Customer support: lessons from IT (2) - the appliance vendor

 

On a hot July day, my mother's air conditioning unit - a floor model just past its one year warranty - gave signs of distress. I call this machine "the white elephant in the room": it's big, noisy, has a curved back and an enormous arching hose (the trunk!) attached to a round hole in the window panel.  

My mother, two years shy of her 90th birthday, is prone to bouts of techno-rage - with good reason, given the current sleek, smart(?) but hard-on-old-fingers-and-eyes designs: she is afraid of touching tiny, finicky and mysterious buttons, and not very able to do so lately. Seeing the "elephant's" panel  displaying "FL" instead of the familiar "24" (the default temperature in Celsius degrees), and feeling that the flow of cool air is no more, she got a bout of anxiety and call her private technical support (and general life line): me. 

Sensing what's coming,  I gear in remote customer support mode: I try to calm her down and, as a diversion, ask her to check the manual of the air conditioning unit, which she dutifully keeps on her table. Meanwhile, I rack my brains trying to recall the name of the manufacturer so that I can find the same manual on-line. Google to the rescue? Not much luck with the error code "FL" but I hit the manufacturer site, which, to my loudly formulated dismay, does not contain the manual and directs me to a Canadian 1-800 number. Reluctantly, I dial it. Surprisingly, someone picks up - and rather quickly. 

No longer am I done my sigh of relief, when the rep at the other end of the line asks for the model number. I say that I don't know it. He says he cannot help. I plead with him to please look up the error code, because I know error codes are usually portable from a model to the next (at least, that's the case with software versions, cannot be that different for hardware, I hope). He digs in: without a model number there is nothing he can do. I try the sensitive cord: look, we are dealing with a suffocating elderly person, I don't know the model and she cannot tell it to me either, why can you not just please look up this code somewhere in your system? He persists in his helplessness. I persist in trying to help him help me by suggesting that he listen to my description of the machine and then look up a picture and find the model. Nope, without a model number there is nothing he can do. Stupid? Lazy? Untrained? "Minimal viable service"  for minimal salary? I hang up and try to calm myself down. 

Then I figure out I can take my own advice, and look at pictures of the various models. I identify the "elephant", and get the stupid model number, a long string of letters and numbers which I jot down on a piece of paper - the ultimate backup mechanism. 

Then I call again. Another voice, a woman, picks up this time. I am prepared for telephone battle, but once I explain the problem, she says, hold on, you just have to drain the water from the machine. But what does the "FL" stand for, I ask. She repeats, with confidence, that it does not matter and this is the action I need to take. She does not even ask about the model! Incredible! I thank her and rush to my mother's place to action the advice. I drain the water, "FL" is no more, and the "elephant" starts his noises again!

While the situation was resolved, the description of the error code remains a mystery to this day. FLood? Full Load? FLush? The error code is not published in the manual, and the model is not printed in it either. One has to bend and locate that all-important model number on the machine itself, on a lateral panel - more than you can ask an almost-nonagenarian to do, or any user for that matter. This reminds me of the awkward placement of the series and model tags on corporate laptops, and the twists and turns induced in order to do data entry for the annual exercise of asset management. And just like in IT, problems sometimes get solved not guided by precise procedures and documentation, but by the intuition of the willing.

Last updated 2021 Aug 21

Image credit: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/02/12/16/34/elephants-2060485__340.jpg