.... always see support as a cost centre. So why not go ahead and prove it!

Long time ago I called our insurance company’s emergency line. They promised to cover all expenses, guaranteed, and off I went to get supplies by taxi. When the time came, they refused to cover transportation costs. Phone recording of the earlier conversation was mysteriously ”lost”.

I switched insurance company. Lying to me and saving 200 € has cost them this far some 30 000 € in lost revenue. Still counting…

I must then be unfortunate in my life that on every occasion I've been lied to on the phone I always seem to be the one losing out. And all they lose is my future business, which being an 'end' consumer is just a drop in the ocean to them.

"And all they lose is my future business, which being an 'end' consumer is just a drop in the ocean to them."

No, because there are thousands of yous whose repeat business they lose.

These businesses forget that finding new customers is much harder and more expensive than retaining existing customers.

Fortunately most of my customers are v aware of this and work hard to keep their customers loyal to them, sometimes for decades. Simply by producing high-quality products with an attractive price/quality ratio, and fixing things promptly when they go wrong. As a result they only need a tiny marketing department.

A good weekend to all commentards -->

"And all they lose is my future business, which being an 'end' consumer is just a drop in the ocean to them."

No, because there are thousands of yous whose repeat business they lose.

------------

True. But it would be interesting to find some way of measuring this. The boycotted business is unlikely to announce lost customers. The lost customers themselves have no way of knowing about others.

For what it's worth, Amazon lost my custom 5 years ago - prior to that they were my go-to for birthdays, Christmas and my own purchases so their opportunity loss is several thousands of pounds (non trivial in my terms, less than a rounding error in theirs) -- and all because they screwed me over with appalling customer service on an item costing less than 150 GBP.

Had they spent a fraction of the effort devoted to tax dodging schemes in customer service, it may have been a different outcome.

"And all they lose is my future business"

And that of your family, friends and colleagues, Shirley.

I never spend money on advertising because I keep my customers very, very gruntled. They do my advertising for me.

I need an extra upvote for "gruntled" :).

It's not mine ... I stole it from a BBS in the late '70s.

>>It's not mine ... I stole it from a BBS in the late '70s.

Honesty as well as, presumably, excellent customer service and products?

Have another upvote dear chap!

I wish there were more suppliers like you.

According to Merriam-Webster, the first use of gruntled dates back to 1904. Hooda thunkit?

Does gruntled predate disgruntled?

Absolutely. One of the best things is when someone phones and wants to bring their business because of a recommendation. All we have to do is not to fsck up. Well, and if something goes pear-shaped, fess up and correct.

It also goes the otherway: when I stop doing business with crappy clients and put them on our black list.

"It also goes the otherway: when I stop doing business with crappy clients and put them on our black list."

Firing customers who are a more of a pain in the ass than they are worth is one of the truly great joys of being self employed.

About three times per year, or thereabouts, I quite literally use the phrase "you're fired" to a client of mine, or of the wife[0]. Frankly, I quite enjoy it. The look on their face when they realize I am dead serious is priceless.

[0] She's a softy, so I draw this detail by default.

I once worked with someone whose parents worked for an insurance company.

They refused to buy any insurance they weren't legally required to buy. They knew first hand what a massive scam the whole industry is.

I'd generally agree with not buying any insurance you're not required to, except in the case of travel insurance. It's one of those edge cases where you're extraordinarily unlikely to need it, but if you do you'll be really, *really* glad you went for it and it's rarely even that expensive. Says someone who rang up medical expenses in the United States.

These days I just book all tickets, cars, and hotels with a credit card. Then I get "free" travel insurance that is no worse, coverage wise, than what I might otherwise pay for anyway.

Yup, it is often worth it - thing is, using "law of diminishing marginal returns", the loss of say £20 for insurance is way less than the potential cost of £1000 if you don't have the insurance. Depends if you can absorb the cost of an insured loss by simply keeping the cash. Normally, house insurance is worth it, because losing £200k+ is more than most people can absorb, but £200/year is manageable. Travel insurance is the same, it's enough to bankrupt you in many places (not just USA) and often included in your current account.

On the other hand, I ditched the pet insurance because once you have enough of the furry critturs for long enough, you're likely to end up spending more on the insurance than you'd save in vet bills. YMMV, one friend had £6k vet bills on a kitten which got run over which thankfully her insurance covered.

A long while ago my car was rear-ended by a BMW. My car was fine, but I swapped details with the BMW driver, and told my (very cheap) insurance company.

