Let me start by saying that I have never been a customer of ancestry.com, nor have I ever done any work for them. However, having just completed a detailed analysis of telephone (and e-mail) customer service activity for a year for a firm in a similar industry, I thought I would take the liberty of making a few suggestions of how to get better responses out of a customer service unit. I hope that someone finds at least a few of my suggestions helpful. I'm NOT doing this for ancestry.com, which seems to be the "only game in town" at the moment in the kinds of records that they sell. I'm doing this for people who have to try to get intelligent responses out of a telephone or e-mail customer service unit. Point #1: BEFORE you call or e-mail, please, please, please Read The Fine Manual (or whatever help screens, downloadable PDF files, or whatever else the vendor makes available), concentrating on the Frequently Asked Questions. In the trade, the expression is "RTFM" standing for "Read The Fine Manual", but "Fine" is not the word that tired telephone customer service operators universally use after a set-to with a customer who hasn't taken the trouble to read what's already available. Continuing with abbreviations, Frequently Asked Questions are FAQs. It is absolutely astonishing how frequently the same questions get asked!! Before the question occurred to you, the chances are that is has occurred to other customers as well. If it's occurred enough times, someone has already written a FAQ - if you find it, you can solve your own problem right on the spot. Point #2: Ask yourself, before you call (or e-mail), if you are expecting the product to do something that should not be expected of it. Here, I'm referring to trying to use the product in a sub-marginal hardware and software environment. While that old PC might have cost $3000 back in 1996, today, unless you have been continually upgrading both the hardware and the software, it is basically a boat anchor. If your configuration is of that vintage, it's simply not fair to expect it to perform well running software that's designed for a much newer, faster, and more resilient hardware and software environment. Here is an easy way to tell for sure that you are seriously out of date: when you turn your PC on, does it say "Windows 95"? If so, you're obsolete! Have you upgraded your browser (usually Internet Explorer or Netscape) regularly? Have you downloaded the various operating system patches and service packs (all Microsoft operating systems have had at least one major re-release or service pack.) Do you have at least 20% of your hard drive free? Have you defragmented it lately? If your CD drive won't read the CD, will it read other CDs? Have you tried re-booting? Have you tried turning your PC off, completely, and restarting it? Can you recreate the problem? Point #3: To get good results from an interaction with a customer service rep, try putting yourself in his or her situation. It's not easy work, frequently it is machine-paced, with computerized call direction sending a new call to a customer service rep the instant that the previous call hangs up (or a mountain of e-mails to respond to in a limited shift), and frankly, the pay universally stinks. Yet every customer service rep I've ever met ultimately wants to make the customer happy, and failing that, at least get the customer up and running again. Remember that it's the inability to make use of the product that you're upset with, not the person on the other end of the phone! Also remember that companies nearly always track the time a rep spends on each call - and rewards the reps with the shorter average call times. So be prepared for the call. Genealogy is intensely involving to the person doing it (having written one family book, I know that all too well!). However, make sure that you're not contacting the vendor just to vent your frustration that great grandpa is not where you expected him to be in the 1880 census!! The rep rarely needs to know your genealogical logic in seeking great grandpa where you are looking for him; what the rep DOES need to know is exactly what steps you have taken with the PC and the product in causing the product to fail. If an e-mail response does not answer the question asked, the chances are that you didn't express yourself clearly when you asked the question, and that the rep saw a few key words and selected what seemed on their basis to be the correct canned answer. (See FAQs under point #1). Point #4: Realize that, at the end of the day, software and databases are rarely perfect. Consider what things used to be like, doing genealogy before PCs, before the internet, and be thankful that we have gotten as far as we have. This year's problem is unlikely to be next year's - but new products and new databases will have problems of their own. I know this is long, and I apologize for that. However, I hope that it is of some help to someone out there at some time!! Sincerely, Geoff Brown www.betweenthelakes.com