Wii Believe in Nintendo Customer Service
Sunday, March 18, 2007 at 01:53PM
Rob in This crazy business

After three months of gaming bliss, we ran into our first problem with the Wii yesterday. Last week I installed wifi in the house, so the kids were itching to connect the Wii and start using its online features. The setup went pretty well until I got to the part where the console needed to update its software.

There are two updates that the Wii has to download after you get wifi working. The first one occurs immediately after the connection is confirmed. This took about fifteen minutes, a bit longer than I expected. The second update is where the trouble started.

The second one occurs after an apparent registration process (i.e., it asks you for your country, etc.). It's a sizeable download, but after two hours it was still only about 25% complete. I spent another hour Googling for solutions and digging around the Nintendo knowledge base. It's a well-executed support site with lots of answers. Unfortunately, this specific problem was not discussed in any detail. There was plenty of advice for slow downloads in general but nothing about this problem specifically during the initial setup.

This is usually the point in these things where two things happen to me:

  1. I get really upset about all the other things that I should really be working on
  2. My blood pressure climbs to new heights

I was not in the mood to waste any more time, but I couldn't figure out how to reset the darn thing back to normal working order. I pulled the plug twice, and both times the Wii started up right where it left off. (Later I found out that if you shut down your router, it will error out, and you can go back to playing games sans wifi connection.)

Lisa noticed my symptoms and decided to call Nintendo customer service. I had absolutely zero expectations and laughed at the mere notion. Think about it: Here's a company with a scorching hot product. The Wii is so allocated that retailers actually have to sell Nintendo on why they deserve more inventory than the next guy. I am no cynic, but this is hardly the recipe for a good customer service experience. I expected nothing more than a message saying they were closed on Saturday and that we were not eligible to speak with them by phone until we had fried our broadband connection searching for help online.

Boy, was I ever wrong. Lisa easily found the number in the owner's manual and got right through. I think she was on hold for fifteen seconds. Even better, the agent knew all about the issue and walked me through a series of steps to correct the problem. This primarily consisted of changing the channel on the router and resetting it.

As it turned out, the real culprit was probably just network congestion. The Internet was slow all day and it was horrific last night. I think the the Wii just couldn't keep up. Bottom line: After about an hour, the second update was completed, and we were able to connect. For me this amounted to checking the weather on the Wii Forecast Channel. The kids went deeper and found new ways for us to spend money on games (of course).

The last thing that the Nintendo agent did was arrange for an advanced technician to call me back in a day to see if the problem had been rectified. That guy called a few minutes ago and was just as polite as the first agent.

Bravo to Nintendo for not taking customers for granted when it would be so easy to do so. Nintendo obviously takes a long-term view and realizes that this is the best time to offer great service and bolster their brand.

Article originally appeared on MacKayNet - Rob MacKay (http://www.mackaynet.com/).
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