Good bye to a good customer

[Tony_Scarpelli]

I've had this customer for some years. Pays great, never complains about the bills and is definitely not a price shopper. The only thing they want is someone to jump when they call and I have managed to satisfy that. I get a call every 90 days or so.

However she is a little Chemo Head and so I have to keep setting things up for her. Sometimes I go out and they have a 2nd or 3rd antivirus installed and such other silly stuff. I get calls she can't find her Quickbooks file or backup or Quicken files or other important docs and have always found them where they should be or where she moved them (sometimes she creates a folder on the desktop and moves them to it). I always move them back and put short cuts on the desktop and explain to her the difference and why they need to be on the raid.

I put a usb external drive with daily automatic backups on and I always check it when I go out. I backup the complete computer incase she moves an important file to the desktop or inadvertently puts it somewhere it wouldn't automatically be backed up.

Last call out the system drive failed. She said she was trying to get it to have sound and might have moved some cables when it flashed and so she went and bought a new monitor but it still doesn't work. The motherboard is shot, the cpu Im not sure, the hard drive is not coming up at all. Should be no problem since she has a backup of the complete computer as well as mirror raid for the data drive.

Except someone turned off the backup 60 days ago and the two things she most wanted seem to have found their way to the C drive rather than the data drive.

I even setup the my docs file to automatically copy to the mirrored drive but I did not setup the desktop. You guessed it she had moved the files to the desktop the day it failed.

I got 99% of her data still on the mirrored drive but she doesn't care about that. She is unhappy not to have the last 90 days of QB's and Intuit Quicken. So she made me take the computer, backup drive out of her house as they do not do what she wanted them to do.

How do I tell her that her chemo is part of the problem without sounding like a jerk trying to redirect blame. I really just want to solve her problem.

I pride our company on going the extra mile to help seniors and other computer illiterate but this one got past me. I think I lost her business which is sad (at least until she experiences my competitors for awhile and comes back).

We also had auto online backup which she paid the minimum but her backups are 40x the minimum so they did not backup the most recent required files so that is when we moved her to the External USB drive. Its not that she didn't have a high amount of backup subscription it is that she makes copies of copies of copies and soon fills any drive/subscription with unnecessary files.

I'd love to hear some ideas about how to help those who know enough to be dangerous.

 

[Metanis]

Based on your write-up I think I'd just move on.

 

[Tony_Scarpelli]

Based on your write-up I think I'd just move on.

I'm not kicking myself by any means, I am just trying to see if there is an easy way to serve such clients. I expect to see more and more of them.

I don't mind when they never argue about the billing. As long as they pay for the service its all fair as far as I am concerned. She hasn't accused me of doing anything other than the USB drive not doing what it was supposed to do.

I just suspect it will be awhile before I hear from her again.

 

[BillMoney]

It is not your fault that she caused this issue. If you explained not to do something and she did it anyway she is 100% at fault. If she decides to leave because of this then there is nothing you can do about it. All you can do is try to salvage the situation and explain why this happened and hopefully she will be reasonable about it

 

[PBComputer]

Do you know if there is any family members close by you could talk to. to see if they could help?

I have a elderly gentleman customer who is in the early stages of alzheimer's who ring me to do general maintenance on his system and household electronics (the last one change batteries in a remote) he has family next door so if any jobs like this come up I give them a ring and they go and do it.

Might be worth to see if there is family who could help with a little but on education.

Paul

 

[jimbojambo]

Personally I think you have been a great help to this person and made a sterling effort. We cannot forsee every eventuality and you had obviously thought about her situation and helped her out greatly but it's just one of those things that slipped through the cracks. I'm sure she will call again. I guess we will know for certain in 90 days.

Keep doing what your doing

 

[LedHed]

Tony,
Don't beat yourself up. You are a victim of what I call the "Million to One" rule (which I write about in my ebook "Doing I.T. Right") and it happens to everyone in this business eventually. The "Million to One" rule states: You can fix a million problems for a client but the only one he/she will remember is the one you didn't. Don't forget, it is entirely possible to do everything right and still have everything go horribly, horribly wrong.

I have been in your situation and I understand. You spend hours and hours thinking, wondering, and second guessing. You are searching for something you could have done differently. Sometimes you find an answer, sometimes you don't. If you do find an answer write it down so you don't repeat the mistake. If you don't find an answer, move on. This is how you grow as a technician.

I think about the "Million to One" rule before I start any job. It has greatly reduced the number of times I have had to tell myself "I should have done this instead of that". It has also helped me cope on the occasions where I know I did everything right and something still went wrong.

Anyway, best wishes.

 

[brandonkick]

I think you've done everything correctly. There isn't much more you could have done really.

You can, for instance, setup a clone of her entire system. Something like acronis true image. I use that here at my day job and it works wonderfully. I have it set up to do full system images once a month and then do daily backups which only backup the "changes" since the last backup.

A 2TB external drive should work wonderfully in this instance. Once it does fill, just sell her a new 2TB drive and start the process over again.

I've taken it a step further to use SyncBack. I use SyncBack to backup only the files and folders that are likely to be changed (read user folder ((my docs, desktop, downloads, favorites and ect...)) and program files. Do a full backup and then schedule daily "changes" backups. This way anything that changes on a day to day basis is backed up. In my situation this works a little better then it may in yours, since I know that only certain directories are likely to change on a daily basis.

But you've taken very reasonable measures to protect her data and her system and they have failed. That is always a possibility, especially when dealing with customers who have special conditions. I don't think there is much else you could have done.

 

[FremontPC]

Tony -

I know this is aside the point, but you might be able to get those files back by using "Restore Previous Versions" or Shadow Explorer (Vista and above).

Tough spot. What could you do aside from putting her in a managed environment with her account on a server ($$$)? Sounds like it's only going to get worse.