It's a firewall problem
Probably not.
Customer "support" personnel (at least the bad ones) are trained to use questions and phrases that are not designed to solve the problem, but to get you off the phone ASAP. To this end the questions and phrases are designed to meet as many of the following criteria as possible:
A good example happened recently. There was a major email outage affecting several of our customers. Basically, a "cloud" service provider had gone "off air" and would be down for several hours. While it was down, mail using the service would not be delivered. This upset several of our customers. (Rightly so: email is a critical service, and the downtime was completely unacceptable - but that's another story). There was no option but to wait until the service came back: which it did, a couple of hours later than promised. Most annoying - but nobody died. This didn't stop one of our customers phoning to say that "he'd be told it was a firewall issue at their end" - implying it was our fault and we should fix ASAP.
This fulfills all of the above criteria. It sounds technical, most users don't fully understand how a firewall works and therefore what effects a firewall issue would cause. It shifts the blame (to us), and takes a couple of hours to investigate, so gets you off the phone.
The thing with a firewall is that problems tend not to intermittent. If the mail was flowing at 6 a.m. but not at 6:30, then it's not likely to be firewall related. Which, in this case, it wasn't.
Customer "support" personnel (at least the bad ones) are trained to use questions and phrases that are not designed to solve the problem, but to get you off the phone ASAP. To this end the questions and phrases are designed to meet as many of the following criteria as possible:
- It sounds technical, and therefore they know what they are talking about.
- It sounds so technical that you can't really judge whether it's credible or not.
- It places the blame with another supplier / the user.
- It requires some time to investigate, therefore you have to ring off.
A good example happened recently. There was a major email outage affecting several of our customers. Basically, a "cloud" service provider had gone "off air" and would be down for several hours. While it was down, mail using the service would not be delivered. This upset several of our customers. (Rightly so: email is a critical service, and the downtime was completely unacceptable - but that's another story). There was no option but to wait until the service came back: which it did, a couple of hours later than promised. Most annoying - but nobody died. This didn't stop one of our customers phoning to say that "he'd be told it was a firewall issue at their end" - implying it was our fault and we should fix ASAP.This fulfills all of the above criteria. It sounds technical, most users don't fully understand how a firewall works and therefore what effects a firewall issue would cause. It shifts the blame (to us), and takes a couple of hours to investigate, so gets you off the phone.
The thing with a firewall is that problems tend not to intermittent. If the mail was flowing at 6 a.m. but not at 6:30, then it's not likely to be firewall related. Which, in this case, it wasn't.
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