I've just been catching up on some support tickets (I personally review all support requests whenever possible) and found one ticket that really annoyed the heck out of me.
A customer, who shall remain nameless, was asking how to customise the People Directory in Confluence. Our initial response was made within 1 hour and then all subsequent responses were made within 5-10 minutes of the customer responding.
Considering the customer does not have a Service Level Agreement with Adaptavist, that's an awesome response time. For support tickets, that's generally what we always aim for and only when we get crazy busy (eg. when a new version of Confluence is released and it breaks stuff) do our response times move from minutes to hours.
However, the client was unhappy with our response time and closed the ticket! WTF?! There's just no pleasing some people. The biggest delay was when the client didn't respond for almost 2 months, after which they came back and told us how unhappy they were with response times! The cheek!
What I've come to realise is that some people are getting so busy that even waiting a matter of minutes is just far too long for them and they go off and spend vast amounts of time and effort trying to develop their own solution to a simple problem rather than waiting a few minutes (or hours in worst case) for us to solve the problem.
It's this "zero time" that's really going to start screwing businesses up in the coming years IMHO. People are getting so insanely busy under increasingly ridiculous project deadlines that they start doing really crazy things.
I remember playing a game called "Sam & Max" which had lots of little sub-games in it. One such game was called "Whack a Rat" where there was this machine with lots of holes in it:
Rats would stick their head out of the holes and you had to bash them on the head real quick with a big wooden hammer to score points. If you were too slow, the rat disappeared and you didn't get the points. Is this what fast-paced business is going to lead to? I hope not...
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