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Story: Skype on taking care of customers

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A Heroic Effort, Rupert

Rupert, that was really a good effort at having a meaningful interview, and asking some of the important questions. I think the nonsense and evasiveness that Durchslag gave for answers speaks volumes about what is really happening (or not happening):

- He says that they have results from a survey of 10,000 Skype Beta 4 users, whereas Skype's Mike Bartlett says it was either 15,000 or 40,000 users, and the Skype Cheerleaders say that it was 45,000 users. It's pretty obvious that the word from Skype PR on this was: "Pick a big number that you like".

- He says that Skype has "recently" doubled the size of their customer support staff. Oddly enough, that was the same answer he gave in a comment on my blog back in July, and we still haven't seen any improvement.

- Your question about the silly "330 million registered users was extremely good - and elicited the most telling response, I thought. Basically, "pick a number, any number. If we can't dazzle you with that one, let me try to dazzle you with a lot of others. We can hit you with so many numbers that no one can debunk them all".

- Likewise, your question about Mac and Linux users being left behind (now two major releases behind) was extremely well put and timely. Again, the non-response speaks for itself.

- Did the answer to the question about the iPhone make any sense to you at all? I couldn't find any useful information in that response at all - the closest he seemed to come was "stay tuned".

- Unless I completely missed something, your question about presence problems and delayed messages was totaly ignored.

The major points that I got out of the interview were:

- Skype is not interested in providing support for non-paying customers. The attitude is clear; try it, if it works for you then you can come back and thank us and kiss our feet; if it doesn't work for you, well, too bad, don't bother use because we don't want to hear it and we don't want to support you.

- Skype's long term-goal is not to provide decent customer support, even to their paying customers, but rather that customer support "should not be necessary". That is at the very least a ridiculously naive comment; in fact, in my opinion, it is actually a poor way to hide from support issues, by saying "we're working hard, not to support you, but to make support unnecessary", meanwhile all of you who currently need support please just shut up and get out of sight.

- Skype wants to be everywhere, on everything, but isn't willing to commit to anything, doesn't want to talk about the iPhone, Mac, Linux, or whatever else. They're going to be on "lots of devices, real soon now". Lots. Real Soon Now. But don't ask how we are going to support all those people on all those devices.

I don't know how you felt after conducting that interview, but after just watching it, I felt rather soiled....

In any event, my sincere thanks and appreciation on a job well done in very difficult circumstances.

jw 6/10/2008

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