Sometimes when a confused and frustrated customer calls, there’s is more to the story. Like in today’s story, where a customer helps the owner of an IT company discover a big problem.
The way the IT company decides to solve the problem is through clever revenge!
See how the story plays out…
I owned an IT company, we’ll call it: UberTech, that strictly manages business networks; no website development, graphics, etc.
One of my employees was tackling an interesting support request with instructions for making changes to a company’s website.
This happens from time to time where a customer gets confused with their various tech vendors (or assumes that we provide all tech related services).
He called the person to get more context and being in earshot, I could tell that my employee’s call was quickly escalating with a frustrated person on the other end – and he has already offered to pass the call of to his manager, me.
Here’s how the conversation with the customer went…
ME: UberTech, How can I help you?
Pissed Off Website Owner (WebOwner): I want to know what is going on here! I don’t know who you are, I don’t know why you’re calling me, and I don’t know why you have my support information.
ME: Sir, to be honest, I don’t know who you are, why we are calling you, and why we have your support information either; but together I think we can figure this out. I understand that you have a website and made a request for some changes. Who hosts your website?
WebOwner: Derp Company. On their support website there are instructions to send support requests, I followed them and now I have YOU calling me with MY support information.
The customer did as instructed.
ME: Sir, I definitely want to get down to the bottom of this. We do not even offer website services. If you would please work with me, I am sure we can get an answer. What I want to do is have you share your screen with me and then show me what you did to request support.
I had him run our remote control software. He then proceeded to navigate to Derp Co’s support website: support.derpco.com, navigated through the customer self service pages to a KnowledgeBase article (KB) on how to submit a support.
He pulled up this specific KB article and I was staring at a VERBATIM copy of an article that I had written on our own support site!
There were NO changes to the article including the step to: “Email your support request to:” and it was my company’s email address right there!
OP pointed out the problem.
ME: Thank you for taking the time to show me this, I think I found the problem. Notice the email address in the instructions – it is telling you to email UberTech dot com – that is us. Now, please allow me to show you something.
I then scrolled down to the bottom of Derp Co’s plagiarized support article and noted the creation date: 2007
I then navigated to our company support website: support.ubertech.com and navigated to our own matching article, we both confirmed that it was the same article and I showed him the creation date of our article: 2005
WebOwner: Oh, look at that.
That wasn’t the only stollen article.
ME: I think it is safe to say that Derp Co has stolen our content, did not even update the instructions, misleading you to send a support request to us.
WebOwner: I am sure you have a few things to take care of with Derp Co. I would appreciate it if you do not mention us when you call them.
ME: Of course sir. Thank you for your time with this.
I immediately searched Derp Co’s support website looking for more of our stolen content, found a total of 5 articles, and promptly printed them out and saved copies as PDF.
OP considered how to get revenge.
So what to do in this situation? Do I call the owner of Derp Co?
This is a small town so I needed to be clever and not taint my own image. How do I get revenge?
Hire a lawyer?
Leave the articles as is and hope more support requests come to us that can bring us business?
OP made sure everyone knew what Derp Co did.
Revenge Unleashed
NO, I wrote a PRESS RELEASE!
NEWS RELEASE RELEASE DATE: FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Title: UberTech Endorsed by local competitor
I got some great kudos from local businesses. One client in particular was rolling!
The owner of Derp Co called.
Two days later I get an email form the owner of Derp Co
I would appreciate it if you were to remove the Press Release from your website. This is a small town and it is just not good business.
I went to their support site and still found 3 articles, from our company!
OP responded…
I wrote back and told him that I would be happy to do so, but there are at least still 3 articles on their support site that need to be removed.
Two days later I got another email confirming that the articles were removed.
EPILOGUE
In the end I took down our Press Release but still have a copy kept in our office and would tell this story our new employees.
At least the owner of Derp Co eventually took down the stollen content.
Let’s see how Reddit users reacted to this story…
Here’s an interesting idea…
There weren’t any really bad consequences.
They probably didn’t learn their lesson.
I thought this part was shocking too…
Seriously, why would he give remote access?
In the end, it sounds like everyone was happy.
If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.
