Supporting our Customers

Since some time we have problems with the printer at home. Good thing is that, if you know the trick, you can get it to work but my internal customers (the family) started to complain.  "The printer 'again' does not work - I need it for school - etc." I guess every IT'er will recognize this ....

Last Sunday morning I decided to fix it to restore 'the confidence in IT@Home'.  My first step was to go to the site from the printer vendor to search and download the latest drivers.   While fighting through the questions and 'term and conditions' I was able to download the latest version.  after 20 minutes download and 5 minutes installation it seems that I hitted an 'unrecoverable error'. My first reflex was download again and re-install.... 

One hour later I was in the position that  I did not have any printer installed and unrecoverable errors in the installation.

Time for Plan-B, ignore the site of the vendor and skip to 'ye old' Google.  Few queries later I found some 'soul mates' who experienced my problem as well and received hits and tips from 'experts' in the field to solve the issue.    20 minutes later, my printer was working better the ever ... tx to the community in the web-world !

When thinking of this time consuming process I remembered a recent discussion with one of my colleagues around the new Communities in My Oracle Support. He explained that the 'new generation' does not fully rely on the vendor site to solve their problems and answer their questions. Instead the new generation starts the search in the virtual community for particular problems.  This was one of the reasons Support started to put more focus on the communities IN My Oracle Support. 

He continued "We learned that questions are not always best answered through Service Requests and get better solutions through the community.  Key factor for the difference is the experience in the field.  Potentially thousands of people bring a lot of experience in and the 'I have seen this before' factor crucial to solve a part of the questions in the field."

I believe he is right and looking to my Sunday-morning experience it make sense.  The real reason for my printer problem was not related to the quality of the downloaded driver but because of a combination of setting in my PC.  A problem difficult to tackle by the printer supplier who will always take some assumptions around the configuration of the PC (not necessarily your configuration..). Solving the problem becomes but less difficult if you use the collective brain from millions of people connected to the web...

If you want to see this new community approach from support, take a look and lets me know what you think !