Real world example from enterprise grade support.
Customer: “I have a support ticket running. Are you handling my problem?”
Supplier: “yeah but we can’t reproduce it”
Customer: “that’s what I said months ago, we cannot reproduce it, it’s on one machine only”
Supplier: “then we won’t do anything”
Customer: “what do you want me to do then? ”
Supplier: “send me a virtual pc image of the pc”
Customer: “how?”
Supplier: “hmm, I will have to contact internal engineering”
(And of course, the support system only allows uploading files of two GB max.)
I doubt any small business will be happy with this type of “support”. I can’t imagine it helps large companies either, but maybe it helps as both sides talk the same talk?
One Comment
I work at a MSFT partner, and get talks like this quite often (though this one takes the cake).
My conclusion is that MSFT support is useless from a techie point of view, If you put just as much time in researching the problem as you would in handling a support case, chances are real that you solve the problem yourself.
The value in MSFT support is commercial. If you can’t fix a problem quick enough you can tell your customer "Microsoft is handling it", and that works great. The customer isn’t hassling you any more, because you can’t help it, and even mr. microsoft himself has a hard time figuring it out. What the customer doesn’t know is that mr microsoft is actually ben allal mansour from some outsourced indian call center who knows nothing else than looking stuff up in a knowledge base and escalating it to somebody who hopefully knows what he’s talking about. But by the time something escalates weeks, if not months, have passed.