I documented everything and my frustrations with their software not working or supporting modern operating systems and sent it over to people who seemed high up - email, twitter or reddit.
later got a call asking if they could show it to the board because as employees they had the same frustrations and I said sure. next day they announced that their president was fired...
Good ol backup exec - if it errored it was working and no errors meant nothing ran.
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.
It does help if you start your email with your value to the company (i.e., I spent $X over $Y time period at your company)
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.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040303-00/?p=40...
"It's black? Okay, it's not that then, I was hoping it would be easy. Right, plug it back in again and... oh it's working now? Cool, ring me back if there's anything else then!"
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!
This is a two-for-one: sometimes it is turned on, and sometimes restarting it actually does resolve the problem (at least temporarily) anyway.
Not sure how apocryphal a tale this is but it does speak volumes to how customer obsessed these companies were.
HOW DARE YOU!!!
