Customer sypport
There is a paradoxon that I just cannot understand, namely, the expectations to the amount and speed and effectiveness of customer support AFTER sales seem to be linked in reverse order to the size of the company the customer is dealing with. For example, one of our customers had an outage which was most probably caused by an outage in one of the CPU’s in the cheap ass server he runs our stuff on. The customer was fuming and screaming and had the expectation that we fix it in seconds (although we told him from day one that this equippment is not really what he should use). Fine, I shutdown my ears and fixed the stuff and still recommended to by some proper equippment which he finally agreed upon. Usually madness.
Now yesterday we where supposed to install a system at another huge customer. Everything is ready, the customer has a huge outsourcing agreement with a major telco and we patiently waited for a sign of life from them for 10 days after which they told us that, yes they can configure the spare E1 on the customers main Nortel switch, but it will cost an arm and a leg and take 15 days.
So, we small guys need to react in seconds, a big guy can take 10 days to answer a call from a fortune 500 and than tell them they just want do it faster than in 15 days ? yay … support & service where have you gone …