Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them.
From the announcement:
Extended Update Support allows a customer with a large mission-critical deployment to reduce server administration and management costs by standardizing on a single update release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for up to 18 months--all while preserving stability and data security.
As Red Hat explains, most software companies allow customers to standardize on a minor, "point" release for 6 to 9 months, or at most 12 months. Through its Extended Update Support program, however, Red Hat is letting customers pick a Red Hat Enterprise Linux build and stick with it for up to 18 months, up to three times the industry average. That means less downtime and less need to re-validate software stacks running on RHEL.
The Register provides some additional insight:
While Red Hat commits seven years of support for a major RHEL version, the dot releases within the versions change about every six months. Within those dot releases, the company ensures application compatibility because it doesn't change the runtime environment, the area where the Linux kernel interacts with applications. So even if there are patches for security or bugs and whatnot in the dot release, customers do not have to go through application testing and certification, which can take many months, as long as they stay within a RHEL version.
This is a great service to Red Hat's customers, and provides further evidence that Red Hat's subscription model helps it to be more attuned to customer needs. Red Hat isn't selling an upfront license: it's selling the continued value of an ongoing subscription. By tuning that value to actual customer needs--in this case, the need to disturb production systems as little as possible to reduce risk and save money--Red Hat ensures renewals.
Subscription models align vendor interests with customer interests. Red Hat's Extended Update Support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux is setting the pace. It will be interesting to see who follows.
The largest bank in the United States has officially ignored the second most popular Web browser--until recently.
A tipster for Networkworld.com pointed out recently that Bank of America's Web site did not list the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox as a "supported browser," even though Firefox now commands almost 20 percent of the browser market. The bank's site lists Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Apple's Safari, and Netscape as acceptable browsers.
Netscape? Even AOL, Netscape's former owner, doesn't support Netscape Navigator anymore.
Of course, Firefox, which was released in 2004 and recently set a Guiness record for downloads in a 24-hour period, still works on the BofA Web site--just not officially. The issue apparently came up when a BofA customer contacted the bank about problems he was having accessing the site using Safari. "Please don't tell me to just use Firefox instead," the Networkworld.com reader told BofA customer support.
Not a problem, according to customer support.
"Please note Bank of America does not support Firefox," was customer service's reply.
When posed with the question of why the No.1 bank's Web site did not whole-heartedly embrace the No. 2 browser's 180 million users, a spokeswoman told Networkworld.com that "there is a process that we go through to 'officially support' a browser type and version, which includes in-depth functional and regression testing cycles.
"As the usage of Firefox browsers has increased with our customer base, we will be initiating a full support model for Firefox version 2.x in the very near future," spokeswoman Tara Burke told Networkworld.com.
Think "the very near future" will prove to be very soon? Don't bank on it.
A number of incidents recently illustrated just how poorly trained most tech support people are.
I suspect that they have the jobs they do because they are willing to work cheap. Period. It seems that companies offer very little training to tech support personnel whose main job boils down to reading from a script and being polite.
If you are dealing with a technical problem where you understand the concepts involved, you are likely to be frustrated talking to someone who does not understand the concepts, but is mandated to do step 1, then step 2, then step 3, and not let the facts get in the way.
In this situation, is lying OK?
Hard to say. On the one hand, when script-reading support persons tell you to do x and then y, they may be lying to you. That is, they may have no clue what x or y does or how it might solve the problem. If you know that x and y won't fix the problem, is it OK to lie and say you did it?
I recently had a problem with a standalone VoIP unit the first time I plugged it into a router other than my own. The unit plugs into the Internet on one end and a normal telephone on the other end. The Internet connection was fine, the lights on the router were all normal, but there was no VoIP dial tone. So I called the vendor of the VoIP box.
The tech support person said to first turn off the router, the VoIP unit, and the cable modem and then turn them back on again. This is a reasonable starting point, assuming you have no interest in gathering any additional information about the problem. In my case, I couldn't turn everything off because the Internet connection was needed for something more important than this VoIP problem. That was the end of debugging. If I didn't do step 1, they wouldn't go to step 2 in the script. The fact that the Internet connection was fine, never made it to the radar screen.
I stewed on the problem some more and narrowed it down a bit. Then I called back to provide my additional information about the problem and another support person said the same thing: turn everything off first. Neither support person had any interest in understanding the problem beyond the simple fact that there was no dial tone.
