2 kinds of support
Posted by Francis | Posted in Internet Stuff, Life Stuff | Posted on 02-06-2010
Tags: Be Internet, ISP, Netgear, Support, Technical Support
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It really is amazing what a difference to a service technical support makes and whether the team actually know what they are talking about. Recently I have had to contact 2 company support teams. One for Netgear, the other for Be Internet.
I contacted Netgear because my router was playing up. I wrote full details of the issue and what I had tried to fix the issue. A day later I received a message to reset my router etc. in fact, I was run through exactly what I had said I had done over about 7 messages before they misdiagnosed the issue and blamed it on my homeplug adaptors which the router wasn’t finding. In this case, they didn’t even try to read my initial message, but took me through the script they had and came up with an issue so wrong, as a normal user, I would have ended up with the router still faulty and sending back a second set of homeplug adaptors. I ended up having to suggest it was the router and they replaced it, as it was still under warranty (the adaptors were not) I received a new one, and it’s all good now.
Fast forward to this weekend. My broadband went down. A rare issue for my provider Be. I had forgotten I’d requested a change in my service requiring a different setup on my router. I called, waited a short time, then I got a chirpy Czech (I think) man who had read my message that my router wouldn’t get an IP address. I confessed that I did not have the original Be router, but one made by Netgear. He replied “we don’t support that router, but I know it well, so I can guide you”. See the difference? He went off piste! He actually surfs the internet and uses the products! In about 2 minutes I was back up and running. No ignoring my email and asking me whether my router was on, he’d done his homework before he diagnosed and fixed the issue. And they are consistently like this!
There are a lot of people out there who know how to use a product, and it’s this which makes the difference, not the quality of the script, because that 5% of the time when there really is an issue, you may need to actually know what you are talking about.