We've all been there, that dreaded time when the realization sets in that you can not fix this issue by yourself. Thank God there is a support line! They assign you a ticket and reassure you that it will get handled soon.
From there on, it can go a lot of ways:
- It can get passed around between first liners.
- It can be ignored.
- It can get escalated to second line.
- It can actually get fixed.
My latest need for support has just been through all of these steps and in that order. I'll give you a small recap on the situation:
One of our clients experienced a serious issue resulting in a significant loss of productivity for a relatively long time. As I am their go-to-guy on IT, I was the first to start troubleshooting from a remote location.
During my contact with the client I immediately noticed the issue to situate itself on the side of one of our suppliers. I say "our" because, although not directly in a binding agreement with said supplier, we operate as internal IT management would, after all, the customer is the king! In these events we have a backup service available, sadly, this was under heavy load and completely unusable, probably because of the wide range of the initial failure.
I contacted the supplier, got a confirmation to my diagnosis and I reported back to the customer.
We never received a formal apology or admission of blame, instead we received a notice that the time for another yearly payment was required to extend our service agreement. The client responded, kindly agreeing to extend but requesting a form of compensation for the service interruption.
That's when shit hit the fan, to the client, this was just a matter of principle that required settling, they would probably have been happy with an apology. Instead, to the supplier, this was deemed a non-valid request because a backup service was available. At that time I started to take offense too since I deem myself quite capable of determining whether a service is available to me or not.
Since the support engineers kept randomly passing around the ticket, repeating procedures and even closing the unresolved ticket instead of escalating it, I took a different approach.
After weeks of this, I just started to contact them in public through every social media channel they had a promotional presence on. Besides the potential for public embarrassment, this also results in ending up with the marketing people, the guys and girls that work every single day to make sure their product and firm are viewed upon in the best possible way. Not the least surprising, this meant a fast escalation to second line and a constant stream of updates regarding the status, just to reassure me they where still on it.
Now that I like! What happened next completely took me by surprise, out of the blue I got confirmation that we would be credited an entire year of service fees... a... whole... bloody... year... compensated...
We where all very happy to except their apologizing gesture but somehow it makes me wonder and rant about companies and policies and employees and how the hell this shit is...
Nah screw it, I'll just publicly message the Marketing department from now on via the FaceTwitPagePlus!
Also, #Winning!