Customer Service Hell

A colleague of mine was telling me about an incident a while ago with a user.

It was a Monday morning and the department was extremely low on staff for various reasons. Ofcourse when you are short of man power, as Murphy's Law states "Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

With only a few people to solve the IT mysteries of the workplace, several crisises hit at once with not enough people to cover them all. It ended with only one person in the office dealing with the telephone complaints and the queue of requests coming through the door.

Just as my colleague was wishing he had never turned up for work that morning, things got a whole lot worse. It started with a phone call.

Exchange Server Down

The other week our Exchange Server had a serious issue that prevented about 2 to 3 hundred of our 3500 users not being able to get to their email. Due to the type of problem it was going to take around 24 to 48 hours to fix the problem. We put up an alert up on our website and got to work. During that time we received numerous phone calls from different users:

1. "Hi there is the email down?"
   We explain the situation...
   "Well please can you just get it going again now just for me?"