Customer Support facts

While investigating facts about Customer Support, I found out little known, but curios details like:

In 1989, Bill Gates answered a Microsoft tech support call, and identified himself only as "William", then solved the issue. The customer called back later specifically requesting him.

A teenager hacked CIA director John Brennan's email by calling Verizon's customer support and pretending to be a Verizon technician

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across. Here are 15 of the best facts about Customer Support I managed to collect.

1. James Franco took up a late-night job at McDonald's a while back in order to support himself and take acting lessons. While working there, he practiced accents on customers and stopped being a vegetarian.

2. McDonalds had the support of Coca Cola's investment in 1955 when it started. Now McDonald's is Coke's largest restaurant customer and the two companies maintain a unique, symbiotic relationship

3. Apple support told customers that experienced problems with their Apple III to lift it up and drop it. It actually worked.

4. In the past, high-end monocles had frames custom-made to fit the wearer's eye socket. The frame was a flattened wire supported by posts. The ends were pulled together, the monocle was placed in the eye orbit, and the ends released, causing the frame to spring out and hold the monocle in place.

5. PeopleSoft, who guaranteed its customers that if it were acquired within two years, likely by Oracle, and product support were reduced, customers would receive a refund up to 5x what they paid for their software licenses. The hypothetical cost to Oracle was valued at as much as $1.5 billion

6. Studies show that Customer Support and Call Center employees that use Chrome and Firefox keep their jobs 15% longer than Safari and Internet Explorer users.

7. The Wii balance board in Japan does not support as much weight as the Wii balance board sold to customers in the West.

8. Panasonic almost named it's newest computer in 2004, "The Woody" after securing rights to Woody Woodpecker as the mascot. Contacting online customer support was to be marketed as "Internet Pecker"

9. C-SPAN receives no government funding or underwriting support; its operations are funded entirely by the cable, satellite, and telco companies which distribute its channels to their video customers

10. In 2009 the developer of the programming language "Go!", having worked on it for over 10 years, requested that Google change the name of their own new language ("Go") and received support from many other developers. In the end, Google closed the request thread with the custom label "Unfortunate"

Customer Support data charts

For your convenience take a look at Customer Support figures with stats and charts presented as graphic.

What is true about customer support?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

What are the PS5's specs?
The new PS5 will have the following specs.

CPU: AMD Zen 2-based CPU with 8 cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
GPU architecture: Custom RDNA 2
Memory interface: 16GB GDDR6 / 256-bit
Memory bandwidth: 448GB/s
Internal storage: Custom 825GB SSD
IO throughput: 5.5GB/s (raw), typical 8-9GB/s (compressed)
Expandable storage: NVMe SSD slot
External storage: USB HDD support (PS4 games only)
Optical drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray drive

Former Flint Mayor in a "Customer Appreciation Cash Giveaway," handed out more than $20,000 at his car dealership. Every one who attended also got a piece of campaign literature, and many in the crowd wore pins supporting his re-election in 2007. - source

Approaching customer support like a marriage - source