Posted on August 15, 2006 at 2:36 PM in @earthlink
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
It's sort of like Pizza sending out for you.
Often in a blog entry when you see the terms "India" and "tech support" in the same sentence, you've come to expect some sort of bitter rant to follow. I've received my share of e-mails and read my share of blog entries about bad support experiences, ours included. Last night I had an unexpected, amusing, and positive experience with our customer service team overseas that made me think about how small the world has become.
It was unexpected because in this case, it was customer service contacting *me*, not the other way around. It was amusing because there I was at 10pm in front of the TV in my living room, chatting with a customer service representative in Hyderabad, India and helping to explain RSS and our Reader product to a customer in need of assistance. And it was positive because at the end of it, the customer service rep learned what he wanted to know, and the customer had his or her problem solved. It was neat to see a customer service person take on the customer's problem as his own, and charge at it like a rhino until he had resolved it. I'll explain in a minute how he decided to contact me.
It was around 10pm. I was watching the 8th inning of the Red Sox/Tigers game with half of my attention, reading stuff online, and chatting on IM with colleagues in Pasadena and friends down the road. An invitation to add someone to my address book popped up, and it was a name I didn't recognize. I looked him up, and saw that he was part of our customer support team in India, and accepted the invitation.
I probably sounded a little grumpy and I had no idea what to expect when Dan M asked me if he could have a few minutes of my time. But then, there I was in my living room chatting with someone in India about one of my favorite products. How grumpy could I really be, and how many jobs in the world could bring about a circumstance like
that? It turned out he was helping a customer who was having trouble adding the Huffington Post RSS feed to their Reader account.
Together, Dan and I figured out that the customer was trying to add the feed through the OPML import box, not the "add a source" box. And also, they may have been trying to add a URL that was slightly off. I created a new account so I could see exactly what to direct the customer to do, and Dan did the same. I think we bonded over Reader.
While I was waiting to make sure everything was ok, I asked Dan how he decided to get in touch with me. He said he had read my blog article from December on RSS (which now needs an update), and figured I'd know how to help out with the subject. He looked me up in the company directory, and then reached out. Reader is a product that's still only officially launched to a subset of our users, so all of the customer service teams don't have all of their resources and training on it yet. I obviously can't be available 24/7 to help answer questions, but I was really proud that Dan was so creative and smart in getting to the bottom of the customer's problem with whatever he had to work with. And it was great to meet him.
Comments
great story, great phone rep
Posted by garayr | August 16, 2006 1:16 AM
I have run out of options so I am appealing to you. Three weeks ago I tried to implement my SSL through my Earthlink ecommerce hosting and they informed me they had a glitch. I cannot take orders over my site yet and consistently get the runaround via phone
and live chat. I have a lot of inventory just sitting here. Suggestions?
Posted by Colleen O'Kane | August 18, 2006 11:47 PM