Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

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Confirmable Experience: Outstanding Microsoft Customer Service
 
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Confirmable Experience: Outstanding Microsoft Customer Service

I just had an extraordinary customer-service experience.   I was unable to receive a Microsoft Developer Network (MSDN) live webcast, and I took the chance of calling telephone support.  The combination of telephone connection and concurrent on-line access led to an amazing customer-service experience that I just have to blog about while it is fresh. 

This is how it is supposed to be, and the Live Meeting support team has it figured out.  I am flabbergasted.  I could weep, this experience was so satisfying.

My full account is below the second fold.  The key take-away: I received mind-blowing support, I was completely taken care of in the span of a couple of hours, and it was personal.  I spoke to real people.  I even know their names (first names on the phone, full names in e-mails) and the discussions and questions all helped me show them what was happening and finding a remedy.  Everything in the conversations and the e-mails was about confirming what was done, where we are, and what will happen next.  They took complete ownership of the problem for me.  I can’t say it better than that.  I will certainly give a glowing report in the follow-up survey that just hit my inbox.

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A Little About Confirmable Experience

Some of the most-difficult experiences that we have as users of computer-mediated communication systems are around our inability to troubleshoot and confirm breakdowns in end-to-end connections for which the intermediaries (worse: the other end points too) are invisible and inscrutable. 

E-mail exchanges where the recipient does not see the same thing the sender sees have been an example for years.  The unanticipated interaction cases can be quite dramatic, as is the tendency to remedy incoherence in the wrong places.  Discussion lists that provide digests are particularly prone to incoherent treatment of list postings, and in one case that I know of, interaction with an anti-spam arrangement actually aggravates the situation.

A different recent example is how, since I tightened security settings on my machine, I can’t order music from MSN Music any longer: the “buy” buttons do nothing.  I have adjusted the permissions for every URL I know about.  I just can’t tell what other URLs Microsoft Media Player is using out of my sight and that are failing to work because JavaScript, or some other level of trust, is not enabled where it needs to be.  I could put a sniffer on my network and see the traffic to and from Medial Player, but that is way too much work just to give MSN my money for downloaded music.  I must also confess that some of my other MSN experiences provide anti-patterns to the story below.

Webcasts raise incoherence and unconfirmable experience prospects in spades.  That makes it doubly remarkable that the support team for Live Meeting may well have mastered the trouble-shooting problem and (using their own product as one tool) found ways to turn problem incidents into positive customer-service experiences.  That’s amazing.

I recommend that other companies find out what contractors have a-somebody@microsoft.com e-mail addresses and hire them for what they know about superb customer support,  … but not before they've shown the rest of Microsoft what is possible.

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Terrific Customer Support, Blow-by-Blow

1. Getting WebCasts on a New Computer.  I haven’t used Microsoft Office Live Meeting since I installed Scampo, my Media Center 2005 PC.  I have a list of eleven webcasts that I want to watch this month, so I need to have Live Meeting set up and operational (and I wouldn’t mind getting an MSDN Action Figure too).  At 9:00 am (pst: gmt-0800) today I entered an MSDN Webcast on a topic that I have tangential curiosity about.  I had succeeded in going through the connection check and installation of the Live Meeting software that I needed for access to the webcast.  Those confirmation e-mails with their guidance through the setup and check-out for successful connection are the first clue that there is something extraordinary about the attention given to customer support here.

2. Uh, We Seem to Have a Problem.  In the webcast itself, everything mostly worked except the shared-application demos.  Every time the presenter moused around in Visual Studio—practically the entire webcast—all I got was the audio and a pure-white presentation area.  Basically, the webcast was useless.  Also, I couldn’t get any assistance while connected to the webcast.  In fact, any time I moved the Microsoft Windows focus out of the Live Meeting web interface, Live Meeting would close and I would no longer be connected.

3. Oh my, I Need To Talk to a Real Person.  I ran out of on-line options for researching my problem.  As reluctant as I am do to so, I called the 800-number for Live Meeting customer service that was included in my webcast confirmation e-mail.  To my delight, I got through immediately.  There was no hold music, no voice-response unit, and no telephone touch-pad menu to navigate.  Jeri simply came on the line and took me through an on-line check.  She captured all of my information.  Together, we confirmed the problem I was having by working in a test webcast she set up with just the two of us.  She would leave the call from time to time to check with up-the-line technical support.  We narrowed the symptoms and isolated the problem to my end.  Having run out of known remedies, Jeri created a trouble ticket.  I was told to expect an e-mail with instructions for downloading and running a reporting tool on my machine.  I would be told where to send the results and higher-level support would take it from there.

4. The Cavalry Arrives.  I had barely received the trouble-ticket e-mail when my phone rang.  It was Doug, in Redmond, wanting to work with me to troubleshoot the problem.  I was headed into a meeting (my breakfast was getting cold and I was still in pajamas) and asked Doug to call me by noon when I would be back at my home-office desk for the rest of the day.

5. The Cavalry Returns.  At noon I had just completed downloading and running the troubleshooting-report tool when the phone rang and Doug was on the line again.  He gave me his direct e-mail so I could send the report directly to him and then he started to take me through an on-line session.  He was interested that I was running Media Center 2005 because there are not many Media Center owners reporting LiveMeeting problems so far.  He sounded like he was expecting that LiveMeeting problems and their symptoms might be different on Media Center than with more-common versions of Microsoft Windows. 

6.  Uh Oh, What’s That Sound?  I had my cell phone in speaker-phone mode on my desk when I started up Doug’s talking me through the troubleshooting.  Coincidently, he heard the funny tone that sounded when LiveMeeting started up.  He asked me about that, and I said there was no message or anything, although there had earlier been a message about audio that I’d suppressed.  He immediately had me check my advanced settings in the properties of “My Computer.”  From there we quickly narrowed in on a solution and within minutes I was successfully operating with all functions in a test webcast Doug set up with me.  Live Meeting stopped closing on me too.  And as part of Doug’s demonstrating desktop and application sharing, I got a look at the UI of the customer-support application that they run, with my trouble-ticket right there.  That looks like an impressive application and having on-line web access to my own trouble ticket is also impressive.  It is also impressive that Live Meeting is a trouble-shooting tool for Live Meeting and other situations.  (This is also a reminder why I don’t believe in web-only applications and trust more in hybrid on/off-line, thin/fat/just-right applications: the Goldilocks approach to software resilience.)

7. Sometimes, One Size Doesn’t Fit All.  The other day, as part of mitigating the risk of the current WMF-viewing security vulnerability, I had enabled Scampo’s full-hardware Data Exception Protection.  LiveMeeting was stumbling on that (as Skype had when I first enabled it).  The “boop” sound was the only clue apart from the failure of application sharing to work.  When I adjusted my DEP settings to grant an exception for LiveMeeting, it all worked.  And Doug got the clue because he heard the failure and he knows what those “uh oh” and other bleeps signify.  (Talking to Doug reminded me of all of the stories about how technicians become masters in John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid’s The Social Life of Information.  I didn’t think to ask him how they train themselves to provide the kind of higher-level support I just received.)

8. Just in Case.  There could still be something else going on.  Doug said he was closing the trouble ticket but that I could reopen it if the problem recurred with a future webcast.  That was all confirmed in an e-mail that just arrived.  I am optimistic.  And whatever happens, I know there is a serious industrial-strength support mechanism in place and I can expect to be completely taken care of. 

posted by orcmid at 1/05/2006 03:53:49 PM