If You Care You’ll Call: WatchGuard Reaches Out.

The power of blogging is becoming very evident to me, and I’m not sure why it comes as any surprise the written word carries a good deal of weight. My recent article, Is the Sun Setting on WatchGuard, evidently caught the attention of WatchGuard Technologies.

In the article I wrote:

In a bad situation, bad customer service and unresponsive technical support simply makes things worse. … [it] simply tells me that they are done trying to learn, grow, and improve; that tells me that it is time to move on to another company that cares.

In this present business climate, customer service is surely one thing that can help you survive. But customer service isn’t just defined as service with a smile – it has to be defined as continuously seeking improvement for the benefit of yourself and your customers to deliver the best experience for the most competitive price.

I was contacted by one of their technical support managers, concerned that my experience with their company was less than stellar. She asked if I had time to talk, and I gladly carved out time to review the cases to see just what might have went wrong.

The conversation started with WatchGuard expressing that in the future they would like the opportunity to address any issues I felt might be of concern prior to me posting a blog article. My comment was that 1) I do believe in exercising my freedom of speech, 2) they were lucky I said anything at all as most customers simply pack up and leave, and 3) I would gladly post any rebuttal they requested – to offer them a fair opportunity to recuse my assertions in this matter.

Surprisingly, she declined, instead stating that she cared more about making sure I was OK rather than defending their honor in a written response. I think that won some points, don’t you?

Moving on…

From there, she began to move through the case notes, and stated that she did not see any severe indications of problems that would alert her to check in on the issue – instead urging me to raise the red flag if or when I felt there to be an issue.

I was rather intrigued by this comment, as I recall that I my initial thought during troubleshooting was that I wondered if they had any automated flags or manual stop-checks to flag them of unusual activity. What I learned was that my case demographics were not very different from the other calls they receive – but the conversations not captured in between the case note entries might have shown a different story. I will agree, this issue plagues every call center.

As we progressed through the conversation, we discussed the fact that I did not feel the initial issue had been resolved satisfactorily, but I could have potentially exacerbated the situation by allowing the engineers assigned to the case to meander off topic by suggesting alternate solutions. My only care was to solve the issue anyway possible, so I was game to follow just about any rabbit trail, rather than force a resolution on the initial issue. We both agreed that given the complexity of the issue, it was indeed difficult to see where the real problem lay.

Finally, I made note to discuss the fact that I felt WatchGuard had a propensity for really living by their ticketing system – and seemed to fall back on that rather than hearing what the customer was saying, in other words not reading between the lines. While many IT-types are not known for their inter-personal skills, I never once thought I was treated rudely. However, I did have the feeling that I was not communicating effectively nor were the various engineers really hearing what I was trying to convey.

As you know, when communication breaks down, that is the real failure.

You really care…

We went over quite a few things, but in the end my take away was that WatchGuard cared. The technical support manager talked with me for over an hour, and I genuinely felt like she was concerned, and was speaking on behalf of her company. Even though I don’t know that either of us will ever know exactly what happened, the fact that she called and was concerned, mattered a great deal.

The power of blogging is that you can quickly get a company’s attention, but the one’s that care about you are the one’s that call – the one’s you want to hang on to.

Ken Stewart’s blog, ChangeForge.com, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology. To learn more about Ken, visit his about page. You may also find Ken on FriendFeed, Twitter, and LinkedIn.