I got a call from the country service manager. Telling me I caused quite a ruckus. They offered to sell me the part for something like 75 Euro's or something I believe. Which was still an outrageous amount of money for a HEPA filter. But I agreed since this was probably as good as it was going to get. Now it is true that there are laws regarding reasonable pricing of replacement and spareparts in the Netherlands I might have been able to base a lawsuit on. But I didn't really feel like going to court over 250 Euro (or really 75 Euro with the new offer) with a multi billion dollar company...

The issue was that their line of thought was; Well according to Dutch standards a vacuum cleaner has a life expectancy of 5 years. So if you want to replace something in it after 5 years (even if it is a customer replaceable part like a HEPA filter), it's not a replacement part / consumable, it's a spare part (which are usually more expansive). Which is also why I asked them; "Does that mean it is the official stance that you shouldn't expect your vacuum cleaners to last much longer then 5 years? Because that HEPA filter certainly needs replacement after 5 years.". Obviously they never answered that.

BTW We are talking about a premium house hold appliance brand here. The vacuum cleaner now costs well over 500 Euro. But when I bought it, it was about 240 Euro's or something. Sells for 700 dollars at Walmart it seems.

Sometimes we're just after the catharsis.

If they had responded, he would have mentioned it in his comment.

Making a big spectacle of doing regular people work, and then normal employees having to go in and actually do it is very in line with my picture of a certain kind of manager. (Your story did not actually come off like this, I just found this a funny interpretation)

that comment should be added to https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights except, since the hightlights are sorted by the time of the comment it's not going to be seen by anyone unless they read all comments to the end...

Could be crackpots or could be regular people who are so frustrated they express themselves that way.

And the truth is if the 'Bill Gates' had to deal with this frustration himself (most likely let's say he doesn't he has people who deal with it for him when he needs something from another company or his own) he'd implement changes to keep users happier. Noting of course that you are always going to have a segment of people that will both get angry and have edge problems.

Did or does 'Bill Gates' ever actually try to be a regular user of Microsoft support actually waiting in the call queue on hold for 10 minutes to an hour and even getting disconnected?

Does anyone at the company (in a position to order improvements) ever do this?

(This applies to many companies obviously 'bill gates' and 'microsoft' are just placeholders.)

I think it's underestimated the amount of psychological pain that some of the software (of Microsoft and other companies) has caused people over the years.

This is really brilliant.

Once thing I've noticed whe dealing with support cases in a variety of industry is, while there are different types of customer needs/comlaints (ex. a customer who is afraid of losing their warranty service via chicanery versus a customer who is dissatisfied with the results of the warranty service) customers sometimes really need to first feel like they are being heard.

Sometimes the emotional response of a person is literally "Can i speak to your manager?". It comes off rude, and it sure and shit is rude, but maybe they need to feel acknowledged, like maybe someone farther down the line was a jerk to them and they just feel blown off, or could just be a bad day. You sometimes do indeed need to perform emotional labor in order to achieve the best customer service.

I like this approach because it acknowledges the customer intrinsically and they feel like the maze has ended. The process has now become pro-active: There is light at the end of the tunnel.

This is not easy to bang out @work 9-5!

I once emailed Tim Cook and sure enough, he responded. Seemed like it was him, too.