Techy: Customers – Read The “Fine” Instructions

Well, that’s been fun! It’s been a strange 72 hours in the techy land of Richy – and to enable me to look back and go what the f—k (WTF), here’s just one of the incidents I’ve had to deal with…

Last week we had a customer report that he was having problems sending email – basically the mail server was rejecting his mail. This is our most frequently asked question (and it’s now had a step by step guide published on our FAQ/Knowledge base about it) and the situation is always the same – the customer has put our mail server in the SMTP (outgoing mail) settings. They need to have their ISPs mail server in this field as our servers don’t permit remote relaying of mail (also known as ‘open relays’). So I sent this customer an email saying that he needs to change his outgoing mail server to be that of his ISPs and heresponds with details of which email package he is using and which ISP dialup/ADSL/ISDN or broadband connection he is using then we’ll provide a step by step walk thru. This was sent within 6 hours of his initial query.

A few days later we get a report from him saying that he’s still having trouble sending email and we explain the situation again (one of my co-worked actually handled this incident). He responds with telling us he’s running Microsoft Outlook 2002. Well that’s good – at least we can now tell him where to change the settings, but we’ve still got no idea what the settings should be. Within 3 hours he sends yet another message reporting that nothing has been done to fix the situation. 20 minutes after that an another message. Sheesh – impatient ain’t he? I respond asking, yet again, for his ISPs details.

He finally tells me he’s with Freeserve. I pop over to their website and grab their SMTP mail server settings and then email him the Outlook settings saying “change this field. As explained, you need to have your ISPs mail server in the outgoing mail field and not ours” – I then do a little explaination to the reason why.

A day later I got an email saying “It seems to be working now” (what a surprise!). So, on closing the helpdesk ticket, I send an email to him saying the issue is now closed, that you are satisified with the result and that if he has any more problems to open another ticket on our helpdesk system or call our technical support line and we will help him.

A few hours later I get a very snotty email back (cc’d to my boss) saying he’s less than satisified about the situation especially since it took over a week to fix. I haven’t yet replied to him for a couple of reasons – one, he sent it after I finished work on Friday so I haven’t “officially” received that email yet and two: it was a setting he had messed up on his end and there was nothing we could do to fix it from our end (and wasn’t our problem). We offered to provide support “outside our remit” and help him follow basic instructions (the instructions included in my original email to him, his signing up email and the online technical support files on our helpdesk AND his website’s “control panel”) – and yet it’s our fault? The mind boggles!

I needed to get that off my chest!