Apparently, they can't handle a full problem description that requires understanding what's going on. For example, neither person asked about the status lights on the front of the VoIP unit.
Eventually, I figured out the VoIP problem myself (it had to do with DHCP vs. static IP address on the LAN) and fixed it without turning off the router.
Update May 23, 2008. Clarified that in the example, I was talking to the vendor of the VoIP unit, not the ISP.
See a summary of all my Defensive Computing postings.
I'm not a big fan of surveys, so I don't quote them often. But a recent Consumer Reports survey about PC manufacturers listed Apple as No. 1 in tech support, with Lenovo second, Dell third, and HP dead last. I should also say that Dell came in second in desktops.
I thought the headline should be "Survey says leading PC maker HP dead last in tech support." But that's not what happened. The media hailed Apple, trashed Dell, and gave HP a pass.
Horror stories about Dell's support are all over the blogosphere. Why is that? I mean, why does the media give Dell such a hard time?
Because perception is reality. But aside from being a pithy statement, what does that really mean? ... Read more
When Robert Pedersen's Dell Inspiron E1705 laptop went on the fritz, he naturally assumed the 5-year Next Day service warranty he purchased would get him instant help from the company's customer service staff.
That was April 18. By May 4, he still had yet to have his guaranteed next-day in-home repair appointment scheduled. And it wasn't for lack of trying. He sums up his frustration on his blog: "Close to a month, 37 different communications, a Certified letter to the CEO of Dell Computers, Inc, and 29 actual hours working directly with Dell Computers, Inc in my attempt to simply get my Dell laptop repaired or replaced."
Pedersen certainly isn't alone. Most people who own a computer can probably cite at least one example of bad customer support or an unresolved technical issue with their PC maker. And to be fair, customer service is one of those thankless jobs. Rarely do we hear or read about good service experiences. Bad customer support is what gets written--or blogged--about.
But Dell seems to get the
So what happened? A combination of doing business in a maturing industry, the resource-intensive demands of being a consumer tech company, and the company's evolving business model is likely what tripped it up.
As disaster stories circulate, public perception also becomes a problem (Hewlett-Packard is ranked 76, while its Compaq brand, for example, is actually last at 73 in the rankings, yet you don't hear noisy complaints about their service as often).
"(Dell is) below the industry average" of 75, said professor Claes Fornell, head of the ACSI at the University of Michigan. "For a company that has really been a high flyer--they were No. 1--for them to drop is problematic."
Consumer Reports this week ranked tech support among PC companies, and Dell came in third in notebook support with a score of 60 out of 100, far behind Apple with 83. It also trailed Apple's score of 81 in desktop support with a score below 60.
It's not as if Dell's not trying or unaware of customer perception. The company says its own metrics show improvement in the past two years. "But we're not finished. We are going to put much more rigor around our service delivery record and aim to improve so we can meet our customer expectations in this critical part of the business," said company spokesman Bob Kaufman.
Dell is known for actively taking suggestions from customers, and has already poured millions of dollars into improving how it helps its customers. Last month Dell announced the availability of more premium services for consumers for more specialized support, and two years ago the company said it would invest $100 million in tech support and put more resources behind its remote support operation. Experts say two years should be more than enough time to show improvement in customer satisfaction.
Luckily, those same customer service gurus say there are concrete steps the computer maker can take to get customer service back on track:
Decide what you are
The tension seems to lie with Dell's identity: Is it a manufacturing company? Or a consumer products company? Manufacturing companies are always looking at the bottom line. Cutting costs and doing more with fewer resources to squeeze the most value it can.
Consumer-facing companies, particularly technology companies, have to do a lot of handholding with customers. And tech support is resource intensive: it requires knowledgeable people answering the phones helping callers who may or may not know the difference between, say, a USB port and an Ethernet port. To this point, Dell says that 80 percent of the time most computers that have issues, the problem is not the hardware.
Another key to the company's troubles is likely found in how fast it grew, says Donald Rosenfield, a senior lecturer in management and operations strategy at MIT's Sloan School of Management. Dell became the largest manufacturer of PCs in the world in the early part of this decade, but after dominating, has since dropped to No. 2.
"When a company grows, sometimes they don't pay as much attention to all aspects of the process as they should," said Rosenfield. "In Dell's case, they didn't focus on services as much as they should have."
