I just came back from a very, very, short client visit – and I feel bad about it. Not because I couldn’t solve the problem that he called about (I did). I feel bad because I could not arrange to get to see him for more than a day and a half, and the problem identification and resolution took less than one minute. To make matters worse, he had spent most of the day waiting for a Time Warner Cable technician to come to fix the problem with his modem, after having spent almost one hour on the phone with their technical support the day before. The issue he was experiencing: no Internet connectivity.
My client called me on Tuesday, right after the July 4th holiday weekend, and said that he could not connect to the Internet. He’s a businessperson who works out of his home office, and I know that getting his email and the attached documents is extremely important to him. He told me that he thought the problem started sometime on Sunday evening, but that he waited until after the holiday to call me.
He said that the lights on the modem were not all lit, and asked if that could be the problem. I told him that it sounded like a bad modem. I also explained that I was booked with appointments for the entire day, but that if he had the patience, he should call Time Warner Cable to see if the problem was on their end. He was willing to do that.
During a brief follow-up phone call later in the day, he told me that he spent almost an hour on the phone with a support representative, who after exhausting her script, told him that she would dispatch a technician the following day. Good for him, right? No, not really – the appointment could not be narrowed down to anything other than between 9 am and 7 pm. My client was going to be a captive in his office with nothing to do but wait.
I managed to take a few spare minutes this afternoon, and decided to see what was going on. Maybe I could do something. I took one look at the modem, sitting on the floor under the desk, and saw that only two of the five lights were lit. There was a button next to the lights that had a label, “Internet On/Off.” I pressed the button and the other two lights on the modem turned on immediately. I am guessing that my client’s foot accidentally kicked the button sometime on Sunday, suddenly ending the Internet connection.
So why do I feel bad? Because I could have cleared this up in one minute when he called initially. However, I just didn’t have the time. So despite my having the goal of responding to your computer problems within an hour, there is a practical element of how many of you I can physically manage in any given day. This is something I plan to work on in the next few months.
My parting instructions to my client were to call Time Warner Cable and cancel the technician’s visit – and to ream them out for not having their tech support person explicitly ask: “Did you press the Internet On/Off button to see if the lights went on?” This question should be at the top of any technical support checklist. I just can’t understand why it wasn’t in this case.
So now my client is happily browsing through the 57 e-mails that piled up for him since Sunday, and I took a few minutes to write about the experience.
Remote technical support is a terrific thing, but it lacks the necessary tactile experience. Sometimes, you just have to be there and see it.
What do you think? Please let me know.