Conference 7.286::digital

Greetings all,

No solutions here just an opinion...

I am generally on-site at  a significant University site and the customers
are pretty much given up on logging calls. We've canned all the local
dispatchers and they get the 800 number that has entirely too many goofy
questions. The customers will now call me through the office or page me
directly BECAUSE OUR PROCEDURES TO LOG A SERVICE REQUEST ARE TOO DIFFICULT!
The reactions are always basically the same. Whatever the number is the 
customer uses, something is wrong and the customer is told that he is Per-Call
and they need to supply a PO for $400.00. Hopefully they will agree to 
whatever the dispatcher says to get to the field service engineer where 
common sense can prevail. What a mess!

Fred

    
    
    		O.K. John,
    
    		How about the follow-up message that included the
    NCD "fix" for our DE203's . What exactly is it that will make
    our E-works card compatable with NCD's X-Ware ??
    
    			Pablo
    

re .0

>It did not come with, nor have I been able to find a "packet driver" which
>would make it compatible with public-domain software.

The new EtherWORKS 3 family (includes the DE203) do not have native packet drivers
available.  However the product does ship with an NDIS compliant DOS driver.  FTP
(Keeper/Inventors of the packet driver) has an NDIS wedge that can be used to run
packet driver applications.  The EtherWORKS 3 NDIS driver has been tested at FTP.

>NCD (Network Computing Devices, Inc. - Beaverton, OR) makes a product called
>PC-XWare which we bought recently.  It includes PC Telnet and PC X-windows.
>The DEC board worked with telnet but with X, it escaped to the DOS prompt.
>X-Ware runs as a Windows 3.x application.
>
>NCD sent me a description of the problem with the DEC board which I will 
>forward to you in the next message.

Please post the problem description!

>Track every customer who bought a bad board and offer a repair.
>
>(I first heard about the board's having problems from one of the magazines and
>never heard about it from DEC).

Digital has no repair since we are unaware of any problems.  Which magazine/vendor
is claiming the boards are bad?

    Does this customer have a Digital Support Contract?  (Usually the
    Universities have some sort of wide ranging contract.)  Or WHO actually
    did he call for support?  PC HELP DESK? 1(800)354-9000?  What product
    did he ask for support on?  Did he ask for hardware or software
    support?  (Granted why does the customer have to go through all this?)
    
    Be on the look out for the new support offerings.  They are geared to
    the different needs of different customers.  He may be able to connect
    with our "electronic solutions" for fairly cheap.  And there's "gobbs"
    of EtherWORKS info in our databases.
    
    I work on the PATHWORKS Support Team in the CSC and I will pass this
    info on to our Management.  I used to work in the the field and know
    that this is a frustrating problem for customers.  The problem being:
    
    Where do you go to to get support for specific Digital products you 
    purchase, based on the the type of support contract you have, or no 
    support contract (but should still be entitled to product info.)?
    
    Heck, I work in the support organization and I can't confidently answer
    that question...there's no excuse for it.
    
    --Gina Chang
      PATHWORKS Support Team
      CSC/Atlanta
    
    VMSNET::G_CHANG or Gina Chang @ALF
    
    P.S.  Send me mail (as a reminder) and I can provide you more info (to
    pass on at your discretion)...on how to get support, technical info on 
    the DE2xx boards, etc.
    
    

    The etherworks notes conference is on NOTED::ETHERWORKS.
    This conference indicates where bug fixes to drivers are posted 
    both internally and on Compuserve and the internet.
    You would get the best response to etherworks issues by writing
    notes there.

This is somewhat related to the basenote (well, the title anyways), as well
as to other discussions going on in this notesfile. Mods, please move it to
a more appropriate place if needed. 

This was culled from comp.sys.dec on Usenet. 

From: mcglk@cpac.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next.hardware,comp.sys.dec,comp.sys.dec.micro
Subject: Digital (was Re: Gateway P5-66? Any comments)
Date: 16 Feb 94 10:26:35

info@absystems.com (Advanced Business Systems) writes:

| In article <CLAJ1s.IrE@nosloc.com> derek@nosloc.com (Derek Collison) writes:
| 
| > I am looking at getting some new hardware. I was wondering if anyone had
| > any comments on the new P5-66 Pentium machine from Gateway?
| 
| Yes...buy Digital!