Plus, he said, the focus on cost reduction to stay competitive in a commoditizing industry, didn't help. "That led them to trouble in last year or two, though they have tried to devote a lot more attention and resources to customer service."
Customers love customization
Customer satisfaction can be measured in three basic ways: Price, quality of the product and service, and the fit between customer needs and a company. In his years of doing the ACSI, Fornell says price is the least important. Second-most important is the quality of product of service.
"The one that's the most critical of all is rarely discussed," he said. "The fit between the customers specific needs and wants and what the company is offering." In other words, customization is king.
Dell began business selling made-to-order PCs. You could say there's been a correlation between Dell's customer satisfaction ranking and shift in the company's business model. As the PC industry has matured, as Dell became more popular as a brand, and the company's direct model moved toward offering more mass-produced computers, including now at mainstream retail.
A possible fix for Dell's service woes could lie in more customization, or better product targeting or segmentation. "If you have a good fit between buyer and seller, you have a high level of satisfaction," said Fornell.
Get up close and personal
Another way to improve could be to have more in-person support. Though online or remote tech support is cheaper and sometimes enough to fix a problem, face-to-face service could lead to more satisfied customers.
"A lot of their problems stemmed from, as they expanded rapidly and they tended to outsource their operations, they set up these call centers around the world. I don't think the service they were getting out of them was as good as it was before they did all this expansion," said Rosenfield.
Invest in quality
Of course, there's another way around all of these issues--the Maytag approach, or making products that don't break. Consumer Reports says that all PC companies, from Apple to Lenovo, see the same quantity of service calls generally.
It's a change the Japanese auto industry embraced two decades ago, and Fornell says the entire PC industry could benefit.
"They just made sure customers didn't have to go to dealerships for service and made cars very reliable," he said. "There would probably be a market for a more costly product if it could be demonstrated that it was more reliable and did not break."
What manufacturer wouldn't want that?
Compaq Portable II, c. 1986
(Credit: Oldcomputers.net)Believe it or not, my high-tech career began using punch cards and card readers to enter data into an IBM mainframe computer. When we got keyboards and monitors, we used them to enter what we called "card images."
As a chip designer in the '80s, I used GE Calma, Apollo, Daisy, Valid, and Mentor workstations. I had to know a whole smorgasbord of platforms and operating systems. I don't know how I did it. Guess I had a lot more brain cells back then.
... Read moreMy 3-year-old Hewlett-Packard PC stopped playing optical discs a couple of months ago. Not only were the built-in DVD and CD-ROM drives out of commission, I couldn't even get a brand-new external DVD drive to work. I searched and searched for driver updates, but came up empty. It wasn't until I happened upon a Registry patch on Chris Pirillo's great Lockergnome site that I got the machine to recognize the optical drives.
The patch was provided by a volunteer who had no affiliation with HP, Microsoft, or the drive vendors. It's not uncommon for PC experts to tell people to update their drivers, but I wonder if these people ever look for updates themselves.
Here's another example: I've got a Samsung SyncMaster 170MP LCD monitor that I've been using for going on five years now. It's a great little monitor (though at 17 inches diagonal it wasn't considered "little" when I bought it). Unfortunately, when I upgraded to Vista, I noticed some minor pixel swimming. As PC nuisances go, the dancing pixels are trivial--they're apparent only where a dark window edge meets a light one--but I'd rather they stopped their shuffling.
I just visited the support section of Samsung's site only to find that the company doesn't offer a Vista version of the driver for this model. Nor could I find one at any of the many sites that specialize in device-driver downloads. So I guess I'll have to put up with the pixel sizzle until I collect enough loose change to buy a new Vista-ready monitor.
Rules for avoiding hardware obsolescence
1) Don't upgrade your operating system. If the OS didn't come with the hardware, there's a great chance that an update will render some of your PC's components unusable.
2) Don't expect hardware vendors to support the products you buy from them more than a year after the purchase. In fact, you can't count on much help from them at all after the standard warranties expire. You may get troubleshooting help from other users of the products, however.
3) Before you buy any hardware, find out when it was originally released. I believe all PC components should come with a freshness date. About a year ago I bought a Linksys router that was reviewed favorably by several independent tech sites--when it was originally released 18 months earlier. In the interim, it was found to require a firmware update, but I didn't find out about its outdated firmware until I spent a day and a half trying unsuccessfully to install it on my home network. (After I downloaded the update, it worked without a hitch.)
