and this too shall pass...
30th of June 2010, Wednesday - a day I will never ever forget in my life!!!
Our team got a call from an irate customer, who was angry that his data was missing - yes that was a very serious problem!!! Even before, we finished introducing ourselves in the phone call, he started yelling at us. His tone showed, how frustrated he was. If at all, that was a face-to-face conversation, I fear he would have certainly slapped us.
We promised to resolve the problem and convinced him saying we would give him a call in another 30 minutes, after looking into the log files. We searched this log file, that log file and all possible log files for his session, but nothing helped us.. When all these were happening, we forgot about that 30 minutes timeline - he called us after 45 minutes and the music started again.
Definitely, it was not our day :-(
The problem started at 8 pm IST and went on till the next day morning. The user (though he was from USA) was also awake after his day time - that showed how important that missing data was to him. At regular intervals, we called him or he called us.
Almost after 14 hours, the next day, we some how found the reason of the problem. It wasn't an application bug. It was because of a very silly mistake - both by the user and a usability problem on our side. Thankfully, the user was so kind enough to understand what really happened and also realized what mistake he did. We promised to address that usability in our next update.
and what happened next, was a sweet surprise to us all. He started praising us and promised to recommend our software to his clients :-) We are also happy that we learned, a new way to look into similar problems in the future.
The show started smoothly, had lots of tensions/thrills/pain or what ever you can call them as and finally had a very happy ending. What seemed like an end of life a 10 hours ago, turned out to be a good learning for life time at the end.
and we know even this shall pass by...
Our team got a call from an irate customer, who was angry that his data was missing - yes that was a very serious problem!!! Even before, we finished introducing ourselves in the phone call, he started yelling at us. His tone showed, how frustrated he was. If at all, that was a face-to-face conversation, I fear he would have certainly slapped us.We promised to resolve the problem and convinced him saying we would give him a call in another 30 minutes, after looking into the log files. We searched this log file, that log file and all possible log files for his session, but nothing helped us.. When all these were happening, we forgot about that 30 minutes timeline - he called us after 45 minutes and the music started again.
Definitely, it was not our day :-(
The problem started at 8 pm IST and went on till the next day morning. The user (though he was from USA) was also awake after his day time - that showed how important that missing data was to him. At regular intervals, we called him or he called us.
Almost after 14 hours, the next day, we some how found the reason of the problem. It wasn't an application bug. It was because of a very silly mistake - both by the user and a usability problem on our side. Thankfully, the user was so kind enough to understand what really happened and also realized what mistake he did. We promised to address that usability in our next update.
and what happened next, was a sweet surprise to us all. He started praising us and promised to recommend our software to his clients :-) We are also happy that we learned, a new way to look into similar problems in the future.
The show started smoothly, had lots of tensions/thrills/pain or what ever you can call them as and finally had a very happy ending. What seemed like an end of life a 10 hours ago, turned out to be a good learning for life time at the end.
and we know even this shall pass by...
Labels: Daily Life, software developer life, software engineering, vetty thinking
posted by Prathees R at 4:09 AM
2 Comments:
Doesn't this kind of things happen frequently? Is this the worst ever that you've seen?
@Venkat
yeah! as a product company, we do face angry customers - almost everyday. but this the worst case, i have experienced.
happy that we got an happy ending :-)
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