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Microsoft...
Subliminal
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I sent in an XBOX 360 ELITE with a broken disc drive, and a few weeks later I got a BRAND NEW ELITE with a broken fucking disc drive THEN! I send it back ($26.00 each time) and they send me an old WHITE XBOX 360, with NO HDMI OUTPUT! I call them, and after about 3 hours of being on hold since they didnt know how to react... They tell me call back in 3 to 5 days to see what they can do for me.
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how about you call back and talk to a manager like somebody with a spine would do?
Wow, that is messed up, there's no reason you should have to pay shipping but that's still crazy that they messed up so many times, I heard they were pretty good with the repairing.
Final Fantasy XI -> Carbuncle - Samash
Call them back and ask to speak to a Manager or someone in charge, be polite and explain to them what happened in detail, listing that this is the *second* time they screwed up.
you kind of have to laugh at the retardedness of the situation.
I laughed the third time my 360 got the RROD.
What the fuck? Isn't this one of the biggest companies in the world?
Do you actually think you are talking to someone that works for microsoft? Chances are probably not. You are more than likely talking to someone who works for a call center that has been contracted out by microsoft. (or not I'm talking out my ass here but...) I used to work in a call center for a company that was a world wide contractor... when a company contracted the help out we were put through a 3 week training course and sent to man the phones knowing fuck all about the company we were "working" for. I quit that job not long after starting
Just a edit, there were several major companies using this company including Citi bank and a few government agencies... after working there I have no faith in phone support any more.
<end or drunken rambling>
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
Then right when Mass Effect came out, the one guy got an RROD and had to send it in for repairs. Just before his replacement arrived, his room mate's (the other guy) got an RROD and had to send it in. Then they went to visit a friend (the third guy) in another city. They were able to play Mass Effect one night, but then the next day the third guy got RROD'd.
It was a crazy coincidence that three RRODs occurred so close to each other. But kind of funny in a way, too.
Suckers. 's what they get for doubtin' me, dammit!
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
this is the best burn ive seen in a long time. loughed out loud at 7 am. almost sigworthy.
You shouldn't have to call for a manager in the first place. Yeah, pushing for one makes sense, but goddamn... hearing about those customer service black holes pisses me the fuck off.
But on this third repair, I'm getting special treatment via a manager-type lady calling me every 3 or so days to let me know what's going on with the repair, she's sending me a brand new power supply/cable (supposedly the power supply/cable could have been causing 360s to burn out, she said), and she also really wants to give me some form of compensation for my scratched games caused by the bad disk drive. 8-)
No, you shouldn't have to, but you will have to and most likely always will. What littleboots said earlier is quite right and in a contracted call centre, very few people care at all. Speaking to managers is the way forward. The team managers in these places do very little and will have the time to sort out your problem...or make someone else sort it out. They are about the only people in call centres who dont want complaints raised.
PSN ID - S-Starwind (Playing Super Street Fighter IV Arcade Edition, Gundam Battle Ops)
Final Fantasy XIV - Masamune Server (Moving to Sargantanas) - Rykosho Hoshikaze
Steam ID - The Starwind
Called back today, tracking number is there but still doesn't work. So I don't really know what the deal was, but the guy I talked to today seemed much friendlier and willing to help and actually gave me his number and extension, and said he was gonna call the service center and find out what the hell the deal was since it was taking longer then it should.
So, I'm pretty sure Ive got Rock Band sitting in the living room on Christmas, and no 360 to play it still.
Yeah, we don't give a shit about the contracted company.
as a matter of fact, oftentimes a call center will be contracted to several companies at once. So even if one company burns to the ground, the workload for call center employees doesn't even change; it just lets a higher volume of calls in from the other companies.
It's seriously a shitty job. You're constantly on the phone. Soon as you hang up, it rings again. You solve the same problems for different persons over and over and over. Think it feels good to help someone fix a problem and hear their gratitude? Try getting that gratitude only to hang up and have another call from someone else within 2 seconds with the exact same problem.
Think being angry and yelling/cursing into the phone will get call center employees to listen up? Yeah, right. You know what happens when we get angry callers? We make up some shit about their problem so we can put them on hold for a few seconds while we laugh and make fun of the situation with our coworkers. "Oh man, this guy, he's so pissed off about! He's threatening to come over here and burn the place down if we don't fix it, hahah!.....*picks up the phone*... Yes sir, I've looked into your issue and it appears we need to etc."
Call center employees have an indirect relationship with these companies. We couldn't care less what happens to the companies. The only thing that gets any call center employees to care about anything is empathy for the people calling. Now try to imagine just how many people at these jobs care about the customers as people. I did, I tried my best to help out these people. But I was one out of a million, and I couldn't take the bullshit repetitive and boring nature of the job for long, even part time. The fact is, most of the employees care only about their call times, because that's how we're judged as employees.
That's right, our jobs are rated based on how quickly we can end calls. Because that's supposedly measures how quickly we resolve the problem. But the fact is, a lot of these employees will make up some shit and tell the callers to do something and call back later so that they can get a short call time, and the customer ends up on the phone with someone else with the same problem.
I personally would spend as much time as I could - which we had a limit before we were forced to transfer to the second level of support/cust. service - to try to solve the issue, regardless of my call time (I was part time and temporary so i could care less about my job performance rating based on call time). I helped out a lot more people than these asshats who would do what they could just to get people off the phone as fast as possible.
In the end, my manager was begging me to stay when I told him I was quitting. And that was because I went against what I was told and tried to actually help peopl.e
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Also don't forget that most people in the call center who get a raise or a new position to the "second level of support" usually do so because of these measured metrics and not due to any knowledge they may have of the product/service being offered.
