Originally Posted by
Hestzhyen
Well, as someone who supports applications and tech for a ginormous bank with thousands and thousands of customers, any customer impacts are bad. As soon as we get notified that three or more people are experiencing the same issue, it becomes a top-priority, drop everything to solve type of mission. I've never interacted with a customer directly and dealt with their ire, but I have been rooting through server logs and packet captures for days at a time to solve problems. I have already worked 40+ hours this week and not a single customer has commented about the issue we are working so hard to solve at the moment. It's been passed back and forth between US and offshore teams six times. Customer service, whether the customer reports it or not, is something we take very seriously.
I say all this to draw a comparison to what I see as a customer of SE. The fact that there are some significant long-standing complaints about this issue is mind-boggling from my perspective. This has been going on for MONTHS and SE basically says "not our problem, please understand". Uh, guys, it IS your problem even if you don't own the infrastructure- your customers are having a terrible experience and your reputation is the one most vulnerable to the complaints. Customers don't know that you have zero technical control over their connection- they only know they have a terrible time with XIV and XIV alone. It's up to the company to do what's right by the customer. Corporate clients have leverage that individuals only dream of... USE IT!
Our customers had issues booking for travel due to a third party issue- a vendor that provides the tech services to book for travel had issues with their ISP between us and them. We escalated up, paged everyone on the continent, and spent hundreds of man hours looking at the issue. In the end we decided to do what was right for the customer and took a whole datacenter out of rotation. We did what we had to to preserve the customer experience, even we were not the ones who were at fault. SE has simply, from my perspective, not tried hard enough to solve this. I don't think they're incompetent at this point- just extremely uncaring.