Vlad’s School of Customer Service

Tip #2: Do not ridicule your customers right to complain by an outpour of sympathy and promises both of you know the organization cannot live up to.

Case and point, one of our larger companies decided to put their eggs in two baskets and share the hosting load between OWN and another huge data center provider. For the sake of the argument, let’s call them “fanatical” – fanantical’s portion of the web server load balanced pool kept on flapping. The CTO at the customer’s site felt the run-around and asked me to call and see if we can get to the bottom of it.

Vlad: Hi, we’re having a problem and we believe it’s the load balancer you’re managing as we can confirm all the servers are responding properly.

Fanatical: Oh, that couldn’t be, we manage it! But I would be delighted to assist you.

Vlad: Ok, well, all servers are up and you’re dropping 30% of the connections.

Fanatical: Oh, that can’t be, we have the biggest network. We take great care of our customers so I am going to escalate this to the engineer more capable of helping you.

More Fanatical: Hello Vlad, hi I am here to help you.

… Fast forward through over 2 hours of fanatical bs to get the load balancer power cycled and configuration troubleshooted to the point where the fanatical support ought to have had it in the first place because they promised a managed environment.

I say this to my staff and myself all the damn time – politeness is not a substitute for competence. I don’t care if you’re the biggest jerk on the face of the earth, we run a network here not a Ms. Congeniality award committe. Every time you are tasked with resolving a problem for a customer and you step out of that problem solving mindset to sympathize, lecture on our process and quality control, share your war stories, etc you’re wasting your time that should be used to troubleshoot issues, you’re ridiculing our customer when we both know you’re staring at your watch, all while the customer is still down. Wanna be fanatical – go to a college football game and paint your chest fired because thats where this conversation is heading. (reminder: customer service tips, not HR tips)

While every customer should be treated with respect and dignity, they are calling us because we aren’t doing our job. It is not your job to apologize, thats my job. Your job is not to hug the user. Not to read our process guides out loud. Not to explain the company policy. Not to be fanatical. Your job is to fix it, as fast as possible and look like a competent engineer not a flower girl.

Previous customer service tip.