Why you get lousy technical support from big companies

Regular readers know that I sell Kerio Connect Mailserver and Kerio Control Firewall. Yesterday I was talking to someone who wants to use the Kerio Mailserver to send out newsletters to a large number of customers.

Kerio is a great choice for that because mailing list management is built in to the server. No clumsy Excel lists or tedious mailing from Outlook, and licensing is based on the number of lists, not on the number of recipients, so it is also inexpensive.  A 5 user base system starts at around $450.00, which is certainly affordable by even the smallest of businesses.

It was Comcast who told him to investigate doing this themselves - Comcast's mailservers doesn't like getting 15,000 messages to relay from one customer. Apparently it gives the poor things indigestion.

I like getting calls from people

He went searching, found Kerio, and then found me. So far, good.

I had led him through basic setup and of course suggested that he should test on a small list first and that he could feel free to add my address to that list too. He did that, and we immediately saw that the message could not be sent to me. I wasn't rejecting it; it just could not go out.

I apologize for getting a little geeky here; it is unavoidable. I will make it quick and painless as possible. Readers who detest tech gobbledy-gook should jump right over the paragraph. It is not a big paragraph; even if you are very out of shape, you should be over to get over it easily.

If not, walk around it slowly and DO NOT LOOK IT IN THE EYE. Tech paragraphs can smell fear!

Warning: Geek stuff!

Mailservers communicate on specific network ports, and the most important is port 25. If mail cannot be sent out, it is often because port 25 is blocked by a firewall. That could be a local firewall, but it could be Comcast and that is what I told my customer. I asked him to call Comcast to get this unblocked if they are blocking it. The reason some ISP's block this other than to their own mailservers is to prevent spammers from spewing their garbage willy-nilly. I hung up to let him do that.

Wheh! That was awful!

Ten minutes later, he called back. Comcast tech support told him that it was impossible to unblock port 25 and that he should configure his mailserver to use a different port.

I laughed. A mailserver needs to be able to use port 25 because that is the lingua franca of Internet mail. Other servers may or may not accept mail on other ports, but if they want to receive mail from the Internet at large, they have to accept port 25, and therefore we have to be able to send mail on port 25. Comcast does admit to selectively blocking port 25, but if they were blocking, they absolutely could unblock. The support tech was uninformed.

After explaining that, I suggested he call back and get a different tech. "Don't they train these people?", he asked.

No, they just pull them in off the street

Of course they train them.. But the higher level techs don't answer calls usually. The people who know what they are doing are busy taking escalated calls. The people who answer the phone are the ones who ask if everything is plugged in.

No, really, it is unplugged, right?

By the way, do you think anyone ever said "Oh, I need to plug it in? I did not know that! Thanks, I am all set now." ?

Well, some years ago I had a call from a customer and, after listening to his description of the problem, I knew that somebody had unplugged the network cable. He insisted that it could not be that and that I had to come, now. I protested that would be five hours of driving round trip, which would cost him a fair pile of money just to plug in a cable.

Nope, he wanted me to come.

So I got in my car and drove two and a half hours, went into the plant and he led me to the equipment. I pointed at the unplugged cable and asked "Do you want me to plug that in?"

Minutes later I was back in my car driving home. When I got there, I prepared a whopping bill and went out to take that right to the post office so he would have it as soon as possible. I made the description "Assistance with network problem" so the guy wouldn't get chewed out for costing the company all that money to plug something in, but otherwise I cut him no slack. Sheesh, I told him it was unplugged. He could have walked down and checked!

Back to the mailserver

Anyway, it turned out that Comcast is not blocking. That makes sense. Why would they tell him to do something they would not let him do? No, he has something else wrong. Most likely he has a local firewall blocking this. It could be on his machine or it could be elsewhere in the building. I actually had asked about that before I had asked him to call Comcast, but now we need to look at that more closely. We will figure it out and soon lovely newsletters will be heading out to 15,000 customers who are eagerly awaiting the latest news from this company.

I know that puts joy in your heart. I feel exactly the same.

Trying to do their job

The next time you call tech support and get someone who asks if things are plugged in, remember that he or she might not know much more than you do. They might even be reading from a list and not even understand anything they are saying. Their job is to keep you from wasting the time of the people who do know stuff.

Really, that is exactly how you want it to work. If you actually do have a complicated problem, you don't want the tech who can fix it tied up talking to someone who actually has Comcast but called Verizon because they really are that clueless. Let the front line people filter out thaf stuff; that is their job.

So be nice, and if the front line person does solve your problem, either because it really was something simple or because they happen to know a little bit more than their job description requires, thank them. Thank them, because most support people really do take pride in their work and often have to deal with nasty, impatient jerks who get all bent out of shape over the "Is it plugged in" stuff. They have to ask, so be nice.

Be nice. Even if you have to grit your teeth and fake it. Be nice.

Oh, and if you need to send thousands of emails out, give me a call. I am the front line and the back end person and I usually won't ask you if you plugged it in.