I’m trying to get some support from Mozy now, on our corporate account. Mozy have a pretty good product that I don’t mind paying for, but their support SUCKS.

The first sin they’re committing is in the back-end user-self-service portal. It’s a nice set of tools for managing their product, but there are no support options. Support is sequestered on an entirely different site, with different credentials. WTF, Mozy? I can’t just log in and open a damn ticket when I notice something weird.

The second issue is something I suspect some idiot marketing droid thought was a good idea. It’s a variant on an old problem. The right way to do hold music is to play something decent and inoffensive so the holding party knows they haven’t been disconnected. Real music is best, not made-up production library bullshit — and then just fucking let it play. Do NOT periodically pitch me with ads, or tell me how important my call is, or babble incessantly with little messages the Chi O in your marketing department thought were cute. Just shut the hell up and let the music play.

Why? Because if it’s music, I can just put the call on speakerphone and go back to work, and maybe even get something done while I’m on hold. It’s easy for my brain to half-listen to the hold music and notice when it’s a human voice again, which signals I should pay attention again and shift back to the task at hand (in this case, figuring out why my backup didn’t run). Peppering the hold channel with lots of meaningless human chatter means I have to basically listen to the fucking thing much more closely, which makes it commensurately harder to shift to a different task while on hold.

At Mozy, the music never plays for more than 20 seconds without a cheery message popping up. It’s insane.