I'm not 100% sure what happened next, but I think the BMW driver told his insurance company that the crash wasn't his fault (not sure how he spun driving into the back of a car stopped at a traffic light as my fault, but anyway). His insurance company then contacted mine. Or at least they tried to, but my company apparently never responded to them.

So, a month or so later, I got a letter telling me that as my insurance company hadn't responded, they were taking me to small claims court. I rang up my insurer, and after a lot of being on hold, I got through to someone who promised that they'd deal with it.

Then I got another letter, saying that as I'd not showed up to court, they'd found against me, and I now owed £600-something, and had a CCJ against me. After yet another phone call to my insurer, they did actually fix everything, but of course, as soon as my contract was up I moved to the next cheapest insurer.

A month or so later they called me up, asking why I'd not renewed with them, so I took great delight in telling the person on the other end of the phone the whole story, and finished by informing them they worked for a shitty company, and that they should quit and work somewhere better :)

The company was elephant.co.uk, and to my surprise, they still seem to be in business.

First of all, he failed to notice which customer he was talking to, or didn't care.

Second, as a manager, you do not immediately defend anything. You get the customer's side of the story, then you tell said customer you'll call back. Then you go get the recording of the call and listen to it with the helldrone.

THAT is when you can decide to defend the guy, or, as it should have been in this case, drag him over the grill, then call the customer back and be all sweet and helpful and replace the doggone drive.

He deserved to lose that contract.

"and be all sweet and helpful and replace the doggone drive."

With a larger one. And throw in some extra RAM. And send a tech to do the work. Today. For free.

Or just send out a higher-specced replacement machine overnight.

"helldrone"

Beautiful. Just beautiful.

Well done! That one's for you ------->

"He deserved to lose that contract."

Agreed.

But isn't 350 laptops a rather small order in the grand scheme of things?

(Quality of response should not depend on size of customer really should it either)

Icon: I became grey before my time after involvement with IT purchasing for a smallish organisation.

Might be a rather small order in the grand scheme of things, but it adds up.

350K today's order lost, plus the next, and the next, and before long you're a million lost to you and spent with your competitors?

... I no longer do business with a certain company based in Redmond ,,, and another one in Cupertino.

I'm far too old to put up with crappy customer support ... I pay your salary, you fucks!

I'm also too old to be passed on to phone support with people whose accent is so strong they're barely comprehensible.

"I'm also too old to be passed on to phone support with people whose accent is so strong they're barely comprehensible."

Contrary to popular belief this is not racism. Rather it's a real, honest lack of being able to comprehend what the support staff are saying.

‘Listen to the Welsh kid talk’. I lived in the Middle East for more than ten years and still have a hard time understanding Hinglish. It is almost Welsh to me.

Hey, leave the Scottish alone. They cant help it...

Cornish, Scottish? I find your comment slightly discriminatory.

Someone once told me a satisfied customer tells 1 person a dissatisfied customer tells 10 people.

.. and a satisfied customer will forgive you an error if you put in the work to correct it. What you do when things go sideways often determines if you lose a customer or have one that will stick by you because they feel they're not just a number. That's why investing a bit in properly handling complaints is worth it because especially nowadays it is a massive differentiator with the competition.

To err is human - I don't care that much if a company fucks up, it happens.

I really care a lot about what happens next.

Fix the mistake promptly then all is fine and dandy.

Double down, deflect, deny, dissemble or one of many things beginning with "d" then it's "thank you and goodbye".

I had an error on an order from Rapid Online - the wrong terminal blocks were picked and sent. I put in the "complaint" early on a Friday afternoon, by late afternoon they'd acknowledged the error, arranged the replacements and arranged pick up of the incorrect ones.

They'll get my continued business,

Many many moons go a work colleague bought a new Ford in the August buying spree. Promptly went on holiday and to the other end of the country and while away the gearbox failed.

Ford couldn't get a new box so told the local dealer to basically bugger the cost and sort it. Customer was taken to his holiday destination, dealer took a gearbox out of a new stock car, replace the failed one to get the customer on his way. Car was delivered back to the customer. No car for three days of a two week holiday, a tiny price to pay.

Yes, he did stick by Ford, yes, he told everyone how good they were.

So it does work.......

Having managed far too many 1000+ pc roll outs I'm astounded that he had 2 vendors, the issues around getting a working initial build alone for 2 different models from the same vendor increase delivery risk. Running a roll out with different suppliers, initial builds and working out what manufacturer specific software is required and what is just a replacement to a windows driver is a nightmare. My approach now is to purchase all devices for a roll out from the same manufacturing run and warehouse them until required. I've had too many instances where a supplier has changed a component without changing the model number to let that happen again. Most large roll outs take time to get a reliable working build as there is always a mix between the brand new software being implemented, limitations on browser and version allowed, java versions (Yes I know,m but I work with large organisations using commercial off the shelf products) and the legacy applications where the supplier has polished the UI but not touched the internals for a decade.

