GEEKNOTE: Customer service takes many forms. Sometimes, the things we do are obvious. Sometimes, not so much.
One of our customers had a lightning strike a few weeks ago and his almost new computer died a few days later. If we had been looking to make excuses, it would have been easy to just tell him that his warranty didn't cover lightning damage (it doesn't). Instead, we RMA'd the board and sent him home with a repaired system the next day at no charge.
We sold another customer an inexpensive Acer desktop system last month. Acer desktops, like most brand name systems, are warrantied by the manufacturer and you have to pay to ship them in for repair and wait for them to be repaired and returned. On this particular desktop, there were a couple of odd incidents with connectivity / data corruption that we traced down to a bad NIC (ethernet port) on the motherboard. The cheap solution would have been to install a network card and forget the whole thing or tell the customer that it was their responsibility to send the machine back to Acer and wait a couple of weeks to get it back. That is not how we do business. I dropped over Friday and swapped their hard drive into an identical brand new system and sent the defective system back to Acer at our expense.
I'm not a pessimist at heart, but I am a realist. Not every new electronic device works as specified out of the box. I built a nice custom system for a customer this past week. As part of my normal precautions, I burned the system in on my work bench for a couple of days. Electronics tend to fail early or run for years. In this case, my caution paid off. The motherboard died. I replaced it before I delivered the computer to the customer and RMA'd the bad board back to the manufacturer. In this case, the customer will never know what I did to make sure that his new computer was as great as we promised.
Sometimes, it is simply a matter of us watching things behind the scenes. We have a growning number of customers for whom we provide network monitoring and IT management services. We get automated alerts when our monitoring system notices something going south and we suppliment that with manual checks on certain "mission critical" customer systems.
I'm taking call this weekend so I've quietly logged into one particular customer's servers a few times just to make sure that everything was running as it should. This particular customer has a 24x7 business and so issues with their billing software (Quickbooks) can quickly turn into a major problem. This particular customer also has my cell phone number and has used it in the past to call me late on a Sunday night when Quickbooks has acted up. Knowing that everything is running well Sunday afternoon improves the odds of my getting a good night's sleep tonight.
I ran a backup software update on another customer's server earlier this afternoon. I'm pretty sure that they don't even realize that I get regular reports to let me know that all is well with their server. They just know that I'm keeping an eye on things for them and things simply work.
Neither customer will ever get an invoice for the few minutes it took me to touch their systems this weekend to make sure that everything was running properly. It's just one of those little things we do for our managed IT customers.
You may be wondering "What is managed IT?" Stay tuned for next week's GEEKNOTE to find out how it applies to both individuals and businesses...
Rob Marlowe, Senior Geek
Gulfcoast Networking, Inc.
http://www.gulfcoastnetworking.com
