XBox Breakage
So, last week while I was working towards getting some hardcore achievements, my xbox 360 crapped out on me. It’s been a pretty frustrating week, considering it happened while my wife has been out on business.
All my pizza eating, xbox playing plans went right out the window.
But, it was an interesting experience to go through all of the points of support before deciding, yes it needs to go in for repairs. I pretty much tried everything.
My first step was to head over to xbox.com. It was really simple to find their knowledbase, and the articles I worked with were well laid out and written. Very simple to diagnose / find what was wrong with my console and get their tips.
Once I had played out as much as I could, I actually managed to get the DVD-ROM drive working to the point of getting back in game and getting some stuff done. But, it didn’t last too long before my entire console was frozen again.
So, on to email support. They wrote back quite a friendly message and told me to call support. They had all the helpful info: phone number, reference number based on my email, and the name of the support rep that replied, which I really like. I actually have our support reps do the same thing.
Now, the one beef I had with support was, the rep was CLEARLY reading right off of a script. Now, I realize that she probably didn’t even work for Microsoft or the XBox team, but it would have been nice if she did. I always got this feeling that the XBox team was this cool little start-up like thing inside of the bigger borg that is MSFT.
I lost that when I talked to support. Now, don’t get me wrong, she did a good job and gave me everything I needed, but it seemed like returning the console was the very first thing she jumped to. She didn’t even sound like she owned an XBox, let alone understand what a DVD-ROM drive was and what I was saying to her.
I think had she actually been more passionate about the console, and had something like, “yeah, my friends went through that, what date was your console issued? Yeah, we’ve had reports of those failing” — or something more than just going down her paper script, it would have continued me buying into the small, start-up like XBox team brand.
Maybe I’m crazy, though. I could very well be the only person on Earth that gets that feeling about the XBox team. But, that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that Support is a key part of Product Management. You get it built into their thinking that there is something more they could do to enhance the customer’s experience. A rep that was saying, “hey, we noticed that 3,000 of the 10,000 XBox’s manufactured during date X to date Y had DVD-ROM problems” would allow MSFT to put the right literature on their site.
I’m not saying that they don’t do that, but based on who I spoke with, I have a hard time buying into that type of ambition going on from their front lines.
