I just came back from a very, very, short client visit \u2013 and I feel bad about it.\u00a0 Not because I couldn\u2019t solve the problem that he called about (I did).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The issue he was experiencing:\u00a0 no Internet connectivity.<\/p>\n
My client called me on Tuesday, right after the July 4th holiday weekend, and said that he could not connect to the Internet.\u00a0 He\u2019s 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.\u00a0 He told me that he thought the problem started sometime on Sunday evening, but that he waited until after the holiday to call me.<\/p>\n
He said that the lights on the modem were not all lit, and asked if that could be the problem.\u00a0 I told him that it sounded like a bad modem.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 He was willing to do that.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 Good for him, right?\u00a0 No, not really \u2013 the appointment could not be narrowed down to anything other than between 9 am and 7 pm.\u00a0 My client was going to be a captive in his office with nothing to do but wait.<\/p>\n
I managed to take a few spare minutes this afternoon, and decided to see what was going on.\u00a0 Maybe I could do something.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 There was a button next to the lights that had a label, \u201cInternet On\/Off.\u201d\u00a0 I pressed the button and the other two lights on the modem turned on immediately.\u00a0 I am guessing that my client\u2019s foot accidentally kicked the button sometime on Sunday, suddenly ending the Internet connection.<\/p>\n
So why do I feel bad?\u00a0 Because I could have cleared this up in one minute when he called initially.\u00a0 However, I just didn\u2019t have the time.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 This is something I plan to work on in the next few months.<\/p>\n
My parting instructions to my client were to call Time Warner Cable and cancel the technician\u2019s visit \u2013 and to ream them out for not having their tech support person explicitly ask:\u00a0 \u201cDid you press the Internet On\/Off button to see if the lights went on?\u201d\u00a0 This question should be at the top of any technical support checklist.\u00a0 I just can\u2019t understand why it wasn\u2019t in this case.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Remote technical support is a terrific thing, but it lacks the necessary tactile experience.\u00a0 Sometimes, you just have to be there and see it.<\/p>\n
What do you think?\u00a0 Please let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I just came back from a very, very, short client visit \u2013 and I feel bad about it.\u00a0 Not because I couldn\u2019t solve the problem that he called about (I did).\u00a0 I feel bad because I could not arrange to get to see him for more than a day and a half, and the problem …<\/span> Read More →<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-users","category-small-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.heliotropicsystems.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}