Putting different hardware into the mix and then trying to find out which specific video driver works with everything and the hardware introduces different behavior which can take weeks to understand (is it the new app, drivers, interactions with the 4 different java versions installed etc). Supplier provided tools for power management, screen rotation, pen functions etc. just suck in technical resources. Whilst the majority of users can live quite happily with the Microsoft drivers there are apps and devices which do need some of the supplier provided apps.

Mine was about a software contract, for database applications, with a company that will remain nameless. To quote el reg, "Just understand that this firm is a big name in the business IT world. You don’t need to have the powers of a seer to figure this one out." They had quoted us an astronomical price for a new application. I had tried juggling the setup to reduce the end user count, but finally they told me that "this is the price, and no amount of arging will change it. We don't think you have the balls to change supplier".

I had to report this to the executive director of engineering. This guy was from the states and not amused whatsoever. Not one tiny bit. So he instructed me to quietly find an alternative supplier, which I did. Again, no names, but this one might turn you blue. I set up the deal: new hardware (a lot of new hardware) disks, database, consultancy, the whole works. It came in a lot cheaper that the first supplier.

Exec Director had the european VP of the first company in, explained his position, and said we could not afford the price that his team were quoting. VP reiterated the mantra that "You can't change, you have to pay us". So, in hius presence, he called me up and asked if I had the quotes on my desk. I did. He then, on speaker phone, told me to sign them and send them off immediately. All work, not just on this project but all other projects with supplier one was to immediately cease and all project manager instructed to immediately move to supplier two. His final comment to me was to call the press office and have a press release issued to announce that we were terminating all contracts and work with supplier one in favour of supplier two.

He then turned to the VP of sales of supplier one and uttered the words "I don't think we need you anymore, please leave the office immediately". Supplier one was excluded from all further work. The loss was measured in millions.

Yup, pride before the fall. I agree, I would have done the same.

We follow a multi vendor tactic in almost everything procurement where possible, exactly because we like options and we don't like companies trying to rig license fees to take a bigger slice of our revenue. We even do that with lawyers, which is kinda fun :)

And yet another similar experience ... I've posted this before, but I think it fits here.

Just over a billion years ago as the Internet measures time (call it roughly 1984), I received a brand new Sun 2/160. It was a dual pedestal beast, with all of 8 Megs of RAM and a pair of 380 Meg CDC SMD drives. Roughly 65 grand worth.

I decanted it from the boxes-on-pallets, plugged all the cables in, and fired the thing up. Into a beautiful new GUI on the Sony Trinitron monitor, just as advertised. Logged in as root, on purpose as there were no other accounts as yet(!!), using the default password(!!!!) ... and poked around. All was well, near as I could tell.

The plan was to repartition the disks to better suit our needs and then reinstall the OS. So I made absolutely certain I had the correct tapes, and did the one thing I had never done as a sysadmin ... closed the GUI, and from the # prompt ran rm -rf / intentionally. I was curious to see how long it would take to lose it's tiny little mind. It trundled away to itself for a few minutes, but seemingly was still working fine, enough of vmunix and the shell were in RAM and the swap partition to keep doing simple stuff. I was quite surprised, but that wasn't really what I was there for ...

So I shut her down, went and got a cuppa coffee, reached for the first tape and went to fire up the machine ... only to discover it didn't ship with a tape drive, despite one being listed on the packing list. It had a lovely bezel that LOOKED like it might be a tape drive, but the space behind it was empty. Oops. So there I was, 8AM and stuck with 65K worth of dead Sun hardware that I was supposed to demo for the Brass at 4PM.

Fortunately the 1980s Sun had Clues about customer service. One call, and their field service rep had the SCSI tape drive, the requisite cables, and a couple of VMEbus cards, (E)EPROMS and spare OS tapes "just in case" on my desk in under forty minutes. She even hung out and made certain that the system worked properly after we took it apart to install the bits that needed installing, and then partitioned it and re-installed the OS.

I made the 4 o'clock deadline ... and bought the Rep the first of many well deserved dinners.

Silly Con Valley was a very small place back then ... Sometimes I really miss it.

Yeah, DEC in that era was similarly good. We once had a fault with the main band printer in the office. Local support didn't have a spare but asked us to leave it with them for an hour.