Or don't.

Don't get me wrong.  I've been working with one DEC box or another for 17
years.  But my first foray into getting a DECpc has sucked like you wouldn't
believe.  DEC is normally responsive and supportive, but I am *still* trying to
get them to complete the order that I placed two months ago.

They were very eager to make the sale, promising that it would be here without
problems in three days.  I couldn't buy that day, but when I did place the
order two days later, I was told that it was going to take fourteen days.  I
called a week later over something---I can't remember what---and couldn't reach
my sales rep (Carol Steffik), but was told by her backup sales drone that I
couldn't *possibly* have been told that it was 14 days, because *everybody*
knew that it was going to take 30 days.

This disturbed me.  When I finally did get in touch with Carol (who hadn't
returned my calls), she assured me that it would still be here in 14 days.

By day 18, I'm a bit frustrated.  I call Carol.  Voice mail.  I leave a
message.  No reply.  I call four hours later.  And two hours after that.  No
response.  The next day, I call six times.  The next day, another six times.
The following Monday, I call eight times.  By Tuesday, I'm calling every hour
on the hour.  No response at all.  I've just sent them over $4000, and I can't
even get a call back.  I've been nothing but polite, but I *am* getting
progressively more insistent with each call.  I started escalating levels of
management, but couldn't get a real human on any of them.  I finally started
having to pay for calls out of my own pocket just to get a human.

At 5pm on Tuesday, I made my final call for the day to Carol, and then called
her boss for the last time that day.  I got his voice mail, and started to
leave a message, when there was a beep and a blurp, and then silence.  I then
stated that something had gone wrong with the voice-mail and that I was going
to call back (just in case it was still recording), hung up, and picked up the
phone again.  Silence, and some clunking.  "Hello?" I said.  Silence.  Again, I
said "Hello?"  "Oh!  This must be Ken!"  It was Carol; she had picked up her
boss' phone about thirty seconds earlier, but oddly enough hadn't bothered to
actually *say* anything.  "How are you!"  Big surprise.  Much innocence.

I said, in a low voice, "Annoyed."  That's all I said.  Whereupon she went into
a long spiel about being in meetings all day, hardly having time to do
anything, she's gonna talk to the manager about this, etc., etc., etc.  I
pointed out that all I wanted was a five-minute phone call.  She promised that
she would call by 1pm her time the next day.

She didn't.  I started calling at 2pm her time.  An hour later, I called again.
Then thirty minutes later, another call.  I started leaving voice-mail calls at
higher levels of management.

She didn't call until 4pm her time.  It was only *then* that she told me about
the problems at their Canadian manufacturing plant.  I said, well, if it would
help, I don't *need* the 5.25" floppy or the 128K cache right away, and I could
get by with 24MB of RAM for the moment, but that I REALLY NEEDED the rest.

It arrived 32 days after I placed the order.  It was missing the 128K cache.
Okay.  But it had the 5.25" floppy, but not the 3.5" floppy.  So much for
installing NeXTstep.  Thanks a lot, guys.  So after some more frantic calling,
I still couldn't get Carol to give me a return call, and went up more levels of
management.  And *finally*, someone in Arizona called me to try to resolve the
floppy problem.  She seriously suggested I call Robert Palmer's (CEO of DEC)
office (on my dime, of course), and so I did.  Of course, I had to leave
voice-mail again.  That was a Thursday.

The following day, I got 15 phone calls.  DEC really came through that day, in
spite of most of them having only heard about the problem on a Friday.  I
managed to get a loaner 3.5" floppy from their local field-service office.
They were a little confused though, because the 128K cache expansion had
apparently been cancelled.  I hadn't cancelled it.  Even if I had, I hadn't
heard a damn thing about any refund on it.

It's now almost a month after that.  Since then, I still haven't gotten the
128K cache.  I did get a 3.5" floppy drive, but it doesn't fit in the 3.5" slot
provided.  I've called Carol a couple of dozen times since then; she did return
one of my calls, and promised to call me back with a return authorization
number for the drive, but she never did, in spite of more phone calls to her.
I've pretty much given up on everybody but the local field office, and they're
apparently meeting with frustration on this, too.  They'd really like the drive
that they loaned me back, too.

