Conference 7.286::digital

Not everyone....  Actually, my recent experience has been that there has
been a surge in effort to "do the right thing" and work with the customer,
even if the problem seems to be in someone else's court.  At least that's
how it looks from here...

					Steve

    Tell 'em all it's my fault. I accept the blame. Now lets get on with
    it. Never let that attitude stand in the way of customer satisfation.
    
    
    		Brian

    If you have specific issues that need to be worked, let's get the right
    resources on them.  If not, all I can say is I believe there are
    pockets of what you indicate, but that things are really turning
    around.  If the problems you indicate are service related, call me -
    I'll help.
    
    Chuck

    My experience is quite to the contrary. Just in the past month my
    customer has had several router (as in network router) problems that
    I've been tasked to have resolved. I've had to call at least 3 or 4
    people in 3 or 4 different groups who didn't know me from Adam to
    enlist their help. Without exception every one of them said "Let me
    know what you need and we'll gladly work with you". It even turned out
    that a couple of them weren't the right people and they STILL said "no,
    it's not us, but if we can help in any way give us a call again".
    
    						Thom...

    What I've been doing is going up and around these people to make sure
    the customer gets helped but I've been yelled at the entire time by
    managers and co-workers...who full of huff and blister screeched how we
    don't do things that way....
    
    we have to worry about ... xxxx
    
    I raised my voice and said, "Well I'm going to worry about the
    customer," and I passed the name of who I think can help on to the
    people we need to and leave the others screaming on their own...
    
    but it's really nauseating to watch...
    
    

    
     It is all part of the new accountability process taking shape. It
    might seem extreme, but I am incline to beleive that some groups that
    are under sucrutiny cannot take the risk of failure. Therefor they will
    shut themselves off from the process. No risk, no failure, no
    accountability. There are other groups however that are properly
    managed and staffed with "do the right thing" people. They will be the
    ones that pull the rest of us along. Our corporation is still changing,
    our culture, our ideas, our vision, our goals. We say the customer is
    numero uno. That is still good. Some people don't say that anymore.
    Now all we have to be is accountable when we touch the customer, and
    this is happening.
    
    Every dog has his/her day.
    Mike Z.

    Playing Devil's advocate.
    
    With every area of this company working as individual profit centers
    and each one struggling to make their numbers look good the attitude
    expressed in .0 is not surprising. After all if XYZ made a mistake in
    an attempt to make a profit they can't expect ABC to fix it without
    reimbursing ABC for thier trouble. This doesn't mean they shouldn't
    help just that they get approval for billing to that cost center.
    
    Brian V

        You'll start to see more of this from support centers as the new
        service menu offerings are expanded to cover all service events. 
        The offerings are getting more detailed to help drive cost per
        event down.
        
        Dave Zaniewski

        	So far when I can read on the right up cordner of my 
        pay check "DIGITAL", I'll help everybody in this same organisation...

        	Asko

    I don't see too much of that here in SoCal, but I do see a lot of head
    shaking regarding who *can* help with an issue, i.e., "who do we call
    for *xyz* service or problem now?".  Perhaps the frustration factor has
    come into play a bit.  If you know you're going to kill yourself trying
    to find the right resource to help your customer out of a fix, maybe
    you just don't want to try anymore.
    
    Not my way, but a possibility.  Personally, I'm still one of the
    "scroungers" whose always trying to find the right person to help the
    customer.
    
    M.
    

    
    
    Maybe it went out the door when we implemented "the employee comes
    last".

Personally, my bottom line, and I believe that of most/all of my teammates,
is "The Customer Signs My Paycheck".  Quite a simple philosophy, really.

Liz (OK, no longer a Digital employee, but still, I believe it!)

    I agree with .9, I will help anyone who comes with a request, maybe not
    immediately depending on my current workload but will at least commit
    to making a reply (or whatever) within a mutually agreeable time.
    
    There are a large number of others out there with the same attitude, in
    some cases naval gazing gets in the road of customer satisfaction, but
    in my experience which spans 15 years in Digital I have never once had
    anyone tell me to "go away".
    
    Notes conference queries almost always get overnight (great time
    advantage for us downunder) replies, and any time I have got on the
    phone in the early hours of our morning I have been greeted with an
    obliging person at the other end of the world, who, if he could not
    directly help, has provided pointers to others and finished with a
    statement such as "if he/she can't help come back to me and I'll try
    again."
    
    Let's keep our can do attitude and put corporate issues behind all
    others and have some fun and satisfaction providing assistance to our
    customers, both external and internal.
    
    keep on keeping on..
    
    Steve.
           

    The customer still comes first although current staffing of our team
    for example doesn't help re-enforce this from Digital's standpoint.  
    We have TFSOed, had people find other opportunities, sold out talent
    to Oracle (and retained products that we sold talent) to the point where 
    Support Specialists are supporting products they don't even know because 
    management feels that dedicating time and money to get people to 
    training courses is not feasible.  
    
    This situation puts alot of stress on staffing as alot of people just 
    get fed up with the situation and find other opportunities which causes
    a spiral effect if talent is not brought in to backfill.
    
    In a sense it is a sacrifice Digital brought on itself but the net
    result is that the customer doesn't get what they paid for... 

    Another behavior I've seen lately...
    
    Several  times over the past few months I've been asked to fill
    in/staff a trade show/presentation because "the person who had
    committed to do it originally had to cancel because their group has
    changed its charter/focus". 
    