They soon called back to arrange replacement of the required part. Turned out that they'd called the only other customer in the area with that VAX & printer combo and who had the spare part in a cupboard, and 'borrowed' it while a replacement was ordered. They owed the customer a favour, we got the printer back online quickly, and IIRC we returned a similar favour for that customer some months later. That's what customer support should mean.

Sadly, though, it's probably why neither Sun nor DEC is still with us, good support always seems to lose out to pennypinching bean counters.

That's reminded me of another one. I installed a PS/2 network (Model 30 workstations, Model 60 server) about 35 years ago when they'd just come out. A short while later the network card on the server failed. IBM engineer came out, had a look, phoned for the replacement part only to be told there were none anywhere in Europe and they'd take a week to come from the US.

As it was a college system used for teaching business students it wasn't a critical system but IBM had the answer anyway. The labs at Greenock were able to produce, populate and despatch a replacement which was on-site and fitted in under 48 hours. I considered that decent service!

For a couple of seconds I put myself in the place of the VP from supplier 1. Just for a couple of seconds, and I am still trying to recover from it. That was one hell of a bitch-slapping the Exec Director handed out; I almost wish I could have witnessed it.

... I think I've told this story before on here but back around 2000/2001 I had a Sony camcorder. One of those that used the small DAT-type tapes.

Anyway it went faulty so I duly took it to the local Sony repair centre.

After several weeks where I had to keep phoning despite promises to call me back etc, there was never any consistent story and it was clear they weren't able or willing (or both) to actually find what was wrong with it.

And then this particular day, I called and the person who answered didn't put me on hold like he thought. And shouted to the person I assume was his boss "It's that cunt chasing his fucking camcorder again . What shall I tell the idiot this time?"

He came back all nice and polite and gave some bullshit. At which point I said "tell your boss that cunt as you just called me wants to talk to him.

Much grovelling later it was agreed that they couldn't fix it, that of course there would be no charge and in fact they gave me something like £150 in compensation as way of apology.

I sold the thing on eBay I think for spares/repair so ultimately made not much of a loss on it (it was second hand when I bought it).

I'd already made up my mind to avoid Sony products after that. What they then did with their awful behaviour towards Geohot back in the PS3 days just reinforced that I'd made the right decision.

Back in the day, as they say, out corporate mandated laptop supplier was Gateway 2000 (remember them?) They only had one support line number, typically waiting time was in hours with no apparent queue system so you got through when you got through. One of the PC magazines at the time did a review of them and suggested they would be good, "...for people with low blood pressure!" Needless to say the corporate changed supplier very quickly to one with dedicated large business support. I don't know just how many units were involved globally but this was a $100million+ business over 25 years ago so I would think there'd be a fair number.

I'm currently in dispute with a UK supplier who sent the wrong keyboard for a Surface tablet. Foolishly they sent me a "case closed, how did we do?" email after several weeks when I'm still waiting on the refund. I haven't yet answered the survey but when I do it will not be complimentary.

I call that survey spam, and they're ALL at it for some reason (personally I think it displays a worrying lack of self confidence).

Now for the fun part: reading through GDPR it appears they're breaking the law if they did not explicitly ask permission to abuse your email address for surveys (and I have this now explicitly banned in my email disclaimer, just about the only thing that is actually enforceable in a disclaimer other than copyright).

So, you might want to file a complaint. First complain to the company, and as their explanations tend to be BS anyway you can then hand it over to whatever privacy protection regulator you have in your country, sit back and watch the fun.

Yes, I get bored sometimes, why?

:)

I was working for a crowd who sourced a batch of 100x laptops from a company whose name would patially sound like Haggard. One of the laptops had a faulty display but these PH people refused to fix it under warranty as it was a different model to the other 99 laptos they supplied. Cannot for the life of me think why anyone would willingly buy from that supplier if that is their attitude.

Not quite the same as this, but...

I remember one guy who used to work for a very large multi-national. He really, really hated working for them - mainly because of the crazy HR policies they had in place and the fact that they insisted on using ancient technology that should have been retired a decade or two back.

He finally managed to find a new job with another large multi-national, which offered a much better working environment.

On his last day at the old job he decided to fire off an email to the CEO to explain exactly why he was leaving, and offered some "suggestions" on where he could dispose of the old systems.

He found out, on the first day at his new, that the multi-nationals had recently merged and had the same CEO...

Crappy support? Unfortunately, I cannot change our own IT department.

... like a disgruntled customer.

One good review begets ten new customers.

One bad review scares one thousand.