The dumbing down of customer support

I happen to live just up the street from one of the world's largest phone, television, internet and wireless providers. I also use their services at my home and actually have been very pleased with their service and support. If you live in the Coppell/Irving area you know who I am talking about. I had their fiber optic service installed at my house as soon as they made it available in my area. From the first day, I was impressed with the knowledge and responsiveness of their customer service. Ok, maybe it was a little surreal to call their support line and realize that they could reach out from some darkened bunker somewhere and reset my DVR remotely, but it fixed the problem so I can live with their ability to virtually intrude into my home.

Yesterday, I learned that not all customer service, even at the same multi-billion dollar company, is created equally. Along with the fiber optic internet service I get free WiFi for my laptop at selected hotspots around the country. Not the major reason I use their service, but a cool little perk.

I went to install the required program on my new laptop yesterday and during the process I get a popup that says my operating system is not compatible with their program. I need to "upgrade" to Windows 7 or install XP or Vista. I just bought the laptop in December, it already has Windows 7 on it. This seems to be beyond my ability to troubleshoot, so I call the support number at the bottom of the popup. When I get a support agent on the phone, he sounds like a young man who speaks American English as his native language. Sorry no offense if you are a customer support person who does not fit that description, but I consider that a tri-fecta.

This time however I was wrong. First, it was beyond his ability to fix the problem. Turns out they actually do NOT support Widows 7. He did however read me a nice scripted response explaining how their delay in supporting the new operating system was totally for my benefit. Secondly he completely did not GET the irony that their popup would suggest I upgrade my software to something that their program in fact did not yet support.

I really was not upset, I have come to expect that when dealing with large organizations it is the norm for one part of the company to have no idea where their co-workers are nor what they are doing. In this case the folks that put the content on the web had gotten way ahead of the people that actually implement the software they put on the website. All I ask is that you be able to laugh at yourself and your organization when you have these kinds of screw ups. I tried a couple of times to get my customer support contact to see the inconsistency, but all he could do was go back and reread some part of his script for me, so I gave up and just took my old WinXP laptop to Starbucks to read my emails. I suppose I will follow his advice to wait a few days and keep trying to install the software as they do plan on it working, eventually.