So four weeks after getting the box two weeks late, I'm still missing parts,
and the only people that seem to want to work with me is the local
field-service office, and it's not even supposed to be their problem.  This has
cost me a non-trivial amount of money to try to resolve, and has cost me some
respect among my partners ("why spend so much on that brand?" "because they're
reliable, that's why"), and it's cost me a *lot* of time that I simply can't
afford.

This is no slam on DEC workstations or their big boxes---they've been nothing
but good to me over the years.  But I can't recommend *ever* buying a PC from
them, because that department is apparently being run by lobotomized gerbils.

It's a pity, too.  This is otherwise a good box.

				---Ken McGlothlen
				   mcglk@cpac.washington.edu
				   mcglk@cpac.bitnet

    Sounds like we don't treat our customers any better than we treat our
    employees:-(
    
    Bob

    And I'm considering buying an XL out of loyalty?
    
    Used, abused, and confused.
    
    Dan

    I just looked in ELF. I can't find any Carol Steffik. Strange.
    
    Dave

    re .-1
    
    Maybe Management reacted...
    
    q
    

    re .6
    
    You have the patience of Job.  I would have cancelled my order and
    bought elsewhere.   I wonder is your experience is the exception or the
    normal buying experience.

    .11
    
    i think it is the exception, i bought my 17" monitor and a printer
    from DEC and every thing worked fine, i had to change my monitor
    and they gave no problem and every thing went smooth dendy well, i also
    wanted to upgrade my printer to a bigger one and i did it with no problem
    and i always was able to get hold of someone when i called anf get my
    calls back.
    
    \nasser

From: mcglk@cpac.washington.edu (Ken McGlothlen)
Subject: Re: Digital (was Re: Gateway P5-66? Any comments)
Date: 17 Feb 94 10:15:31
In-reply-to: mcglk@cpac.washington.edu's message of 17 Feb 94 09:55:57

info@absystems.com (Advanced Business Systems) writes:

| DEC has had an extreme problem because of their growth from 30th in the PC
| market only two years ago to number 6 as we speak.

Yes, I agree that that is probably the problem.

The story, by the way, has been added to somewhat.  For not four hours after I
posted that to the network, I got an otherwise unsolicited call from Carol
Stecyk.

(What Ken Learned, Part I:  DEC actually reads Usenet, albeit through their
internal message service called NOTES.)

(What Ken Learned, Part II:  It's not Steffik.  It's Stecyk.  Shame on me.
You'd think after eight or nine weeks, I should have known that.)

I should make very clear, by the way, that I *don't* think the problem was
solely Carol's, and it would be a big mistake on anyone's part to lay the
majority of the blame at her feet.  In 90% of cases like this, the blame lies
with management.

Now, granted, *I* don't know why I couldn't get a five-minute phone call back,
but then, I'm not there, and I don't know what sort of a customer load anyone's
handling.  But judging from some of the E-mail that I've received in the last
day, Carol isn't the only sales rep who's being unresponsive---in one case, for
example, one of DEC's customers is probably going to go with HP now after
trying to get in touch with a sales rep for three weeks about buying an Alpha.
So I'm guessing that it's pretty much system-wide, and Carol deserves only a
minor blame quotient, if any.  Her managers should be looking at the system,
and take my experience with Carol only as a data point in a much more general
problem.

(What Ken Learned, Part III:  Be more clear in your writing.  I got one letter
telling me that Carol probably wasn't the one at fault, and that was actually
one of the points I tried to make at the end of my post, but alas. . . .)

Sure, DEC's PC department is growing like mad.  But they may be falling into
the trap of putting preferential service to big customers.  If that's the case,
I understand that---how could I possibly be mad about that?  If their Canadian
manufacturing plant broke---well, okay, life sucks sometimes, and that's okay.

But I'm not a big customer.  I'm involved in a startup business on somewhat of
a deadline.  The money in the machine came from hocking one of the partners'
personal vehicles (it's collateral in a personal loan).  If I can't find out
what's going on---if DEC can't arrange to let me know what's going on---then it
makes *me* look *BAD*, because I was the one who justified buying this
particular machine.  I nearly lost my place in this startup over it.  It's
gonna take some time for my reputation to quit bleeding.

