How Microsoft Office Tech Support (In Reality Convergys of Ohio) is a Miserable Failure and Oxymoron

*How Microsoft Fails to Stand Behind Microsoft Office and Support Their
Products Because of the Poor Quality of Their Contract Support; Microsoft
Support is an Oxymoron*


Hidden or camouflaged among the Longhorn, TechNet, and MSDN Evangelist
buzz/blogs and great initiatives in a company full of dedicated and
multi-talented people at MSFT is a phenomenon that truly contstitutes the
dirty underbelly of Microsoft--"support" that is not Microsoft at all--but
an abusive sham that is a lucrative contract held by Convergys of Ohio who
boasts on their web site that they have a staff full of attorneys who are
ex-staffers on the hill (in the American Congress), and that they provide
world class support. This is a prime rip off of Microsoft and it's
customers. Whether that means "don't mess with us" or "we get results and
our calls returned inside the Beltway" I don't know or really care. The
major call centers for Convergys of Ohio are in Nova Scotia and on
Newfoundland known by many in Canada as "the rock."

On their site, Convergys boasts they "take care of their customers." I'm
going to outline *how* they take care of their customers with a $500 box of
Office Pro or SBE. It's my understanding that Tony Soprano takes care of
his customers as well. "Bada-Bing Bada-Boom" is the corporate ethos when it
comes to Microsoft's customers for Convergys.

This slogan on the page below should more accurately read "Dispose of Your
Customers With Convergys--How To Quintessentially Jerk Them Around and Dump
Them Fast and Show Complete Disdain For Them" Convergys reports revenues of
2.3 Billion, and can decimate the support for a $500 box of MOS 2003. Even
if Convergys employees know nothing about the product, that doesn't stop
them from charging full steam ahead with their unique and potent combo of
arrogance and ignorance.


Take "Better Care of Your Customers" With Convergys
http://www.convergys.com/company_ove...ml#better_care

This is one aspect of Microsoft where Steve Sinofsky, Jeff Raikes, Doug
Burghum, Paul Flessner, Eric Rudder, Lindsay Sparks, Jodi-Ueker-Rust, Henry
Vigil, SQL Server Product Manager Kirsten Ward, and a number of others are
asleep at the switch.

If one goes to the Microsoft Office site and reads every possible web page
associated with Outlook and BCM, they will find none of the many hoops that
may be necessary to get BCM installed and up and running due to its use of
the MSDE 2000. The tack taken is rather to scatter a few (and leave many
out) of the tips throughout 15 KBs and construct a 'Redmond Raiders of the
Lost Ark' search.

Tech Support Microsoft style has been an enormously egregious time wasting
experience. I want to distinguish Microsoft from Convergys here for good
reason. I was having trouble associating BCM with Outlook. I had read all
KBs, and appreciated and took all the suggestions posted in the Outlook and
BCM public newsgroups, here and on the web. I did everything possible to
keep the MSDE 2000 data base engine "happy" with respect to user profile,
services started, and file and print sharing.

After talking with a number of contract support people who were not
Microsoft of course, but actually Convergys although they lied and claimed
they were Microsoft employees, and whose offerings consistently were to go
to the OL toolbar and add BCM and getting the same crashes over 100 times.
No less than 10 appointments were made during the month over a period of 4
hours for each two day tandem. My support case was "escalated" to "BCM
research" No one from Convergys ever kept the appointments, or had the
courtesy or common sense to call and say something got in the way of the
obligation.

This was of course extremely time wasteful because you have to be at the
machine ready to "work with them," and by a clear phone line. It also
meant while Microsoft employees are very conscious of their own schedules,
PDAs, Tablets, Laptops, "SharePoint workspace meetings", meeting requests
and meeting workspaces, and Outlook calendars and schedules, they could
care less about the time and obligations of anyone else. There was never an
apology for these missed appointments by the glorified Microsoft phone
router manager that the phone answering temps from still another company
referred me to. The problem of 10 four hour periods that were scheduled and
blown off was brushed aside. Imagine what might happen to you if you stand
Ballmer, Raikes, Sinofsky, Burghum, Flessner or Rudder up for a scheduled
meeting, let alone ten of them, and you're on their payroll.

When I called to try to find out what happened, after trying to email
several I got emails from two Canadian Convergys
employees in Novascotia assuring me of escalation and prompt
calls but none came, nor were any actually planned.

