The Microsoft "Sells" Department

So, I'm sitting in my office pair programming with Geoff Kizer when my phone rings. It says "Microsoft" on the display, so I figure it's one of my brethren.

"Hello?"

An angry voice replies, "I'm calling you because your technical support sucks and I'm tired of being put on hold!"

"I'm sorry? Are you a Microsoft employee?"

"No! I'm a *customer*! I'm trying to use Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit and it doesn't work!"

"Oh." Now I'm reaching way, way back into my distant technical phone support past. First, defuse the anger by empathizing with the customer. "Well, on behalf of the 70,000 Microsoft employees, I'd like to apologize." That was a little over the top -- have to dial it down a bit next time...

Second, try to take things back a step and establish a rapport with the customer. "My name is Chris. What's yours?"

Calming down a bit, "John."

"OK, John. I can't claim to know everything there is to know about Vista, but I'll answer your questions if I can."

"How do I get the icons to be smaller on the desktop? No matter what the resolution is, they're always huge! I want them to be small like on XP!"

"Are you at your computer now?"

"Yes."

"OK. I know you can change the icon size on the desktop. Let you look around a little." At this point, I'm opening up the Personalize control panel, finding nothing about desktop icon size. I used the cool narrow-as-you-type Help. Nothing about icon size (although I can change the icons themselves). Now I'm cursing Vista myself. "I don't see it here," I admit to John.

At this point, I look up and notice I've gathered a crowd outside my office, including my boss and his boss, all laughing because a) dealing with angry customers is not the most fun job in the world and b) they're glad it isn't them.

At this point, Mr. Kizer reaches over to my computer, right-clicks on my desktop and shows me the context menu option that actually changes the icon size, which I share with John, making sure he's happy with this solution before moving on.

And move on we did. John has one more problem, which I repeat back to him to make sure I've gotten it right, emphasize with him and try to help him reproduce it. When we can't, I send him an email, asking for some additional data when he is able to reproduce the problem so that I can follow up with a fix, apologizing again for the trouble he's had today, both with Vista and with tech support.

After about 15 minutes, John thanked me and asked me if I was in Sales or Support.

"No. I'm a developer," which was close enough to true for your average person.

He then told me how he got to my phone in the first place. Apparently, he had called the main number and was tired of being put on hold by our support, so he told our voice-recognition system that he wanted to speak to "Sales," I'm guessing to give them a piece of his mind. That day, "Sells" was enough of a match to "Sales" and suddenly, I'm the one talking to John.

At no point during this call did I consider sending John somewhere else for help. He'd already been through our support and didn't like it. I can't make people purchase Microsoft products. I can't make people like Microsoft products. However, that one day with that one customer, I was going to do my best to help one customer to not hate Microsoft. Sometimes that's all you can do and I was proud to do it.

Sweet! Chris Sells is providing tech support?!

Ummm. Chris? My retractable cup holder on my computer is broken. Can you help me fix it?

;)

Fascinating and well done.

On a related note, Chris, have you succumbed to any impulses to disable UAC on your dev machine?

I'm still running UAP and don't find it bad.

"UAC"

BTW, my single experience with Microsoft support as a non-employee was fabulous. I called to ask how to make Project do what I wanted and got a two-hour seminar on how to think about project data, which was exactly what I needed (and free!).

I've had several bouts with our internal tech support for internal things and they're fabulous, too, but they don't count for this metric, since they're not customer facing.

Well done, Chris. More companies (not just MS) need techies like you.

I had a debate about this post with my wife, a product manager for an automotive supplier who comes down firmly on the customer service side. Unfortunately, I don't think I would have put as much effort into it as Chris did. I find it dangerous to switch from replicant-like code analysis to dealing with an overly emotional customer.

With me, only bad can come of it.

I salute you Chris, that’s really teach me why people in industry have so tremendous respect for you. Its really inspiring and motivating small developers like me :)
Keep it up man.
Dhananjay

Second use of empathize is spelled "emphasize".

If everyone at Microsoft had your attitude, they'd only need 7000 employees (or less), and people would be able to find their menu items.

Next time I have a development question, I am calling Microsoft and asking for 'Sales'

It sounds like this should be cross posted on the Microsoft Speech server blog!

Heheh, brilliant. Gonna try this next time I need to call MS. :-)

Umm, isn't it like the first menu on the context menu of the desktop? View->Large/Medium/Classic icons.

It's not exactly hard to find it's in the same context and sub menu as you'd use to arrange the icons!

Unless of course you can size them arbitrarily - that would be cool. Can I call you and you can walk me through that!

Excellent support though Chris - I've pinged people I know in Microsoft in the past and they've always managed to find me someone who can help (typically PM's ), despite that person not knowing me from Adam. I'm constantly amazed at the amount of help people who are obviously very busy are willing to provide complete strangers.

I'll go ahead and throw out my MS tech support story from last week. I had a deadline due last Monday, and while I had removed admin access from my main account weeks earlier, I hadn't rebooted (you can take away admin rights from the last non-built-in admin via MMC...it's not really aware of Vista's user setup). Well, on Sunday, I rebooted and had no more admin rights but no ability to log in as Admin (it's disabled). Turns out that in my case, my hidden Media Center Ext admin account fools Safe Mode into not enabling Admin, so I was locked out.
Regular tech support was OK, but they seemed suprisingly unaware that a non-admin cannot grant himself admin rights (I even told one "If I can do what you're asking me to do, you guys have a bigger bug than Safe Mode").
After the 2nd call, I put a comment on a Vista team blog, and shortly thereafter, someone there escalated the issue for me (a manager later de-escalated, wasting 2 hours with level 1 tech #3, but I got re-escalated).
Point is, level 1 support is obscenely time-consuming (6 hours total for my case), kinda lacking in security knowledge, and pretty dense, but once you walk up the ladder a bit, you can run into much more knowledgeable folks.

Chris you done a really great job. Not many people that are not in customer service could just deal with an angry customer. It would be nice if every time you had a problem that you couldn't solve on your own that some brillant person will be willing to give you a helping hand.

I'm here for you, Leslee.

Just FYI, I get asked about Vista at work all the time. I am going to encourage all my friends to call Microsoft and ask for "sales". Has he found a new calling??? :)
Gotta love him.

Chris, this rules. I am proud to be in the company that employs you.

Rock on, you crazy diamond.

Betsy

It's a little bit strange news that Mic sells it's departments. I am a little bit confused.
Here is my website: http://www.infoborder.com

Chris, Keep up the good work. You should be rewarded for the excellent customer support and attitude. You went out of your way to hear out the customer and solve his issue, which is a noble thing. I hope the Tech support management read your blog and attempt to reduce the wait times. I had a frustrating experience of 40 minutes wait time and then the case being passed from one group to another for about a month. But ultimately it reached the right group and they were able to provide a solution.

I want to know what happens if you call up Microsoft and ask to speak to "Ballmer"... ?