Microsoft engineer, who has been with the company for 30 years, shares what happened when irate customers wanted to speak to Bill Gates
Microsoft had a specific method for handling angry customers who demanded to speak with Bill Gates. According to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen, the company used to transfer these customers’ calls to a special phone line where operators pretended to be the CEO’s secretary. In his “The Old New Thing” blog, Chen noted that the software giant’s operators would tell customers that Gates was unavailable, take their complaint details, and route the information back to tech support, which would then call back, claiming, “Bill Gates asked me to contact you.” He explained that support teams followed this process when important customers became upset. If saying sorry and trying to fix the issue didn’t calm them down, the call was sent to a special internal number that sounded like Bill Gates’s office. He noted that this elaborate ruse satisfied angry customers without bothering the billionaire founder of the company, and the support team itself finally handled the issue. Chen revealed this while recounting the 30-year-old procedure used by the company’s product support team.
What Microsoft engineer said about company’s method of handling angry customers
In his blog post, Chen wrote: “A colleague of mine who used to work in product support told me that they had a procedure if a customer became irate and demanded to speak with Bill Gates. (This was, of course, back in the days when Bill Gates still ran the company.)The product support technician would apologise for not resolving the problem to the customer’s satisfaction, but if the customer continued to demand to speak with The Boss, the technician would indeed transfer the customer.The customer was transferred to a special internal phone number, and when the operators saw a call on that line, they took the call and said, “Bill Gates’s office.” They weren’t actually in Bill Gates’s office. They were just pretending to be Bill Gates’s secretary. Their job was to tell the caller that Mr. Gates is currently unavailable, but if the customer leaves a message and their contact information, they will pass the information to Mr. Gates.Of course, I assume¹ the information was never actually passed along to Bill. The information went back into the product support channel with a note that the customer was escalated to “Bill Gates’s office.” The technician who returned the call would probably say something like “Bill Gates asked me to contact you to follow up on an issue you had earlier.”Maybe Bill got a copy or a summary of these messages, I don’t know.”
