It’s a restaurant picture, from our fantastic buffet lunch yesterday at Garrett’s. But our server there was not Siegfried. Or maybe he was. I can’t remember anybody’s name. I loved Garrett’s and the servers there were fine, if a little bit raw. But that’s logical since they are in a culinary program, training to be chefs, not food servers. They have learned enough about serving to be *very* attentive to their customers and if they are a bit klutzy sometimes, it’s okay! The FOOD — which is what we were there for — is FANTASTIC!

And then we have the Internet provider industry. I can’t even begin to count the number of times that I have emailed a “support” team for help, only to have them 1) not READ my email [or maybe not understand it because their first language is not English] 2) suggest that I do something that I have already tried umpty-nine thousand times to no avail 3) give me instructions for a browser and operating system that I’m not using, even though I’ve TOLD them what browser/operating system I’m using. Uh. Can you guys read? Or not? If you can, why did you obsequiously commiserate with my problem? And then not solve it.

Please, you guys. I don’t much care whether you know what you are doing or not or whether you can understand me or not. If you cannot fix my problem or if you can’t understand my language, PLEASE forward my problem to someone who can help me.

And bosses? I’m guessing that some of your employees are AFRAID to escalate issues to you and that’s why YOUR CUSTOMERS get weird, unsatisfactory experiences. Is that true? Back in the Jurassic Age, I was afraid of a few of my bosses too. You guys need to make sure your employees can talk to you about this stuff. You have to be a *team*. Please?

What ever else is going on, like Garrett’s, your *product* has to function. If the tech support people are a little klutzy we don’t care much but, fer kee-reist, we want our email and internet connection to work without a whole lot of troubleshooting on our end. If your tech support people can’t solve our problem, we want them to feel free to report issues that you don’t understand to higher powers. There should not necessarily be employment consequences. Comcast, getcher act together. Take it away, Webmomster!

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 3rd, 2008 at 8:51 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.