I'm actually considering purchasing an Elite since it's a lot less noisy and I've heard it has less DRE problems so this topic is kind of worrying me. So, more details please.
PSN = Wicker86 ________ Gamertag = Wicker86
Absolutely. I was about to edit that into my little story, but you've already hit on it.
Think a person like me, who actually had empathy for these people, and would spend time to actually fix the issue, would get raised to the second level of support/cust. service?
Fuck no. Because actually helping people and thoroughly solving their problem takes time.
And time is by far the highest weighted metric for call center employees.
So these asshats that get calls about something that takes more than a few minutes to fix? They make up something like.. "Ok sir, check your such-and-such and call back if it doesn't work." All that ends up happening is the caller will hang up, do what they were told, it fails, and they're forced to call back and wait in a fucking hold-cue for Lord knows how long, and wind up with a different call representative.
The original call rep. gets rewarded for his short call time, and the pissed off caller who has wasted not one but two instances of waiting in a call que on hold and waste time talking about the same problem to 2 employees gets nothing but a major headache.
Want to know what the "top employees'" average call time at my center was?
3.5 minutes.
That's right. You think you can actually solve a customer's issue in three minutes? Fuck no you can't. It usually takes at least a minute to enter their information and a minute for them to describe the problem. That means that these "top representatives" are spending a minute and a half "resolving" the issue. When in reality, they are actually costing the caller time and frustration, and wasting the call center (and thus the contracting company's) time and money and resources.
Who gets promoted?
The people whose call times are 3.5 minutes. Meanwhile, people such as myself, who talk through the issues with these people and are polite and help them get a permanent fix on their issue? Our call times regularly go up to 12 minutes (my average). I would try -everything- to help the person, because I was only doing this job temporarily and didn't give a shit about my metrics. Our -maximum- time limit on calls was 20 minutes before we were -forced- to transfer to the second level of support/service, but if I was on the verge of fixing the issue, I'd keep going with the caller to get it fixed, and I did every time. The idea is that if a level 1 rep. can't solve the issue in 20 minutes, it's more efficient to let an "experienced" level 2 rep. resolve the issue more quickly. Hah.
People like me get stuck in the lowest level of the company. People that disregard the customer and waste company resources get promoted.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Welcome to the world of corporate power. Quit crying, because this is what you are going to have to do.
Sorry to say it, but when it comes to customer service now-a-days you HAVE to call and ask for a manager.
I worked customer service/sales for a short while for Sam's Club, and management told us to get away with as much as possible (in a subversive manner, mind you). Stiffing people out of their money is corporate doctrine these days. Deal with it, because short of a retail boycott, you fleas aren't gonna do crap about it, because they have all the merchandise you want, and there is no where else for you to get it.
Exactly! And to bring it back to "asking for a manager", as you would know but others may not, you don't actually usually get the "manager" of the person you are talking to. As has been pointed out most of the time the place you are calling isn't even "Microsoft" but is actually something like "Inandtech outsourcing" (made up name partially stolen from Office Space) or whatever. So the "manager" has nothing to do with the damn company (and really couldn't care less about your issue) and is only responsible for that person (and many others) attendance and making sure they meet their metrics. When you ask for a "manager", chances are you are getting one of these promoted "specialists".
You misunderstood me. I agree, that's how it is. It's just not how it should be.
I'm a manager (the underpaid, low-level type you'll actually get on the phone, though I don't work for a vendor) on one of the few non-outsourced customer service teams at MS. We support licensing and pre-sales questions for partners and corporations. More importantly (in my mind) we're supporting a number of initiatives to "sell" our processes to service delivery managers (SDMs) across the company. Standardizing contact lists, escalation channels, and most importantly, methods to impress the ability and need to take some fucking ownership of issues on outsourced reps.
So, I agree, that's the reality in the corporate world. But it still pisses me off to hear about it at MS.
Someday... someday.
all of my 360 woes have been DREs.
Although, I hear that running it vertically causes problems, and all my 360's have been upright. my new 360, with the best drive, has been running horizontally. 3 weeks old and not a problem... yet.
Also, Thats bullshit. You bought an elite. You should get one back. The whole garbage of them sending back something that is not identical in the least is complete utter crap. No one should be treated so disrespectfully.
You shouldn't run it vertically for one simple reason: if it tips while a disk is in the drive, you can say goodbye to that disk.
well, my 360 was in an area of my room where it couldn't be tipped. like, it was pretty impossible to accidentally reach it. But that's neither here nor there, now, since I run it horizontally.
?! My 360 scratched up my Guitar Hero II disk. I'm calling them up.
Edit: Who exactly do you call? Microsoft's web site isn't being much help.
Yikes, customer support barely speaks english. Should be good times.
Come on
You can PM me if you don't want to admit it publicly
But we've all worked there once in our lives. I know I have.
CUZ THERE'S SOMETHING IN THE MIDDLE AND IT'S GIVING ME A RASH
Mine was ICT Group, though I'm not allowed to say what company I was contracted for while I was there. Its not like I think they'll ever find out if I did say but god knows what kind of shit I signed when I started working there
Tofu wrote: Here be Littleboots, destroyer of threads and master of drunkposting.
PSN = Wicker86 ________ Gamertag = Wicker86
I purchased mine there, and anytime it freezes or I want a new one, I just box it up, bring it to the nearest Costco and get another one. Last time, I got a new one, which had the falcon processor and HDMI and got refunded $80 since the price had dropped.