Army Of Experts Readies Windows 95 Aid Plan Microsoft Prepares To Help Legions Of Customers Deal Quickly With Glitches Over The Phone

Microsoft Corp. is bracing for the flood.

Recalling the overwhelming tidal wave of calls after it released Windows 3.1, Microsoft is determined that no customer with a question will have to wait more than two minutes when it releases its new operating system, Windows 95, later this month.

To that end, the world’s largest maker of personal-computer software has lined up 1,600 people to stand by Aug. 24 when Windows 95 hits the market.

One of them is Martina Krimps, who tells a story exemplifying the customer-friendly response Microsoft hopes will be the norm for both expert and neophyte computer users who run into glitches that prompt them to call.

It happened during the “beta” program, when Microsoft gave copies of Windows 95 to a bunch of people and asked them to try it out.

Krimps got a query late one afternoon from a relative beginner who was testing the program.

“I got him to the point where he felt comfortable taking it from there,” she said. “But I could sense his hesitancy, so I said I’d call him back in an hour or so.”

She called him back three times, the last time at 10 p.m., working him through fresh snags each time.

“He was the kind of person that, before you went to bed, you wanted to know he was OK,” Krimps said. “My day had ended well earlier, but he didn’t strike me as the kind of person who could go ahead and work out some of these situations on his own.”

Of the 1,600 “customer support engineers” at eight locations around the country, only one-third will work for Microsoft. The rest are being hired by five other companies that are part of Windows 95’s launch team.

For example, Keane Inc., a Boston-based information services company, will have 350 people working in a downtown Seattle building.

Keane’s project director, Scott Owen, said good support engineers tend to have liberal arts backgrounds.

“You can teach someone how to run a computer, but you can’t teach them how to be a person,” he explained.

Microsoft generally receives 20,000 to 25,000 support calls a day, and is preparing for double that. The system might still bog down at first, warned Linda Glenicki, Microsoft’s general manager for end-user support.

“With all those people going through installing and playing with the product, we’ll probably have, in those first couple of weeks, some longer delays than the two-minute goal,” she said.

That’s because the calls are unlikely to be evenly distributed, leaving a bottleneck in peak periods - especially the first day.

It’s kind of like when a Rolling Stones concert is announced, Glenicki said.

“The day those tickets are for sale, everybody wants to call in.”

The system uses a single phone number that automatically routes calls to the first available support engineer, no matter where he or she is. It also is supposed to send a busy signal if the caller faces an “unreasonably long delay,” Glenicki said.

The phone help is free for 90 days from a customer’s first call. Assistance also will be available on the Internet and through some on-line services.