Some of our customers prefer to have their unit repaired and returned ("Repair & Return" program), which is always an option. In this case, we ship an empty box to you, with a return, pre-paid airbill enclosed. You send your Palm organizer to us, and we ship your own repaired product back to you. This process ordinarily takes between five and seven business days.

Palm support representatives
You may want to know a little more about who is on the other end of the phone when you call us. Unlike others in the high tech industry, the majority of the people whom you interact with at our call centers are dedicated to supporting only Palm products -- so they are experts in helping you.

Our call center teams are thoroughly trained on all of our products, including new products before we ship them. New team members go through several weeks of extensive product training and problem solving. You will never get an untrained person on the phone at Palm. After the classroom training, phone representatives spend time taking calls under direct supervision until we believe they are prepared to handle customer calls independently.

Improvements
We are always trying to improve the support process, and we evaluate measurable scores like average on-hold time and average duration of contact, as well studying the best and worst cases in a given month very carefully. Our goal is to deliver the most prompt, accurate information we can to every customer, and to resolve your issue the first time you contact us.

Nearly all of our customers tell us that they have access to email and the Internet, so watch for improvements in our communications using these media. By better utilizing the Internet, we will be able to provide you more information and faster support, day or night.

Soon, we will be offering certain service and repair options to our customers via email. In the next few months, we plan to deliver a new service repair order (SRO) system that will allow customers to check the status of their SRO via our web site.

We're also very aware that our products are sold and in use around the world. You will see a concerted effort from us to improve international product support, with new support options scheduled to be available in the near future.

Recent dip in service levels
While we're talking about improvements, we're well aware from the letter to the editor of PalmPower Magazine, and some of the reaction to it on the PowerBoards, that some of you readers were among the customers who were impacted by the recent trouble we had during an upgrade process. We were doing some systems and process upgrades which, unfortunately, did not go as planned. This transition period caused a reduction in the normally quick response time and speed of resolution for some of the customers who contacted us during this period.

We want you to know that by the time this is published, we should have recovered all the data affected and made the appropriate systems and process corrections. We are completing the process of resolving all the issues that we believe were outstanding. We will soon be sending a note of apology to those customers who we know were affected, along with a token of our appreciation for their patience.