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It's not even about the freedoms you get working in other countries. Once had a Japan client change some settings in their account which cause a different workf
by philliphaydon 7y ago
It's not even about the freedoms you get working in other countries. Once had a Japan client change some settings in their account which cause a different workflow to occur. I had to write an incident report for the issue.
It's like "if you change A to B, B will happen instead of A... If you want A to happen, select A..."
Another job we were processing the POS system records and tracking sales / inventory. The dates were converted from JST to UTC. Oneday the client rang and was raging on the phone because all the dates were wrong. Turns out they changed their setting from JST to some other time zone, so we converted from UTC to this other time zone. Incident report about why we store in UTC and why the values displayed wrong etc. Threats to drop us as a business because we "obviously don't know what we are doing"...
- sanxiyn 7y agoThis sounds normal and not specific to Japan.
- philliphaydon 7y ago14 years in this career and Japan is the only country I've had to do this with.
- coldtea 7y agoHave you changed timezone storage and displayed dates wrong (even if it was a configuration issue) in many other countries/customers?
- philliphaydon 7y agoAll dates stored in UTC, so if any other country raised a ticket, we just told them to update their timezone in their profile, and the client was happy. Japan is the only country that this required incident reports.
- netsharc 7y agoSounds like a pain in the ass. I would just build the incident report form to have the option "Date/times are all wrong", and when you see the user is from Japan and selects this drop down option, check if their timezone is set correctly, and if not, reset it to JST... Then the form would prompt them "Are you sure, please look again", and most of the time the problem will have disappeared, right?
- duxup 7y agoI've worked with Japanese customers. What he described is quite unique to Japan, particularly how many completely run of the mill situations (hey how does this widget work) go on for weeks of expiation. I'm talking about even completely predictable things. Like "Hey if I turn this thing off, is it off?" will start weeks long series of questions. I don't fully understand it, but it is a Japanese thing for sure.
- duxup 7y agoYeah I've had lots of Ulta detailed report requests from Japan too. Often it is clear they don't understand but keep asking. Several had so many questions they asked for the actual code for a misc set of settings.... They were always meaningless rat hole type discussions and usually with enterprise customers. I'm not sure if they were impressing their bosses with big reports but oh man it was a pain.