[Guy Macon]
I was searching for failure rates of 9V vs AA batteries today, and
stumbled upon the following web page. I have my own opinion about
how the author of the page should have handled this, but I would
like to hear some other opinions first.
I choose to believe that the whole incident is mostly due to
miscommunication or a lack of communication, and that the failure
happened very early, after the first email from the seller the
customer spent too long time doing diagnostic, and he got a negative
attitude and got fed up with the whole thing.
It can very well be that there is some distance between the setup
where the customer can test the equipment, and the "email terminal"
where he can communicate from. In such a setting, I can fairly well
understand that the customer chooses to spend long time carefully
examinating the first hints he got from the seller - and maybe
particularly due to the optimistic ending of the first email.
The seller writes in his comments that the problem probably could have
been solved easily if telephone was used instead of email. Of course,
it's always easy to be smart in retro-perspective; the seller should
in the first email have stated his telephone number and encouraged the
customer to call. Probably a better ending would be "check those
things first, and then call or write me back".
If I read the communication correctly, the customer does come with a
fairly good theory of what's wrong (the first digit on the display
doesn't work) and as far as I understand, the IR tops did work at
first, the customer could see the green indicator lights (but failed
to see that one of them faded away). While checking the IR tops, the
customer also noted that the power for one of the tops was
alternating. I do not know this kind of equipment well enough to
estimate the users techincal knowledge, and I don't know how much this
system costs. Self-diagnostics and bootup-tests is fine, but will add
to the cost of the product, and it will never be able to catch up with
all kind of errors that may occur.
I also think that if a customer buys a package, with software
included, and have legitimate reasons for returning the package, he
should also get the price for the software refunded.
I had a bit of a similar situation some days ago, a lengthy
communication between one guy at support and a customer was sent over
to me. The customer apperantly was employed in a "finance
institution", but I discovered that the real problem was that he
didn't really knew the difference between a credit card number and a
bank account number. The tone from the customer had already started
to become a bit angry, in such cases I think it's nice that some other
person takes over. When beeing stuck with problems, it's often an
advantage to get some fresh eyes to look at it.