gaming
Xbox 360 repairs – when customer service red-rings
Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009 | consoles, consumer culture, design, gadgets, gaming | No Comments
A couple of weeks ago, my XBox 360 suddenly stopped working and displayed the Red Ring of Death (RRoD) – anyone who has been playing a game and forgotten to save in the last little while will totally understand my anguish and the loud, heart-felt cursing that followed.
Still, Microsoft made it pretty easy to send the console back:
- Watch XBox 360 red-ring and despair.
- Call XBox 360 people.
- Get free shipping label.
- Pay $13 for UPS to box it up nicely and send it to the repair centre.
- Wait and rejoice at its speedy return.
Today the good people at Purolator brought me a new XBox 360 – I plugged it in, practically humming with excitement at getting to play The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion again. I followed every instruction to the letter about setting it up again and – more despair; no Oblivion for me.
I got an error message telling me the downloadable content (DLC) for the game was not available to me. I found this pretty puzzling since I used to have access to it with no issues at all.
I called XBox 360 Customer Service and set up a ticket to document the issue. I was told to wait three to five business days for the problem to corrected. Annoying, but OK.
I looked on the XBox LIVE site and discovered that my LIVE account still had the serial number for the previous XBox associated with my account. This got me worried – what if the repair centre hadn’t registered the XBox correctly at all?
I called again and was treated to a woman reading straight off cue cards who was unable to tell me if either mine or Joe’s account was associated with the new XBox’s serial number, but a second ticket was issued under his name and gamertag.
To make matters worse, during this second call the supervisor admitted that my issue is a frequent and ongoing issue with repaired XBox consoles and that they’ve received many complaints about it.
Anyway, Joe discovered a few hours later that the new XBox was listed under his gamertag and account, but not mine – so I called again to cancel his ticket and keep mine open with a note cross-referencing his now cancelled ticket.
This was apparently beyond the scope of the script; the third customer service person I talked to was not able to answer my questions with yes or no answers and interrupted me several times to repeat the same stock phrases over and over again from his script.
I understand that Microsoft wants to keep answers consistent – that makes sense. However, not everyone processes information in the same way and forcing your call centre staff to repeat the same things over and over again doesn’t make them more intelligible.
I admit that I was frustrated with the responses I got during my second and third calls – I spent nearly two hours in total on the phone with people who are not allowed to tell me things, don’t know the answers to things and either can’t or won’t rephrase anything from the script in a way that makes sense.
I also found it very annoying to have my name used repeatedly throughout the conversations; for instance: “Thank you for your patience today Renee. Now, Renee, we are going to escalate this matter to a higher department and we assure you, Renee, that everything is being done to correct the issue. Is there anything else you’d like to bring to my attention today Renee?”
I’m sure they think this will calm frustrated customers, but honestly, it’s sort of creepy. Even Joe rarely uses my name, so to hear someone reading off a script and putting my names in the blanks is just weird. Also, it’s very annoying – I had a moment where I just wanted to yell “I know my own fricken name!!”
If anyone in a position of being able to do and know things at the XBox 360 Customer Service centre reads this: please, please, give your staff a little leeway and let them think outside the box just a tiny bit. Let them answer questions in plain English. Tell them not to use my first name so much and NOT call me ma’am either – I hate being called ma’am.
And most of all – if customers are calling frequently about a specific problem, you need to find a better solution than scripted answers that your staff can’t really understand or explain.