    I understand that "charters change", it has been a regular occurrance
    for most of us. However, if you have committments,  you should be
    allowed to follow through with them. In the cases I know about,
    "management" has told the people to cancel. And it at least 1 case, if
    not all, expenses were not the issue, because another group was already
    paying for expenses.....
    
    not a good trend.
    
    

In the last three months, I have been at a customer with major performance
problems on a large clients time and attendance system.

I received the first call at 10am and was at the site before noon. the customer
was "positive" the problem was due to a memory shortage. I installed DECps and
examined the system during the afternoon clock-out period. CPU 100%, Memory
20%. I interrupted a meeting (at the vice-president level) to inform them that
memory was not the problem. They asked "how quickly can you get a cpu in here?"
at 4 pm on a tuesday. I called our local field service and was able to convince
the manager to leave a $50,000 board in her office for me and then convinced the
local fs engineer to leave his current site and meet me at the customer site
at 7pm (I still owe him lunch...). We installed the board and discovered the
reason for the performance problem on reboot -- the cache on one of the existing
boards had been disabled dropping performance from ~26 vups to 6 vups. Bell
atlantic had missed this when the machine had crashed earlier in the week.
Net result, Digital has won back the maint contract at this site.

Two weeks later, we had the busiest day of the year and performance was BAD.
The customer decided to add a 4th 6600 board and 2 ez54 solid state disks at
7 pm friday night. We had all of the parts on site by 7 pm of saturday which
allowed us to perform the upgrade before the 5am monday deadline. Someone
I have NEVER MET sent $170,000 worth of parts to bradley airport so that we 
could help the customer solve a major problem (their customer was seriously
concidering ripping out the computer system and going back to paper payroll!!).

Not only were Digital employees doing EVERYTHING possible to help, they were
sticking their necks out to help. I personnally put in 93 hours that week, but
without the co-operation and can-do attitude that I saw from people in ct,
mass, seattle washington and hawaii, we would have lost this customer instead
of doing over $250,000 in sales and gaining back a field service contract from
bell atlantic... Digital still can "do the right thing".

Dan Buckley, ct dc

Dan, stories like that send chills up my spine.  What a wonderful
testamony to ability and capability of Digital employees!  I hope
you et al get some much deserved recognition over this!

Liz

    re .16
    
    Thank you!
    
    Sounds like field SERVICE!

     .....kinda make you feel warm and fuzzy all over....
    
    good job
    
    
    hornet
    

    To the basenoter, just some thoughts that might be a reasonable
    explanation (not an excuse) *depending* on the situation (you didn't
    go into specifics).
    
    I work for the services and licensing team at 1-800-DEC-SALE; we talk
    to MCS, DEC sales reps (those who are left), ATDs, VARs, etc.  I've
    noticed an increase in calls from MCS reps who are trying to quote
    SW licenses and sell other product "because there are no sales
    people remaining locally to talk to the customer".  I can understand
    their concern, but there is a model to handle this scenario (unfor-
    tunately this information HAS NOT been relayed to MCS people very
    well, if at all).
    
    The IB4000 group has people assigned by industry to handle the smaller
    accounts who do not have designated sales reps (I know, I know some
    customers insist on someone local but I believe this *can* evolve in
    time if a little finesse is used).
    
    A former co-worker at DEC-SALE is now with the IB4000 group.  He pro-
    vided me with a list of people geared to handle the smaller acounts.
    I recently connected an IB4000 rep with an MCS rep; the opportunity
    was passed along.  The IB4000 rep contacted the customer and said it
    was at the request of (insert local MCS rep's name here).  The order
    got booked, the customer was satisfied, the MCS rep was relieved of
    a responsibility she was not equipped or trained to handle.  From 
    what I'm hearing, MCS and Base reps are already to their knees with
    their own workload; trying to be a "jack of all trades" will definitely
    result in being a "master of none".
    
    Obviously, a hot customer satisfaction issue will always have to be
    handled at the local level and I think it's incumbent on all of us to
    pitch in and help whenever we can.
    
    Whether we like it or not, we don't have enough people in the most
    strategic places.  We have to change the way we work; if we do it
    right it won't have a negative impact on our customers, it should have
    a positive effect on them.
    
    I'm sure someone at the upper levels of IB4000 has made people in
    the upper levels of MCS aware of their group; but "hear" me on this,
    the information on "how to pass the baton" has not filtered down to
    many of the people in local offices who pick up the phones and have
    Mr/Ms Customer on the other end of the line.
    
    TWYWALTR,
    
    Karen
    

    can you post a DTN for this group?
    
    Thanks
    

    The group doesn't work off one specific DTN; customers are supposed
    to use 1-800-DIGITAL to call them.  I've tried the 800# and you have
    to listen to their menu VERY closely or you'll miss this group (unless
    the menu has been clarified of late).
    
    To work my issue I used the list of reps that I have and made contact
    with the rep who handled the customer's industry.  The rep acted pro-
    actively and made the call to the customer.
    
    This group does not compete with DEC DIRECT, but are geared to deal
    with customers who probably need a little personalized attention, i.e.
    an assigned rep.  It is my understanding that if a customer wants to
    see someone in his local area, this group can get one of the authorized
    re-sellers to contact the customer.
    
    I'd post the list, but I haven't been able to reach the individual who
    sent it to me to get permission.  Contact me off-line if I can be of
    assistance.
    
    Karen