techrecovery | Jul. 10th, 2007

Jul. 10th, 2007

valiskeogh.livejournal.com

Sprint Cuts 1,000+ Customers For Excessive Complaining
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- Hundreds of cell phone customers are being given the boot, accused of being too high maintenance.
Sprint-Nextel is disconnecting more than 1,000 subscribers on grounds the clients call customer service too often and make "unreasonable requests."
The 1,200 people getting dropped will have to find a new carrier by the end of the month.
A Sprint representative said the average customer calls customer service less than once a month, but the 1,200 clients getting the boot call 40-50 times as often.
Sprint said whatever the complaint, it has worked to resolve it but due to the volume of calls it's obvious customers involved are not happy.
In a statement, the company said: "Rather than continue to operate in a situation that was unsatisfactory for Sprint and our subscribers, we chose to terminate our relationship with those customers to allow them to pursue other options."
Cell phone user Joe Graham said Sprint reserves that right.
"I guess the company had good enough reason to get rid of 1,200 people. You don't just do it on a whim," Graham said. "Because they make the contracts they can do what they want."
"I didn't even know you could do that with a contract. That's astonishing," said cell phone user Winston Bryant.
The customers told to find a new service provider were notified by mail last month and will not have to pay a termination fee.

anyone know if sprint is hiring? i'm liking them more alrady.
if only more companies would do this...

Valis

ladynisa.livejournal.com

Why must almost every single customer I've gotten this month have to be baby-walked through the simplest of things???

I feel like a life coach.

Or someone who's walking a nervous virgin through sex.

Or someone who works on a suicide hot-line.

Current Mood: frustrated
Current Location: Work
Current Music: Voices of the Asshats

lihan161051.livejournal.com

Just talked to someone who had two computers, both connecting to the Internet, but clearly not on the same subnet because their peer-peer services wouldn't see each other. I figured it was just a couple of stacked NAT routers .. but I was wrong.

One machine was connected through a cable modem via a wireless NAT router.

The other machine was directly connected to a DSL modem.

I can't figure out if she just didn't tell the DSL sales people she had another machine already on a cable connection with everything she needed to put that second machine on the LAN with the first one, or if she did and the jerks set her up with a separate DSL anyway just to make a few bucks off of her. Because it was painfully clear that this person was in about ten feet over her head even with basic navigation on either machine, and I'm willing to bet that she had *absolutely* no idea what she was doing when she set up the second machine. Or she has multiple relatives/friends with strong opinions about which type of Internet connection she should be using.

Needless to say, the DSL modem is now sitting there connected to DSL and no longer connected to either of her machines, which are both now happily chatting with each other on the private side of the NAT. I hope she calls the DSL provider and gives them a piece of her mind for selling her DSL when she clearly didn't need it .. or beats her "tech support" relatives about the ears a bit ..

Current Mood: flabbergasted

darkrose.livejournal.com

New-ish here. Joined a few weeks ago, been lurking for the most part.. I've been in IT professionally for 12 years, and geeking out on computers since I was 5 (I'm 32 now, do the math)..

Anyhow, I've worked at a small software firm/e-commerce company for 5 years or so now, and I've become quite convinced that "VAR" stands for "Very Aggravating Retards" as you will see below. Now mind you I've got a severe case of Clerks-itis (I'm not even supposed to be here today!) when it comes to supporting people because it's not my primary job function, but the boss is out of town and there's really no one else qualified to answer the phone intelligently, so *shrug* guess who gets stuck with it (My official title is Linux Admin for the record).

Anyhow, so there's this VAR that I am intimately familiar with. We'll call him Bob. Bob calls us about once every 2-3 weeks and every time he gets any of us on the phone, the first thing that passes our lips after he starts explaining the problem is "What is the error message?". Guess who never has the error message available.

So 3-4 minutes later after he's managed to duplicate the issue, I propose a solution. One he inevitably doesn't like. So what does he do? Rather than actually trying the solution, he argues. So another 5 minutes wasted with me trying to explain to him not only why we should try a particular course of action, but that it's imperative that if he wants to satisfy his customers, he should follow my directions and help me help him. Usually then it's a brief lecture about how troubleshooting requires us to try things, etc. 9 times out of 10 he's actually surprised when things magically work after he decided to pay attention and follow my instructions.

Today, he called because he was getting a particular error relating to opening a file in a built in development server. After the usual rigamarole about the error message, he says:

Him: It says "Cannot find file $path".
Me: Ok, and are the files in $path?
Him: Oh yes! I copied them from a backup!
Me: Ok, are you SURE they're in $path?
Him: Absolutely.
Me: Ok, let's search for them [and I had to walk him through that, too!].
Him: Ok, it found one file by that name in $notpath.
Me: ...
Me: So um, the files were in $path, then why are they in $notpath?
Him: I swear! I copied them to $path!!!!
Me: Ok, copy them to from $notpath to $path and let's see what happens.
Him: Why won't you believe me that I copied the files to $path!!
Me: Bob, please just copy the files over.
Him: Ok, done.
Me: Now try it again..
Him: Hey, it works!
Me: [muted] Yeah, because my 4 year old's a genius compared to you dumba$$.

My boss won't ditch him as a VAR because he sells too much software. Unfortunately, he knows nothing about what the product actually does, how to set it up, etc. He just calls us for that.