasses. The catch? They would cost about 33 cents apiece.
So here's me, Mr. 7-11 Guy in my orange smock, standing behind the counter. All of a sudden, at about 5pm, customers start filing into the store. It seems that just about everybody got a call at work at some point during the day, asking if mommy could pleeeeaaaasse go and get some of those 3-D glasses so everybody could watch the fun movie tonight. 33 cents was no big deal, so everybody did.
The problem was, if they were free I could just toss them at people as they walked through the door. That's the way dumb promotions usually worked. But because they were 33 cents, every single customer that came into the store just for 3-D glasses had to wait in line at my register (I was the only employee on duty). Not to mention all the other people who came in for beer etc., just like usual.
Well, I lost track at some point. But the following day my manager told me that, according to the register tapes, I spent the next three hours ringing up roughly one customer every thirty seconds.
The thing is, a few people walked out. At times the line was as much as 12 people long, which is pretty long for a 7-11. But most of them didn't (as testified by the fact that I rang up so many of them). I kept my cool, cracked jokes, and pretty much nobody yelled at me. In fact, one guy even gave me a $5 tip on a 33 cent pair of 3-D glasses. And because people were waiting in line at 7-11, half of them grabbed a candy bar or a bag of chips or beer or something while they were waiting to get their glasses rung up, so it was a huge windfall for the store.
My point? No, you can't control it when you get excessive wait times at random. But that doesn't mean you can't control your customer service.
Breakfast served all day!
And it's usually your own fault it's so long. There are basic fixes, such as:
* A meaningful message saying 'we're swamped, wait time is [whatever], the big problem right now is [whatever], our email and website are at [these locations]'
* Actually connect customers with people who can address the problem. Wasting 45 minutes rebooting and tweaking the software before admitting that it's a kernel problem caused by your software and the only fix is to entirely uninstall it and wait for the next release is a tremendous waste of everyone's time, but it's happened with both Symantec and McAfee within the past year.
* When a customer gives you the workaround or the fix, publish it to your staff quickly and put it in their flow charts. This has happened repeatedly, with both Symantec and McAfee, and numerous staff have wasted their expensive time for months going through the same problem and the same failures to fix it, then finally getting notified by their colleagues that the correct fix was on our internal web pages.
* That 10-20 minutes of time you mention is usually wasted as the tech tries to shoe-horn the problem into a complex ritual of irrelevant problems before acknowledging the problem, when by listening to what the customer actually says they can leapfrog the flowchart to the actual problem.
I've been that IT staff on various occasions. I do *not* consider Symantec's call center to be helpful, and it hasn't been since long before this recent incident. It's only good by comparison to McAfee.