Should vendors turn support calls into sales pitches? It certainly raises questions in the customer's mind when they do, as in a recent gripe from a reader about a call to Brother printer support.
"After a few days of power outages from severe thunderstorms, one of my remote offices called me with a problem with a low-end Brother laser printer," the reader wrote. "They told me the error code the lights were flashing, and I looked it up on the Brother website. The error was a 'fuser error,' and the prescribed action was to call Brother's service center. Hoping to save having to send the printer in, I went out to the site and took the printer apart to check the fuser out. Everything appeared fine, so I put it back together, and still no joy."
The reader called Brother, expecting to have to box up the printer and send it in for warranty support. "Instead the person on the phone, after putting me on hold for about ten minutes, tells me a simple reset procedure and has me print a test page successfully," the reader writes. "Once that was done she asked if I had any other questions. I did: 'Why don't you make that reset information available on your website; I could have had the printer fixed instantly, and saved myself not only the trip but the time spent taking it apart and sitting on hold here to speak with you?' She played that off, and segued right into the reason they don't make that information available on their website. 'Well,' she asked me, 'since you're on the line, do you need to buy any toner for your printer?'
"I have never had tech support try to sell me supplies I didn't need to fix the problem at hand before, but once she asked that it dawned on me the reason the information is not available -- or at least not easily found -- on Brother's website," the reader continued. "Their printers feed calls to their call center, where after the reps are so nice and helpful, they kindly offer to sell you some toner straight from the manufacturer. I wonder what the blinking-LED-error-code to toner-purchaser conversion rate is for this sales method.
"I don't mind them selling supplies for their printer," concludes the reader. "Had I needed toner I may have bought it from them, if the pricing was competitive. But what I do mind is the withholding of a simple piece of information to make the user call in, and using that in combination with sales to try to turn tech support from an expense into a profit center. It was like a longer, real time version of spam that I had to sit through for 10 minutes to find out how to reset the printer. Is this where free tech support is headed?"
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