Conference bulova::decw_jan-89_to_nov-90

        You have got the csc involved? The Hardware problem (if it is
        such) has been elevated through the Field Service Action Outage
        mechanisms? That is usually the best way of getting the most
        qualified people involved with the greatest urgency and guarantee
        of responsiveness.
        
        q
        

    RE: .1
    
    The CSC was involved, and they told the customer to upgrade to V5.2
    (which didn't solve the problem).  As far as the "right" channels
    are concerned I guess I'd have to be naive and say that I would
    think that the responsibility lies with the CSC to resolve a problem
    once a custoemr calls in.... since that's what the CSC gets paid for.
    
    Now I got involved in this whole mess because the problems been dragging
    on for about 3 mths and the problem has gone from a (very expensive)
    3540 that doesn't work to a VERY MAD CUSTOMER with a 3540 that doesno't
    work.
    
    I'll talk to anyone who can help me with the problem.
    
    Which CSC supports 3540s anyway?  Atlanta or Color Spr?
    
    Regards,
    
    Gary BOyles
    

re: .2

As far as I know, CSC/AT supports the *hardware*, CSC/CS supports VMS. We share
responsibility for supporting DECwindows.

Your quite right that it is a CSC responsibility to try to resolve a customer
issue once they call in.

Now if you called CSC/CS on this, part of the issue may be that we have *no*
Firefox here, and so no one has ever touched one, let alone tried to diagnose
a 4 cursor problem. When we don't have the equipment, and are unable to resolve
the issue remotely, we follow the Customer Services escalation procedure, which
is to notify the local office of the issue and request they provide us onsite
support to try and identify a solution. If we can't resolve it by working with
local customer services, then it is escalated to area/country/corporate support.

Questions:

Which CSC(s) have been involved? can you point us to call handling sequence
numbers? Which groups at CSC(s) have been involved? Has a formal escalation to
local Customer Services been done? Have local Customer Services escalated this
issue to Area/Country/Corporate Support?

As Bob said, CSC/CS has no firefox so I susggest you go through 
Atlanta.  If the customer is mad our procedure is to do a local office 
referral so that you know.  Given that you already know, you need to 
put pressure on Atlanta for them to either fix it or pass it on up to 
CSSE, etc. and get engineering involved.  Notes are nice, but if the 
customer's hot it is not a reliable escalation route.

Bruce

    RE: .3
    
    The problem did go to Colorado Springs.  The call # is C8910102215.
    
    The suggestion given to the customer was to install V5.2 of VMS
    which didn't change anything.
    
    RE: .4
    Don't "you guys"  (i.e. Colo. Sprs. & Atlanta) work together if a
    problem can't be resolved?
    
    Question:
    Local Office Referral.... What is this supposed to do anyway?  With all
    of the "big picture" people running around in local offices you're
    lucky to find someone who can find the switch to turn a system on.
    
    
    Regards,
    
    Gary Boyles
    

I have responded to Gary by mail.

However, I'll take the opportunity to answer some of the questions from .5

> Don't "you guys"  (i.e. Colo. Sprs. & Atlanta) work together if a
>    problem can't be resolved?

Yes, we work together all the time (perhaps not as well as we could at times,
but we try.) In this particular case, we were not even aware that the customer
was continuing to have problems as the customer had never reported back to
us (as far as we can tell from our admin system) that they had attempted to
follow our advice. If the customer had done so, and we realized that V5.2
had not resolved the problem, we most likely would have been in contact
with Atlanta on this.

>    Local Office Referral.... What is this supposed to do anyway?  With all
>    of the "big picture" people running around in local offices you're
>    lucky to find someone who can find the switch to turn a system on.

A local office referral is the process by which Digital Customer Services
supplies a local focus to problems which for various reasons are not resolvable
remotely. Notice, it is the Customer Services folks that respond, not pre-sales,
sales, consulting groups etc. Now we realize that many local Customer Services
groups may not be staffed to handle software issues, and may infact get
additional local Digital organizations involved. The general idea is that the
local Customer Services manager is ultimately responsible for "their/our" 
customer, and the LOR is the mechanism we use to get them involved in the loop.

    Found the answer to the problem.... thanks Bob and Tom.
    
    Apparently there was a bad board (#L2005-AA).  It was discovered that
    the diagnostics does not detect the bad chip that causes this problem.
    Manufacturing knows about the problem.
    
    Thanks.
    
    Gary Boyles