Posted 10/20/09 at 09:12:00 PM by Ryan Whitwam

We’ve all experienced that feeling of dread when a gadget is dropped. The more unlucky among us are also familiar with the horror felt after realizing that our once beloved thingamajig is now junk. Paul Gowder must have felt that after dropping his Kindle 2 recently, leading to a damaged screen. He, however, moved past that and decided to get Amazon to replace his Kindle.

Paul felt that it was pretty unreasonable for the Kindle’s screen to break, seeing as it was in a messenger bag at the time. His story fell on deaf ears at Amazon, where he was offered a replacement unit for $200, provided he returned the broken one. He agreed, but Paul wasn’t through with these Amazon folk.

It turns out that Paul went to law school, and he set about crafting a seriously frightening letter to Amazon. Among other things, he cited Amazon’s drop test video for the Kindle 2. Since his Kindle broke after a much less severe drop, Paul claimed that Amazon was misrepresenting the product. All he asked was that Amazon pay him $400. Shockingly, they did. Net gain to Paul: $200 and a new Kindle. Well played, sir… well played.

You can check out Paul’s letter, as well as Amazon’s response at the read link.

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Posted 10/09/09 at 06:04:34 PM by Jason Barry

Twitter made an embarrassing mistake this week by suspending security researcher Mikko Hyppönen’s account for allegedly sending direct messages containing phishing URLs. Hyppönen realized Twitter had unexpectedly banned his account without any warning yesterday.  He received a message from them last night with a customer-service-disaster of an explanation:

“I've unsuspended your acct.
You were suspended for using the malware URL rnyspeceDOTcom in DMs.
Be careful!
We scan evrythng for malware.”

It’s all downhill from there.   Hyppönen posted the tweet they are referring to months ago trying to deter users from visiting a particular phishing site.  He took precautions to make sure it was not linkable and even included the warning “don’t go there” in the tweet.  Not only is the post benign but its intent is actually altruistic.

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Posted 07/21/08 at 04:29:49 PM by The Maximum PC Staff

I was a victim of the Symantec triple-license AV software whose timer started ticking with the first installation (March 2008). I called Symantec’s customer service number and complained, and the company fixed it for me by resetting the timer to start with the third installation. This rectified the situation to my satisfaction, and I learned a lesson.

Fast forward a year to a similar three-pack from Computer Associates. Being careful, I installed all three licenses on the same day to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues with the expiration date. As soon as the software ran an update cycle with the home server, it took three weeks off my license! I called CA and the company fixed the problem. The culprit? It seems the clock started ticking when I bought the package (or so I was told). But how did they know when I bought it?

Customer service didn’t say, but I bet it’s from the rebate form I sent in after buying the software. I had purchased the software locally prior to the expiration date of the current antivirus software on the systems I was using and waited a few weeks until the current licenses expired before installing the new copy—a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

This strikes me as an extremely deceptive practice. I wonder if anyone else has been bitten by this?

Answers for Louis (and the rest of us) after the jump.

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Posted 07/09/08 at 08:25:30 AM by Chris Moody

It turns out that off-shoring tech support and customer service might not be such a great deal for companies after all. A paper titled, “Does Offshoring Impact Customer Satisfaction?” posted on ssrn.com for feedback, touches on the subject. There is plenty of evidence that off-shoring saves companies money on their bottom dollar, but what hasn’t been looked at until now is how it affects customer satisfaction and loyalty. What is surprising is not that the papers over all conclusions that in customer service off-shoring is bad but that back office functions like tech support can be a good thing for customer perception. I find that hard to believe from a tech’s aspect. 

If you’re the tech Guru for your circle of friends and family you know that they all cringe at the thought of calling tech support. They will relate horror stories of speaking to someone claiming to be named “Bob”, who is reading text from a computer screen in a hard to understand, thick accent. This is why they call you with their technical woes. The paper however suggests that this alone isn’t what causes customer dissatisfaction, but rather the perceived lack of expertise.

 Make the jump to hear more about off-shoring and the invasion of the computer puppets!

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