Brampton Factor: Customer woes

Ever been infuriated by a hardware maker or IT service provider who just didn't seem to care about you? Martin Brampton shares two recent tales of customer service woe - and ponders what they mean for IT users everywhere.

For homes and small businesses, highly sophisticated technology is incredibly cheap. Sadly when things go wrong, support is likely to be abysmal. It's two sides of the same coin - larger organisations forever cut customer service costs in the name of 'efficiency'. The result is a good experience if things go well and an awful one if they don't.

On the good side I recently bought a wireless Ethernet bridge for my office. It allows me to link four devices through a 100Mbps switch to a wireless network running up to 54Mbps. This is amazing technology. The switch alone would have cost thousands of pounds a few years ago. As it is, two Ethernet cables cost me nearly as much as the smart device. And it plugged in and worked with only a little head scratching.

But other recent experiences have demonstrated the dark side. Just how weak our position as consumers is was brought home to me when I assisted a neighbour with setting up broadband. All went smoothly until we tried to use the service, a couple of days past the stated live date. It was plainly not live. In the following week a BT engineer appeared, although nothing was said about what he was doing. Eventually, signs of life started appearing although the service was intermittent and slow.

Notification that the service was live came only a month after the original stated date but invoicing started long before this. On questioning the provider (an independent ISP who has to buy the actual basic service from BT Wholesale, which in many areas like mine has a monopoly) it was made clear the actual commitment to service provided by BT is astoundingly low. To be more precise, there is no commitment at all.

The ISP starts billing from the date BT says the service has started. Unfortunately, broadband is described as a non-guaranteed service - it has no assured service level. So if you are not receiving any service, that does not mean BT cannot charge. Moreover, BT is not under any obligation to give notification when the service starts. The consumer is thus in the position of having no reliable means of knowing when the service starts. Notification may fail to be forthcoming, as may the service itself. The only thing guaranteed is that the customer has to pay.

And while all this was going on, I was also battling with another piece of networking equipment with far less success than the Ethernet bridge. At home, we have had a wireless router for several years to share internet access among several people. On the whole it has worked fine but more recently needed to be switched off and back on again every couple of days. This became annoying so early in January I ordered a replacement. With the march of technology, it seemed sensible to choose the latest draft 802.11n wireless standard. That turned out to be a mistake.

The first unit to arrive would not connect to the wireless PCs with any degree of reliability. At this point, I had to resort to calling the manufacturer's technical support. After suffering the usual delays and recorded announcements, I was forced to go through a tedious series of tests. The best part of a day was used up this way, until the manufacturer agreed the unit should be returned.

Now returns to the dealer are not handled with anything like the same enthusiasm as sales. The procedure was convoluted and slow. So it was late January before we had a replacement for a unit that had effectively been dead on arrival almost a month earlier.

The second unit seemed to work until people started complaining they could only send very short emails. More testing suggested that only emails of well under 1,000 characters could get through. Back to phoning technical support. On the phone, the suggestions made no sense, involving a protocol that was not actually in use. So the operator suggested reporting the problem by email instead. The email was ignored. So was the next and the next. Eventually, after numerous attempts to chase the issue, it was again agreed the unit was defective and should be returned.

Now, in the middle of March, I have no new router at all, although I paid for one in early January. If the old router had been totally failed rather than inclined to go to sleep occasionally, we would have been in real trouble. As it is, the amount of time wasted is hugely out of proportion to what should have been a simple issue.

There are some support services available for homes and small businesses. BT runs one of them but given their level of broadband service, I have not felt inclined to sign up. The services are probably useful at times but the issues that have caused me trouble are specific to products or services and can only be resolved through the supply chain. Having someone else to chase it all up for me would have been prohibitively expensive.

You might say that my experiences were atypical but there is plenty of evidence that this is not so. Many online retailers now encourage customer reviews. And it is evident that others are having similar problems to mine. Many of the reviews are glowing but a significant minority slate the product. Why? Because they had a problem and had to resort to technical support. Often, they report that the 'support' was simply inadequate, and some fail to ever achieve a resolution.

Maybe we have to resign ourselves to a percentage of the high technology products we buy being simply unusable. But that goes against the grain, especially as success in dealing with IT problems is often dependent on a dogged determination not to be beaten by mere technology.