From Mobilityguru on Tom’s HW Guide, an interesting collection of Customer Tech Support Stories (Part one).
“An overwhelming number of you responded to Barry Gerber’s request for tech-support stories. In the first part of what will likely be a long-lived series, we share your horror stories. Read on.“
Tags: support, customer support.
News.com reported today that the the University of Michigan released their latest update to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is “a uniform and independent measure of household consumption experience.” According to the News article on ACSI’s study…
“…customers still rate PCs lower than several other consumer product categories, including cars and appliances.
“Even though servicing a car or dishwasher can induce the same kinds of headaches as PC technical support does, car and appliance makers have done a better job of simplifying their products and reducing the amount of maintenance needed to keep their products going, while PC users continue to flood help lines when faced with complicated problems… “
(In some cases, sure. But I’ve had more expensive problems and repairs with a family car recently. And unlike the situation with my car, I was able to self diagnose a recent firewall problem on one PC using on-line and application help in 20 minutes… a feature my car dealer doesn’t offer.)
The ACSI’s latest study results are available on the ACSI web site here.
Apple Computer was in the lead, followed by Dell, HP brand, Gateway then HP-Compaq. Apple improved over their score last year, and it was reported that Dell’s score rose. The ACSI also rated Google, Yahoo and AOL:
Tags: Microsoft, ACSI, customer service, customer satisfaction.
“Google has a strong lead over all other search engines with a score of 81. That was actually down a little bit from last year, but no other search provider made a run at Google during 2006. Google is the most widely used search engine, followed by Yahoo and MSN, according to comScore Networks.”
We often talk about the importance of eating our own dogfood. See this article from News.Com on “Managing desktops the Microsoft way,” which describes the effort Microsoft took on to manage desktop PCs at Energizer. Steve Ballmer discussed the effort last year.
“Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in an e-mail interview before the company’s partner conference last year that the effort would not be limited to just Energizer.
“There will be a few others, where we will mirror our own internal IT environment, running the technology hand in hand, as opposed to being a step removed,” Ballmer said. “We’re going to test this out and see where it takes us.”
“In a case study posted to its Web site last month, Microsoft characterized the Energizer effort as a work in progress. It said it is still in the pilot phase of some projects and has only partially completed other efforts, such as desktop management work and a move to SharePoint-based portals.”
Although News doesn’t include the link, you can find the case study here, on the Microsoft Customer Evidence Search Site.
For more on how we do things internally, there’s also this interview from TechEd 2006 with our Ron Markezich, CIO and VP of Managed Solutions, as well as the CIO Webcast Series.
Tags: microsoft, ron markezich, dogfood, energizer, IT management.
With respect to my post today re: Slate on “The Myth of the Living-Room PC” I was sent a note via the blog email feature, reminding me of Matt Goyer’s Media Center blog and his post noting that MCE is now at 14 million units. (Matt points to an interview in the Seattle PI with Robbie Bach, in which he updates that “we have Media Center with over 14 million units and growing around the world.”)
I enjoy Matt’s blog and would like to say thanks to Jennifer for the pointer.
Tags: microsoft, dvr, pvr, media center, Windows Media Center.
You’ve heard their renditions of “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Gentle on My Mind” on The Best of Leonard Nimoy & William Shatner.
Now you can be inspired every day by these Star Trek Inspirational Posters.
“BASED ON THOSE DELIGHTFUL INSPIRATIONAL POSTERS WHICH HAVE BECOME A FIXTURE OF DENTIST’S OFFICES EVERYWHERE.”
Some of these are very funny. As the creator of this site said that they’re running up to bandwidth limitations, maybe they could benefit by setting up a free OfficeLive Web site.
Tags: Friday Link, Star Trek, humour.