A World without Gray: Why Customer Support Sucks

I called RCN a year ago shortly after they installed my brand new cable modem account. “Look,” I said to the customer service rep, “I know your support stops where your wire stops, but I just spent 5 hours trying to get my Linksys-based home network running again and I’m wondering if you can tell me if it can be done.”
“Sure,” said the rep, cheerily. “I have one at home.”
“Great! Is there some trick to getting it to work?”
“Um, yes, but I can’t talk with you about it.”
“But there’s some one thing I have to do?”
“Yup.”
“Can’t you just blurt it out?”
“These calls may be monitored.”
“Ok, I understand that, and, for the record, you’ve been great and have followed the guidelines. Is there a Web page that talks about how to do it?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Can you email me the trick?”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not allowed to help you with this.”
Obviously, this rep was going out on a limb just by saying that RCN cable can be home-networked via Linksys. It was RCN, Inc.’s fault that the call went wrong. Their message that “This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes” should say “We may listen in to make sure our reps aren’t using their own judgment. Remember, here at RCN Customer Support, customer support comes second and protecting ourselves comes first.”
The problem isn’t just that companies are afraid of the legal implications of going beyond the smallest range of responses. It’s that the legal system has scared the gray out of the system. Had the rep said, “Look, we don’t officially support home networking and there’s nothing in the RCN playbook about this, but I have one at home, and here’s something you might try…” I would have understood — from the words and their context — that this wasn’t an officially sanctioned RCN procedure for which I could hold them responsible. Our language accommodates conditionals and qualifiers. Our legal system doesn’t.
Even better, I wish RCN had set up a customer-to-customer support board. I’d be happy to share the PPPoE tip. And I bet the support guy would have already logged on from home with step-by-step instructions on how to get a home network going.
Two followups:
1. After another day of trying, I randomly discovered that you have to unclick the PPPoE box on the Linksys prefs page.
2. RCN Support now answers questions about home networking with the Linksys box.

Categories: Uncategorized dw