Sunday 28 March 2010

A rant about help-desks

OK, I know.  Help desks, especially when located abroad and populated by people whose grasp of the Engish laguage is tenuous, are an easy target.  But this one takes this week's award for most useless response I've come across.

Some months ago I changed the password on my ISP master screen-name (which I rarely use), and then lost the password.  Stupid, but these things happen. I have 6 other screen-names registered, so I sent a message from the other screen-names via the very-hard-to-find 'help' option to let them know that I couldn't access the master-account, and asking if they could help.  Response - nil... time passes...

To cut a long and all-too-typical story of incompetence short; yesterday I finally managed to talk to a human, get the password reset, and log in, to find 471 messages stacked up for me. Among them was an email from the ISP sent in December, telling me what to do to access an account with a lost password and a request to complete a feedback survey "How well did we do?"

Resisting the urge to say what I really thought I replied, and explained that their action had not resolved the situation because they had sent the information to the locked-out account.  Later I had a response, telling me that the information in their email was correct, and it was 'unfortunate' that I didn't access the account it was sent to.

I might add that one of the question in their feedback survey, was along the lines of 'On a scale of 0 to 10' based on our response to your enquiry, how likely are you to recommend us to your friends?  Go on... guess.  What did I reply?

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