I’ve Moved In !

After some discussion and no end of frustration, I have followed my son’s advice and moved my BLOG here ! I found it amazing that the folks at Microsoft just could not figure out how to fix the glitch in my account, but after two weeks of debating the point I decided to give up and look for a place that was more customer focused. I’m still getting settled in, but its starting to feel like home already.

Fun With Microsoft

Well, it has been a fun filled few days !! My son keeps telling me to switch over to another BLOG space provider, but till now I really haven’t had an issue with the Microsoft Live spaces offering, other than not really caring for the advertisements. I was looking through the settings section, and lo and behold I noticed in the small print that if I just pay a few $$ and upgrade the account the adverts can be blocked !! Sounds great eh ? Not quite so easy – for the past few days I’ve been bounced back and forth between Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Customer Service, Microsoft Billing and then back to Microsoft Tech Support – bottom line is they have a bug in their data base and I’ve been told that I have to fix it myself because they either won’t or can’t ! It’s amazing, and quite sad really. The Xbox person I spoke to actually refused to delete the data causing the problem (!!) so here I am two days later still stuck.

I will say that with the exception of the Xbox person, they have been unfailingly polite – I got an email from the Customer Support folks – someone by the name of Salie (no idea if this is a real person or just a computer auto-emailer pseudo) who sent me a note saying “Ian, please accept my sincerest apologies for not being able to assist you fully. You are a valuable customer to MSN and we are glad to give you consistent and effective service”. And the Billing guy I just got off the phone with actually said the same thing almost word for word, so I’d say Microsoft at least has managed to give them all the same training and script to read from. Frankly I’d almost be happy to deal with a rude person if they would just fix the problem. The only consistent piece in this story is the general lack of competence, together with some really odd views about customer support from the Xbox clown.

Oh – and the suggestion to allow me to fix it myself ? Create a brand new account ! As a result, I am considering following my son’s advice.