After nearly 25 years as a PC, I became a Mac late last month.
I didn’t make the switch so I could grow my hair long – bedsides it’s probably too late for that – and I discarded my tie in favor of open collars long ago. The Mac just seemed easier and besides, my son, Eli, was lobbying me to switch for quite some time.
And while the adjustment has been pretty stress free, there are some moments…which brings us to tonight’s tale.
Perhaps one of the most maligned groups in the IT world is the overseas tech support team. People say that those from across the globe may be more difficult to understand and culturally, are not in tune with an American’s way of thinking and approaching an issue. However, if my most recent experience is any indication, it may be time to reconsider this perspective.
My friend, Alan, at Microsoft tells me that the technical support world is changing. The shift is to more online chat – and less telephone conversation. There are a lot of reasons for this. Online chat allows supervisors to more quickly review calls for quality and the transcripts of these calls are much simpler to access.
Anyway, back to our story.
I had purchased an application for offline storage called Mozy. I had heard good things about it and one of my colleagues at a client was a strong proponent.
One of the differences in the Mac world is that when you click on an application icon, sometimes the only thing that opens is the thin ribbon for the application on top of the screen. In the case of Mozy, it also opens a screen to show you what it is backing up. My previous orientations with PCs had taught me that the screen that opens is indeed the application itself…so I never noticed the ribbon.
This led me to believe that the application’s client had never loaded and so I could never set preferences or schedule the backups. Naturally, I made a call to technical support.
I’m not writing about the fact that the two people that I worked with were courteous or knowledgeable or patient. What impressed me was that I received personalized, professional e-mails with new suggestions every day. It felt like these two professionals were focused solely on my issue – and that they were more committed to its resolution than I was.
It took a little more than a week for me to realize that the “problem” was likely not a problem and simply my unfamiliarity with the Mac interface. And while I learn new things about Apple each day, the most important thing that I may have learned is that international boundaries are likely not what separates quality from mediocrity. More appropriately, it is corporate culture, professional training, personal commitment, outstanding character traits and appropriate reward systems that are the differentiators.
So Sandeep and Mohammed, here is a shout out for an exceptional job. Well done – and thanks for this important reminder and lesson.
Strategy Insight 