Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen on how company tackled customers who wanted to talk to Bill Gates: They were transferred to…

Microsoft had a clever solution for irate customers demanding to speak with Bill Gates. The company used to transfer their calls to a special internal line where operators answered, "Bill Gates's office," without actually connecting them to the CEO. In his “The Old New Thing” blog, veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared the insider procedure that product support staff used to handle such situations while keeping customers satisfied.

He said when a customer (typically a high-value one) became angry enough during a support call to demand speaking with Gates, staff followed a specific protocol. First, they apologised for not resolving the issue to the customer's satisfaction. If apologies failed and the customer continued demanding to speak with "The Boss," support staff transferred the call to a designated internal phone number. When operators saw an incoming call on that special line, they answered with "Bill Gates's office."

What Raymond Chen said about Microsoft making customers talk to Bill Gates

In his blog post, Chen wrote: "A colleague of mine who used to work in product support told me that they had a procedure if a customer became irate and demanded to speak with Bill Gates. (This was, of course, back in the days when Bill Gates still ran the company.)

The product support technician would apologise for not resolving the problem to the customer’s satisfaction, but if the customer continued to demand to speak with The Boss, the technician would indeed transfer the customer.

The customer was transferred to a special internal phone number, and when the operators saw a call on that line, they took the call and said, “Bill Gates’s office.” They weren’t actually in Bill Gates’s office. They were just pretending to be Bill Gates’s secretary. Their job was to tell the caller that Mr. Gates is currently unavailable, but if the customer leaves a message and their contact information, they will pass the information to Mr. Gates.

Of course, I assume¹ the information was never actually passed along to Bill. The information went back into the product support channel with a note that the customer was escalated to “Bill Gates’s office.” The technician who returned the call would probably say something like “Bill Gates asked me to contact you to follow up on an issue you had earlier.”

¹ Maybe Bill got a copy or a summary of these messages, I don’t know.”