At last, a customer compliment letter

At the Empire, customer compliment letters and emails definitely get attention paid to them.  Your manager reads them, then generally he turns around and forwards them to your team both as a way of saying “One of our team members is so skilled and so good at what he does that he got this mad cool letter!”  And not only does it go to your own team, it goes to the other team managers, the group manager, the area manager (someone close to the vice-president level), and your personnel file, ’cos it’s not like they come along all that frequently; in a heavy week we might see two for our team of 25, and as often as not no one gets one during a week.

For some time now I’ve been wishing that I might get one of ’em.  I’ve had my share of calls where I pulled someone’s balls out of the fire, but while they’ve sure been complimentary during the call, somehow it never turned into a commendatory email.  I was almost to the point of thinking that my style of support, while good at getting users out of storms because I’ll take several hours on a call if that’s what it needs, just wasn’t spectacular enough to make the customer think, ”Wow!  I have got to tell this guy’s manager about the great job he did!”  Others on my team have gotten them, and some more than one, but I always seemed to be left watching from the sideline.

But my turn finally came the other day, when I picked up a call at about quarter to four (fifteen minutes to my normal quitting time).  I knew I was in for a long haul when the customer began the call with “I think I did something stupid . . . .”  He was right.  He’d tried to use a Windows XP Professional installation CD to install some features onto a copy of Windows XP Home, and got the computer so hopelessly confused that it couldn’t finish installing, couldn’t back up and undo, couldn’t do much of anything except chase its tail in an installation DO loop.  After trying a couple of quick get-me-out-of-trouble tricks, I saw that nothing was likely to help except a format reinstall, wiping out everything on the drive.  I told him that was where we were, and asked how much important Stuph he would lose if we formatted, because (naturally) he didn’t have anything backed up.

He called across the house and asked his wife how much important data there was and what would happen if they lost it.  The answer, he told me, began with a glare and continued with her saying that among others they would lose everything, including financials and photos, they had to have in order to file an insurance claim on a rental property they owned that had just been wiped out by Hurricane Ivan.

That’s the kind of answer I hate to get.  Tons of important data, none of it backed up, and the customer expecting a miracle.  I swore to myself, because I knew that I was going to have to try pulling off a miracle, that I had a good chance of falling flat on my face, and even if I succeeded I was going to be way into overtime by the time I was done.

I told him there was one chance we might be able to salvage his data by doing a second, parallel installation of Windows onto his system, so he was running from the second copy, and then abandoning and killing the first one.  He answered that I was driving, and he was along for the ride.

I dove in, walked him through the parallel installation, got enough drivers installed that he had network connectivity again, then remote-controlled myself into his box and spent another couple of hours finishing up the drivers, creating user accounts for himself, his wife, and their four children, moving everyone’s data from the old installation to the new one, and generally cleaning up after myself.  By the time I disconnected from his system and signed off it was seven-thirty in the evening, and I’d been on the call for almost four hours straight.  I was worn out, but I’d saved the customer’s data and saved him from a major family uproar.  He couldn’t think of enough to say about what-all I’d done, so I told him if he’d like to do me a good turn, put it into an email to my manager.

Occasionally, when I’ve had a particularly grateful customer, I’ve asked him to write my manager, but no one’s ever actually done it and I never really expect anyone to follow through.  However, two days later the Tulip forwarded an email to the team from my customer, who said all kinds of nice things about how I’d gone above and beyond, staying on far past my regular time to fix his issue and bail him out of trouble with his wife, and ended up by saying this was why he was happy that he used Empirical systems both at home and at work (“work,” in his case, being the military; he turned out to be a B-1 pilot stationed at Dyess Air Force Base).

So now I have my first letter of commendation to go in my file, and I know that my support style is one that can draw compliments, given the right situation.  I hope it won’t be ten more months before I get another.

The indicated gargoyle reverse-engineers a tofu Harley-Davidson.  Fnord.