Supporting our Customers

As mentioned before, the customer services team is on the end of the line of support so whenever processes fail or customers are not services well they end on my desk...   
In this case I received a call from on of our sales colleagues. He picked up  a complaint that 'his customer' was not services well and their service request was not solved....

First reflex is to go to MetaLink/My Oracle Support and review the details. It was clear that support did solve the problem and the SR was still open.  The reason was that this customer tried to order a shipment of Database version 8.1.7 .   Most of the readers will know that 8.1.7 has been de-supported for years so we simply run out of CD's of this version.

The support engineer provided this feedback to the customer but he insisted on the shipment of the software CD's.   In addition I tried to add some nice words to the Service Request (explaining that we cannot ship and support this version etc.. ) but this did not solve the dispute... even a mail to this customer did not resolve the situation so I decided to call and ask for clarification.

This call clarified a lot  ;-)  .   The technical guy was aware of the lifetime support policies and did migrate a long time ago (they even where preparing the 11i upgrades). When asked about the escalated SR he started to laugh ...  the reason for him to get this software was because a team member was almost celebrating his 10 year anniversary for the company and the 8.1 version was his first Oracle version in his career - he needed version 8 to make an award for this technical specialist....    With this is mind, we agreed that I would check the archives and get back to him on short notice.

So I dived into the archives (real deep), picked-out and send the requested CD with the required software.  Customer happy, I believe the colleague who will be awarded will have a good time celebrating his 10th anniversary and the SR was closed.
  

Hans

p.s.: we are out of CD's now - for the next anniversary think of another award ;-)