Ever find yourself right up against your moral wall. That happened to me this weekend and although I’m not proud of what my “knee jerk” reaction was (I know now why jerk is in knee jerk) I am glad for the experience.

My Outlook program decided to bite the dust and simply not let me access emails or send any. I have a new Dell Inspiron that is “insured” up to the hilt (so I thought) because I love my computer…but I don’t understand how to fix things when they go down. Not at all.

I call Dell and spend close to three hours (most of it on hold) trying to get this fixed. The final half hour was spent with someone who could fix it…but wouldn’t unless I paid them.

Turns out my four year extended warranty and my four year extended technical warranty doesn’t include software. Now go figure…what would technical mean to you. Plus the last question I asked when buying this beauty was, “Is my system now completely covered?” Yes yes I’m told.

I hear myself saying for the second time in three days something about a class action law suit. I’m so angry at Dell for what feels like trickery and certainly no concept of customer service. (I noticed that not one of the people I spoke to emailed me that “customer feedback” form!)

But that’s not why I’m upset with myself.

I turn to the dreaded Microsoft for assistance. With help (bless my Tom) we (well he) found a phone number for customer service. It took about 5 minutes for me to get to a live person. Stephanie listens to my plight and says, “We can fix that and here is your case number.” I’ll transfer you to our technical support desk (I knew technical meant software!).

I get the dreaded Muzak and wonder how long I’ll linger here tightly clutching my case number when a young man picks up the phone (three minutes maybe). Zafar is his name and this is where I get on tricky moral ground. I can’t really place his accent. I hear myself thinking, “Oh no am I in

India

? This will never get fixed.”

I ask a couple of quick questions and determine he’s on the east coast of

Canada

and feel a little better. Turns out however, I’m right and Zafar can’t fix my problem.

That said, my time with him felt well spent as he did some good diagnostics and then sent me to the ‘expert desk’.

Here is where I really fail. The next person who answers the phone is a young woman. I’m totally OK with that except she is somewhere in
India

(turns out to be from the Southern tip actually).

My heart sinks because I’ve been “outsourced” before and it never works.”

I’m going to shorten this up a bunch and give you the bottom line. Vanitha spent more than 5 hours with me and managed to keep calm (and keep me calm too) until she was able to walk me through everything I needed to do in order to fix Outlook. In the end we had to create an entire new identity and move all my email (we are talking years here) over as well as my other data.

Flawless performance. She was wonderful…and interesting.

I learned a couple of things from this experience. At least this woman in

India

would never see herself as an “outsource” person. She works for Microsoft and has done for the last 18 months. She understands the meaning of customer service…and it is much more than simply being completely competent to fix my problem. This woman cared, was kind, and seemed to fully understand my frustration and fear at loosing my work and emails.

So what’s the deal here? Those fellas at Dell based upon accents (or the lack thereof) fell into North American white category. There were four of them over two days and they proved themselves to be rude, uncaring and not very clever.

Yet I didn’t find myself throwing all North American men (or people) into a category of incapable. And this is not the first time I’ve dealt with poor customer service at the hands of North American brethren.

But I found myself quick (way too quick) to do that with people who don’t …I don’t know … sound familiar. I lumped them all into one category with little or no thought. Oh I get that I maybe had to ask Vanitha to repeat things a few times because my ear had not yet familiarized itself to her accent. Big deal.

In the end it’s all about my arrogance isn’t it.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 14th, 2005 at 2:48 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.