Is that Carol's fault?  Actually, probably not.  *Management* has the
responsibility of making sure that the customers---not just the big ones---get
notified.  If I could have gotten notified first, we could have all done some
internal bitching about the situation and coped with it.  Instead, I had to
keep getting frantic phone calls from people asking where the machine was, and
had to keep replying, "well, I don't know."

Do I think Carol would have called me if she'd had time?  Okay, I don't know.
I can say that when I *have* gotten to talk with Carol, she's been engaging,
intelligent, and reasonably knowledgable.  So yeah, on some level, I think it
would have been better.  But why doesn't she have the time to let her customers
know what's up?  Why doesn't she have the information at hand?

Management.  Pure and simple.

(What Ken Hopes DEC Learns, Part I:  DEC, you never know which one of your
customers hocked their trucks or reputations to buy your equipment based on
your reputation of excellence.  Try treating them *all* well.)  [Note:  This
could just as easily be applied to NeXT as well.]

(What Ken Hopes DEC Learns, Part II:  Kids, your customers will cope with your
delays *infinitely* better if you TELL THEM WHY, up front, and be honest about
what's going on.  It's quite possible to cope with Bad Things if there's enough
information.  If you leave them completely in the dark until you've actually
managed to annoy them, then what you've got is a bunch of annoyed customers.
Or ex-customers.)

(What Ken Hopes DEC Learns, Part III:  Don't overburden your sales reps.  Too
often, they're the only link your customer has with the rest of your company.)

Oh.  One other thing I apparently wasn't especially clear on.  Do I like the
hardware I got?  Well, what I've gotten, *yeah*.  This really is a beautifully
designed box.  For example, I thought that putting in the 3.5" floppy drive
(when I got it) would be nearly impossible, it was in that tight of a space,
until I realized that the entire central bay just came out.  The machine runs
perfectly.  I'm using NeXTstep on it even as I type, and it's worth the extra
bucks just for 1280x1024 color.  There are 16 icons in my dock.  I don't even
need a dock extender.  This machine should be usable for some years to come,
too; it'll take the P24T upgrade, memory goes to 64MB, and my SCSI cache is
expandable to 64MB as well (though that's not DEC's doing).  My single hardware
complaint is that they didn't provide a set of pins for hooking up the
front-panel drive-activity light for those of us that aren't using IDE.  Big
deal.

It really is a nice box.  Were it not for DEC's dropping-the-ball lately, I'd
recommend it to anyone.

(What Ken Learned, Part IV:  The problems at the Canadian plant are over as of
the last few days; DEC is allegedly caught up, and back to a 14-day lead time
on all their PCs.)

Note that if this is true, though, I'd still be leery of recommending DEC if
only because of the difficulty I had getting a response.  If DEC improves
this---and I hope they do, because I'll probably always have a soft spot in my
heart for DEC stuff---then I'd go back to recommending DEC wholeheartedly.

Like I said:  before this, I've never been disappointed by DEC.

				---Ken McGlothlen
				   mcglk@cpac.washington.edu
				   mcglk@cpac.bitnet

    This customer is too nice.  There is no excuse for what happened.

Re the problems in the Canadian plant -
wasn't it about a year ago we closed the Springfield plant, which was the other
North American plant building PC's?
No, the problem is not the sales rep's fault, but some VP's, who probably got a
raise for saving money, but didn't get hurt when we couldn't deliver to
customers.

    In a Peter's "Search for excellence" series, he  mentions a prominent
    sign for employees of  the famed mail order company L.L.Bean to read
    and commit to memory: "WHAT IS A CUSTOMER?"
    
    "A CUSTOMER IS  THE MOST IMPORTANT  PERSON WE SERVE. WITHOUT THE
    CUSTOMER, WE WOULD CEASE TO EXIST. WE CAN NEVER TAKE A CUSTOMER  FOR
    GRANTED. HOW WE SERVE THAT CUSTOMER TODAY DETERMINES WHETHER WE WILL 
    CONTINUE TO SERVE THAT CUSTOMER IN THE FUTURE.THAT CUSTOMER DETERMINES
    THE SUCCESS OR FAILURE OF OUR BUSINESS".