I hate remote call centers
I love Tivoli Storage Manager, IMO, it's one of the most capable and scalable products out there for data storage management.
However, there's very little love from me toward IBM's call support.
Earlier this week I was trying to rpm --resign the binary rpm's from IBM and no matter what I did, the command always produces corrupted RPM packages. after googling I found out that RPM packages produced by older version of rpmbuild (3.x in IBM's case), can be corrupted by rpm --resign.
After obtaining that knowledge, I opened a ticket with IBM PMR (Problem Management Records, their ticket tracking system). and got a response really quickly that basically says "no it's not a defect, what you want is a 'feature request' and we don't handle it, call the marketing guys instead." ( No, it's broken!, latest version of TSM is certified for RHEL4 and it should support RHEL4's rpm, which is 4.3.x, but I digress)
So I called the number he gave me, got connected to one of their remote call centers.. after asking for my name, phone number, address, customer #. I got put on-hold for more than 5 minutes, I was then told i'll be connected to the sales department. A few minutes went by, I got connected to yet another remote call center. A guy with thick accent answered my call and told me I called the wrong dept, and transferred me to the 'marketing' people.. after another few minutes I got connected to Lenovo Sales.... UGH!!!!!
Things I don't like about IBM's call centers:
1. They're generally hosted over horrible VoIP lines. A lot of the staff they hire have thick accents, that combined with laggy VoIP services irritates me to no end.
2. Why do you need all those information and then the customer number to figure out who I'm calling for ?! A customer number should be enough!
3. Please transfer people to the right department, the last time I checked Tivoli was still part of IBM, not part of Lenovo.
(Not to mention I'll think twice about telling people to use TSM if it were a Lenovo product)
4. Did I mention the horrible VoIP lines ?
However, there's very little love from me toward IBM's call support.
Earlier this week I was trying to rpm --resign the binary rpm's from IBM and no matter what I did, the command always produces corrupted RPM packages. after googling I found out that RPM packages produced by older version of rpmbuild (3.x in IBM's case), can be corrupted by rpm --resign.
After obtaining that knowledge, I opened a ticket with IBM PMR (Problem Management Records, their ticket tracking system). and got a response really quickly that basically says "no it's not a defect, what you want is a 'feature request' and we don't handle it, call the marketing guys instead." ( No, it's broken!, latest version of TSM is certified for RHEL4 and it should support RHEL4's rpm, which is 4.3.x, but I digress)
So I called the number he gave me, got connected to one of their remote call centers.. after asking for my name, phone number, address, customer #. I got put on-hold for more than 5 minutes, I was then told i'll be connected to the sales department. A few minutes went by, I got connected to yet another remote call center. A guy with thick accent answered my call and told me I called the wrong dept, and transferred me to the 'marketing' people.. after another few minutes I got connected to Lenovo Sales.... UGH!!!!!
Things I don't like about IBM's call centers:
1. They're generally hosted over horrible VoIP lines. A lot of the staff they hire have thick accents, that combined with laggy VoIP services irritates me to no end.
2. Why do you need all those information and then the customer number to figure out who I'm calling for ?! A customer number should be enough!
3. Please transfer people to the right department, the last time I checked Tivoli was still part of IBM, not part of Lenovo.
(Not to mention I'll think twice about telling people to use TSM if it were a Lenovo product)
4. Did I mention the horrible VoIP lines ?