Finally, after calling back I was told a call would be coming. The
gentleman said he had "1/2 hour," and essentially played what I now know is
the "Convergys BCM toolbar game" to hit the toolbar for a BCM add-in and
watch the
crash. He asked me to email the error messages about 3 weeks ago, said
someone would be in touch and no one was. The error messages are all in
hexadecimal; you can't paste them; and you have nothing with which to decode
them. I screen shot them, and I pasted the ones I could in text. I emailed
these to every SP listed who had owned the case as well as the managers at
Convergys who did not seem to know much about software in general, and
certainly Windows as I later found out when they called error messages
directed at NT Build 2600 the default XP Launch build a beta SP2 build.

I never heard from them. When I called and got a manger of call routers, he
was over the top hostile,and said your only support option is our
contractors--take it or leave it or I'll end the case and prevent your
calling. It was also clear he knew as little about Office as he did about
Windows.

I received an email the next day saying my case had been closed because I
was using a Beta OS. In fact, I
reproduced the same errors on Windows XP default launch build, Windows XP
SP1, and every current SP2 build. They had nothing to do with the build of
Windows period.

The non-technical Canadian manager who killed the case didn't seem to give
me credit for having the trouble-shooting sense to uninstalling a Beta and
BCM and to reinstall them which I had done weeks before the case was
"escalated" or asking for help. This is an old Convergys ploy. They'll
do anything they can to squirm out of support, particularly in a case like
this where they know nothing about BCM.

They also do Comcast support, they told me that Windows XP did not work
well with Comcast and it was causing me to go off line shortly before the XP
launch. I pointed out that Bill Gates bankrolled Comcast's start and this
was absurd since Windows XP has a number of networking and broadband
configuration enhancements compared to other OS's and Wintendo (Win 9X).

A cracked RJ6 cable outside and several hardware problems beyond the cable
tap were the problem. This was Convergys being Convergys and I might add,
not being Microsoft. Convergys will do anything to weasle out of support,
because with them, the emperor has no clothes and they know little about
much of the software they are purported to have SPs (service professionals)
for.

In other words, Microsoft who touts that they make excellent software
products contracts with some of the most incompetent support on the planet.

After I pointed out the only move several Convergys tech support people
including their BCM "research" team had was to click on the toolbar to try
to add in BCM, and had little understanding of the use of the SQL server
MSDN 2000 that had been adapted as a miniversion for BCM, or the KBs the
phone routing supervisor who alleged he was a MS employee in a suburb near
Redmond snarled to take it or leave it and I got an email stating the same
thing.

This made me wonder: If Mr. Sinofsky and Mr. Raikes were getting the same
crash, would they sit at their desks and click on the toolbar for months and
embrace the Microsoft phone manager's mandate to keep on keeping on?

If I were on that product group, or part of the endless number of managers
for Office products, and I
were Jeff Raikes and the rest of the Office VPs, I'd want Microsoft to stand
behind a $500 Microsoft box. What I have seen has been disingenous with
respect to that concept. In other words, Microsoft ain't supportin' no BCM
or Office boxes for any of us no how. I have the emails and broken
appointments and insistence that I keep clicking the toolbar to prove it. I
also don't speak hexidecimal, and make extensive use of the Event Viewer
when I can.

Microsoft needs to start supporting their products for real. I don't
believe anyone at Convergys knows a great deal about BCM and wish when
theypost instead of the alias [MSFT] those who are Convergys would be up
front and proud of their $2 plus billion dollar grossing company. Most of
us aren't fooled, and most of us know aV-1 or V-2 email is from a Convergys
employee or other contract employee and not a Microsoft employee. It would
not so much matter if the support personnel were part of J-Lo's back stage
roadies, if they knew something about the product they were supposed to
support and honored appointments.

I don't believe on the user rather than enterprise or medium business level
Microsoft, the Redmond company where Jeff Raikes works, supports their own
products at all, and I have substantive evidence to back this up.

Convergys is the *nasty* and completely incompetent underbelly of Microsoft
support. I would urge anyone who gets this treatment not to be satisfied
with it as an end result and to take it up with the real *Microsoft,* not
Convergys of Ohio. I'm not the lone ranger in this perception; I've seen it
for years on the XP, IE, OE
newsgroups on the web as well as the MS groups. I see posts for help that
begin "I couldn't solve this with long waits for Microsoft support." You
weren't waiting for Microsoft; you were waiting for their "support" from
Convergys.

Chad Harris