Not Enough Information

I deal with a company on a fairly regular basis.  When I call in about any issue, we open a trouble ticket and I’m given the ticket number.  They have a Quality Assurance team, and before I go bad mouthing them know that I think having a good QA team is awesome and more companies should do it, however… their QA team will call and based on whatever report they are looking at will ask if a) I’ve been contacted, b) my problem is being resolved, or c) if I was satisfied with the completed work.  I have no problem with this at all, and as I said, I wish more companies would do it.  The problem I have is that the QA team is not given enough information.

They call and say, “Hi! I’m [insert name] from [company X] and I’m calling in reference to ticket number [ticket number]…” and then they ask their question.  Given that at any one time I may have three to five tickets open with them my first question is always, “And what is this ticket in reference to?”  They never know because they aren’t given that information.  They get contact info and a ticket number, that’s it.  I could always look it up myself, since I keep my own notes, but I’m not always at my PC when they call.  This company also has a website where I can view my open tickets and add details.  Only, all I can see is the original ticket and the latest update.  This means if there have been multiple updates to the ticket, I cannot see anything but the last one.  The last one is usually the most useless too.

1. [original problem] Stuff is broken, please fix it.
2. Assigned to dept A
3. Researched, found errors in logs that indicated dept B is actually needed
4. Assigned to dept B
5. Resolved source of log errors, item still not functioning
6. Assigned to dept A
7. Trouble appears to be on external lines
8. Assigned to contractor Z
9. Z found damage, repaired
10. Assigned to dept A

After the above series of events, I go to the website and can only see:

1. [original problem] Stuff is broken, please fix it.
2. Assigned to dept A

which is pretty unhelpful and looks like they’ve done nothing at all.  Why have a customer viewable ticket if you are going to have it be that useless?

All in all, this is something I run into all over the place.  So many people want to control information because they feel like controlling the information gives them the upper hand… which it does, but it also often slows things down.  Or worse, they’ve been told to never admit fault, ever, and so they hide all those details so they can do some hand waving and things will be magically fixed without ever telling the customers that a problem actually existed.  It is just so frustrating…