4) Be careful when you mix and match old and new hardware and software. Replacing the hard drive on your trusty-but-ancient PC with an enormous-capacity drive that spins twice as fast as the old one will work only if the system is capable of supporting the faster speed and higher capacity. You may find it's more efficient to spend the money as part of the cost of a new PC.
5) When all else fails, bug the vendor. Send an e-mail to the company's support address (but don't bother calling the toll-free support number unless you have lots and lots of time on your hands). Detail the problem, and ask for a solution. Just don't expect to be offered one. However, if enough people complain about the same problem, the chances improve that the vendor will actually do something useful, even if it's simply to offer a discount on a replacement.
Wednesday: The first steps toward a New Year's resolution to compute in a Microsoft-less (and Apple-less) world.
I used to think customer service and technical support were givens: you either did it well or failed in business. After all, if you don't support your customers, what have you got?
Now I'm not so sure. The multiyear trend of outsourcing service calls--primarily to India--seems to have consumers endlessly frustrated. The big question is: does it matter?
Conventional wisdom says we're frustrated because American jobs are being outsourced. But anecdotal evidence from my own personal focus group suggests that we may have gotten over the outsourcing thing, only to hit a snag on the support itself not being up to snuff. ... Read more
As SAP tries to untwine its third-party support and maintenance company, TomorrowNow, from its legal entanglements with archrival Oracle, a sale, or effort to wind down the company, may be its preferred path.
SAP, which earlier this week announced TomorrowNow's chief executive and several managers had resigned, is now apparently operating without its senior vice president of sales, Bob Geib, and vice president of international sales, Nigel Pullan. Both executives are no longer on the company's management roster, and Pullan's office phone is no longer active. Geib, when contacted by his mobile phone, referred all calls to the company's press contacts.
Meanwhile, one source noted that a couple of TomorrowNow's best sales representatives have been folded into SAP's sales team.
Calls and e-mails to SAP were not immediately returned. It's not clear whether SAP plans to fill those TomorrowNow sales positions, in light of its announcement earlier this week that it was considering selling its subsidiary. TomorrowNow continues to be run by Mark White, TomorrowNow executive chairman.
Meanwhile, TomorrowNow customers were migrated off the company's systems Wednesday and left to get their Oracle updates for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel Systems applications on their own systems, according to a report in eWeek.
TomorrowNow was making good on a promise it made last August during its case management hearing in federal court. SAP said it had revamped its download policies and planned to require any download of Oracle updates for PeopleSoft, JD Edwards, and Siebel be done on the customers' premises, rather than hosting that work on its own servers.
SAP, which acknowledged it had engaged in some improper downloads of Oracle's support and maintenance software on behalf of the customers it wooed away from its rival, is debating its next steps for TomorrowNow, a company it acquired nearly three years ago.
Upate: November 21, 1 p.m.
TomorrowNow's remaining sales team will now report into Mark White, TomorrowNow's executive chairman, a representative for SAP said in an e-mail late Wednesday. The representative declined to elaborate, however, on whether the company is winding down its operations.
Editors' note: This blog initially misstated the first name of the founder of Downtown Records. His full name is Josh Deutsch.
RCRD LBL launched this week after several months of publicity. It's an online-only record label overseen by Engadget founder Peter Rojas and Downtown Records founder Josh Deutsch.
The service is an interesting combination of things we've seen elsewhere, such as blog postings, streaming audio, player widgets, and free downloads, but I wouldn't call it groundbreaking. Most of the artists on RCRD LBL are also on traditional labels and have so far only released a few songs through the site. I could see bands with devoted followings like Art Brut and Cold War Kids releasing excess material--live tracks, B sides, outtakes--through the site, while saving their favored material for old-fashioned physical albums or paid downloads. Less popular artists might make more material available through the site for promotional purposes, in hopes of boosting tour attendance and merchandise sales.
That said, I do like RCRD LBL's approach: much of the material on the site is licensed under a Creative Commons license that lets users share and remix it as much as they like. In other words, here's a business that acknowledges what's actually going on in the digital world rather than fighting it and alienating customers in the process. And if you're a fan of the artists or labels on the site, the blog postings and podcasts could be a great way to stay on top of what's happening.
Will other indie labels follow? That depends on how big an audience RCRD LBL can draw, which will determine how much the company can charge advertisers.
