Turboing, or what happens when the customer is really pissed

Rob Levandowski, a UNIX system administrator and former tech support engineer has written a very enlightening article called The Art of Turboing and a follow up case study analyzing an experience with CompUSA. Turboing “refers to the actions of a customer who goes around the normal technical support process by contacting a senior person in the chain of command.” In other words, a customer for a variety of reasons, sometimes good and sometimes bad, decides the tech/customer support team can’t resolve the issue at hand correctly or quickly enough and calls the CEO or other high ranking executive to try and get the desired result.

I ran into this many times in the 18 months I managed the NetDynamics Tech Support team. The situations played out in one of two ways: a game of hot potato, where the upset customer was handed down the line from CEO to VP to Senior Manager to me, or, less unpleasantly, when the customer asked the support engineer to speak with his manager. There were some customers who thought, since they had met our CEO, that they were always entitled to call on him for the slightest problem. There were others who automatically called me after filing a support ticket to scream in my ear about the cost of downtime to their company. Not pleasant and usually doesn’t help that much in the big picture but it surely happens everyday.