Once again the ineptness of many of the phone tech support services reared its ugly head again. This time it was Sony's phone support. I worked with a client to set up his new Sony Vaio laptop (great screen by the way) and found that he was not shipped the Microsoft Office 2007 CD or certificate of authenticity that he paid extra for at purchase. Without the certificate, we could not activate the Office product. We called tech support and after 35+ minutes at three different people at two numbers, we were told that a call would be made back to my client within "three hours".
About four hours later, I received a call from my client saying that the tech's did call back and after working with them on the phone for nearly another hour he was in the middle of a reformat!!! I said, "WHAT???" Too often tech support people on the phone get frustrated that the problem is not getting resolved and resort to the all to easy and much over used "reformat" the system. It is an extremely easy tactic for the phone support person to take a break from the call without every resolving the issue.
I reformat systems all the time…but only when they truly need it. In this particular case, all we needed was a simple 25 digit authenticity code from Microsoft. Sony could have easily said, "0ur mistake, we will put a disk and certificate in the mail today." They would have had an extremely satisfied customer and resolved the issue in under ten minutes. But that would make too much sense, instead they used up at least two hours of phone and tech time to NOT resolve the issue.
Uggh, I get so mad I could spit nails at the lack of common sense and decency in today's business world.
On an aside, situations such as these really solidify my resolve to help people discover the world of free, open-source software and support. Paying for a product used to mean that we could count on getting a solid product and support. Unfortunately, that is no longer the case.
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