My Wet Coast Life

10 days and still waiting. We left this issue off waiting for a manager's call back from Xbox Live Support. My true value as a Microsoft customer has now been shown courtesy of Xbox Live Customer Support. Normally I would have dropped this issue and moved on but once again, Maria, the stellar employee I got to deal with on January 5th let me down again. Instead of getting that promised "guaranteed" call back from one of her managers, Sam or Grace on January 6th, I sit here in utter dissapointment writing this article. It is January 15th. I even tried to give them benefit of the doubt and gave them 10X the promised time to contact me. Sadly they continue to drop the ball.

On January 12th, not hearing anything from Xbox support, I decided to use the email form on xbox.com to see if I could get an update or hopefully get someone to finally call me back. A day later, I at least get a Zen response from Xbox email support, literally. The support person's name was Zen but sadly he could not help me.

Thank you for contacting Microsoft online support for XBOX. I am Zen and I will be helping you today with this issue.

As I understand it, you are still waiting for a callback from us, about unable to redeem your prepaid xbox LIVE subscription code. Please accept our apologies for the inconvenience and for the limited capability of our support team (email) to rectify your issue.

Unfortunately, due to the sensitivity of the information required to review your query, our support team will not be able to assist you further through email. This support line does not have an access to a customer's account information for verification or even allowed to divulge personal information over email. I know how bothersome this can be, but, we may need your patience to contact us via our phone support option. When you call, appropriate resolution will be provided to your inquiries or request.
- Zen (Xbox Email Support)

Well that was not the Zen answer I wanted. If they cannot provide me support due to privacy, why not at least schedule a call out to me to avoid further incoveniencing me? Would that not be proper customer service? Sorry, that would make sense and apparantly Xbox Live support lacks some.

Once again, Xbox provided a supposed means of contacting support to get assistance only to be told to call in. 2 out of 3 ways of contact them apparantly are useless for my situation. Why even offer it as support option in the first place when they cannot fully support the customer? Instead they should rename it to common question help desk and stop misleading customers and wasting their time. Even an easily visible disclaimer or notice stating they can only assist with A,B and C and for any other issue just to call in would have saved both mine and those support people's time. More or less, if you're dealing with Xbox Live support for any account related issue, just call in to avoid delays. Noted. And as G.I.Joe puts it, "Knowing is half the battle..."

Follow up:

So today this issue is still bugging me. Seeing the search stats for previous articles on this issue, I am definitley not the only one being wronged by Xbox support and receiving the terribad service. I assumed my email could have prompted something at Xbox support but alas to much wishful thinking. With optimizism depleting, I decided as my final attempt for resolution with this issue to go the old school way and write a letter explaining all that has occured. One last vain attempt at trying to get their support improved. So out comes Word and the typing begins. Now as a minor joke to me at least, I used Microsoft's own complaint letter template as a base. My letter ended up being just over 3,400 words. Just a slight bit longer than the supplied example template. But if you're not experienced in writing a complaint to a company, it is a good place to start. Now I didn't expect the letter to be that long but apparantly, the 2 calls I had with Xbox support genertaed a fair amount of lies and poor displays of customer service.

At least for me, when I finished typing the letter, I felt a minor sense of accomplishment that I've done as much as a consumer could be expected. If at least one person with a decent grasp of what customer service is reads it at Microsoft, I hope it will be enough to get some changes at Xbox Support and improve the overall customer experience, even if only a slight improvement. Just maybe. For those interested, you can read the a PDF version of my letter here.

Now that the letter is complete, I replied to Zen's email with it attached informing them of my complaint. Not knowing if Xbox Support will even receive it or get it and ignore it, I felt obliged to also send a copy to others with positions that relate to my concerns. So after a bit of research, the final list of people at Microsoft who I felt should be informed of my bad support experience ended up as follows:

• Microsoft Board of Directors
• Marc Whitten, General Manager of Microsoft’s Xbox LIVE
• Toby Richards, General Manager for worldwide customer experience
• Rich Kaplan Corporate Vice President, Customer & Partner Advocacy
• Kathleen Hogan, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Services

Now contacting them via email is a bit more difficult of a task. If their emails were public, I can only assume the other not so happy Microsoft customers would be trying to do the same that I am and they would be inundated. The only email address I could find is to contact the board of directors. You can either send an e-mail message to AskBoard@microsoft.com or snail mail a letter to:

MSC 123/9999
Corporate Secretary
Microsoft Corporation
One Microsoft Way
Redmond, WA 98052-6399
USA

Knowing it will be hard to get emails for the non-board members, I tried the standard combos for corporate addresses such as firstname.lastname @microsoft.com, first initial and last name, etc. and all came back undeliverable. So not wanting to waste anymore time, I have resorted to snail mail and will send an individual letter out to each of them on Monday.

If anything happens out of it, I will post an update, other than that, I am done with Microsoft and in particular Xbox Live support. I leave you with a quote I liked as joke but find more truthful now and fitting of my situation.

Microsoft is not the answer, it is the question
The answer is NO!

* UPDATE January 18, 2011: Read the final conclusion to this HERE