Unprofessional Support-Fu, Let's Talk about It

Check this out. A 22-minute call from an angry customer to the Astro customer service. Most people would say that the customer was being unreasonable and having unbalanced hormones. But I have a different opinion -- that's very bad customer service by Astro.

I am a nasty and very-nice customer, it all depends on the issue am having and how the personnel speaks to me (of course, the same to most people too). I always dial the hotlines whenever I have something to complain or to inquire or I feel that I need to talk a bit with someone on a good afternoon. Always, really. To the extent that my colleagues questioned me a few times if I was simply too free.

At the same time, for the past 2 years, I worked on two support projects, providing technical support to customers around the globe. I was trained and I was also responsible to train new guys to come into this field.

My experiences with TM and Astro were usually bad. And what would I say for this case? Terribly handled. This case could be resolved in 2 to 3 minutes and it was ridiculous to drag it 'til more than 22 minutes 31 seconds.

To handle this emotional customer, Jeeva should:

1. Apologize for the misunderstanding ("that's your problem, I can't..")
2. Not question / argue with the customer, there's no rationality at another end dude. Be polite and say "I'm sorry" to calm her down, and bring her back to the point. What do the customers need? Solution.
   
3. Not keep quiet to dilly-dally the call.
4. Escalate! Or maybe not, because it would have been settled if Jeeva had better support-fu.

I always like the Atlassian's core value #3 - "Don't fuck the customer." Seriously don't. If you ever want to do it, do it in the nice way.

- yc, bloody hell.

Configuring CNAME to SWURL

I just received a tweet about how did I configure www.yclian.com to point to yclian.swurl.com, something that I actually was stuck in a while. Here is a short blog about it.

1. Configure your DNS CNAME
   Create a new CNAME, e.g. www, and point it to your SWURL's host, e.g. yclian.swurl.com.
2. Configure your SWURL
   Go to SWURL > Settings and add set the CNAME http:// field to your new domain alias, e.g. www.yclian.com.
   

Clear enough? I actually found it from this conversation.

- yc

Changing Context Path of Hudson

Just a quick tip for whoever wants to change the context path of Hudson stand-alone continuous integration server. It runs on Winstone, simply adds the --prefix=/${context.path} to the start-up command.

Yes, they named it "prefix".

- yc