Let me tell you a customer service thing - I subscribe to the most expensive BT broadband service there is (I thought, wrongly, this would help my work as I have to download huge PDFs from my main office most nights) - I am tied in for 12 months. I live in walking distance of the exchange. Yet I get super slow broad band - when I phone up the customer service people in Mumbai (and i'm not knocking them, coz they speak more comprehensible English than the Scots I used to deal with) they tell me 'I am too far away from the exchange. I have two words for them: one begins with F and the other O (I know the real reason - its Edwardian cables in my South East London street - you see, corporations are racists and put South East London in the same modernisation rating as Outer Nether Cleethorpes - For example of all Londoners we get the Tube in 2010 - one hundred years too late!)
Then my wife's brand new wireless computer stops receiving BT's broadband, so I have two attempts with the tech dudes in Mumbai who take over the computer via cable - and, with all fairness to them, they spend 2 hours each trying to fix it (showing their secret web pages that show that my £26 per month broadband is actually going at the speed of twice the fastest dial up connection - hardly superfast). In the end they say 'your computer is broken' its not our service. I take it to PC world in Catford (I go to Catford once per decade), they try it with their connections and IT WORKS. I take it home, it doesn't work (to be fair, the dude in PC World is a bro I went to school with and played footie with in the 80s and he doesn't charge me). He says its BT's fault and I should phone them. Not again.
Then I have an idea, maybe BT has updated its software and the driver for my wife's PC has not updated with it, so the wireless adaptor is not working. So I update the driver - IT WORKS. Two very helpful people paid to do customer service in sunny Mumbai by BT and a bloke in Catford and they didn't think of it. I at least conquered where other's failed (which makes me a bit sad probably).
So rant over - and conclusions - 1. People on the end of a telephone are generally nice and incredibly helpful people put in an impossible situation by their employers and 2. customer service is another word for 'read from our employer produced manual and don't think'.
