random-c.livejournal.comSometimes you just can't get any reason out of a customer.
Yesterday I was trying to explain to a customer why no, during our busiest few days of the year, we were not prepared to spend an hour explaining to him how to work his computer. If you've got specific questions, fine, you want a walkthrough, you talk to Training and pay. This chap wasn't having it. It wasn't even that he just didn't know how our app worked, he had no idea how to use the computer at all.
"If I buy a car, I expect the garage to service it!" he yelled, at the end of a rant about how we weren't providing the service he paid for.
Aha, I thought. An analogy I can use! "Of course, Sir, that's what our support is. If you have a problem then you can call us. However, you're asking us to teach you to use not just the software but your computer. Our software is something added which makes it do more, so if you think of the car as your Windows computer, our software is the CD radio you put in to replace the tape player. You'd expect the garage to service the car, but you wouldn't expect them to teach you to drive - and you certainly wouldn't expect the people who made the radio to do it, would you?"
Guess who had to endure five minutes of ranting about how I was insulting his driving.