When you run a company, you want to make sure that your website comes up when people search for your type of products.

What would you do if you sold an industrial device that used Bluetooth to connect to different systems, which led your site to rank for the search phrase, ‘Bluetooth Support?’

That is what happened to the company in this story, and after one Christmas, they were flooded with calls from people who got unrelated Bluetooth devices as gifts.

How our industrial Bluetooth device turned us into holiday tech support for everyone’s grandma

Back around 2013ish, I worked for a (very) small company that designed niche industrial products.

There are many companies that do very unique things.

Stuff for factories, warehouses, and the like. As the company began to grow, we started generalizing our offerings and trying to expand our customer base.

To help with that, the owner decided it was time to overhaul our website and hired a professional company to rebuild it.

As long as they can make it work, I suppose.

Up to that point, it had been designed and maintained by our embedded software engineers, because hey, it’s all just programming, right?

As part of the update, the owner brought in a marketing consultant to improve our SEO, with the goal of making sure that when plant managers searched for very specific industrial terms, we’d be right at the top.

You have to make due when a company is small.

Because of our size and the technical nature of our products, we didn’t have a dedicated support desk, instead, our five-person engineering team (me included) handled customer support directly.

The owner emphasized support as a top priority, and our website prominently boasted our “world class support.”

Oh great. What happened?

That might have been a mistake.

Enter: The Holidays.

We took a few days off for Christmas and New Year’s, and when we came back… chaos.

They should have been monitoring their support systems.

We were flooded with calls and emails demanding support — like, angry people yelling that our Bluetooth products were garbage, or asking how to pair their headphones with their phones.

Confusion.

Oh no, this is not good!

Turns out, we had exactly one product that used Bluetooth, a super-specific device that connected certain pieces of industrial equipment on the factory floor. Not exactly consumer tech.

Well, it seems the SEO work really did its job. If you Googled “Bluetooth support” or “Bluetooth help” in our region, we came up right at the top.

Sometimes Google isn’t the best.

So now we had a perfect holiday storm: tons of people opening their shiny new Bluetooth-enabled gifts, running into pairing problems, Googling “Bluetooth support,” and finding… us.

Explaining to callers that we didn’t make their headphones or speakers didn’t always help. A lot of them just didn’t get it:

Sadly, end users are often pretty dumb.

“But its Bluetooth- your website says Bluetooth. Why do you refuse to help me!”

A few even said things like:

“Well [insert random cheap headphone brand] doesn’t have a support number — can’t you just help me to Bluetooth it anyway?”

They did find success in the end.

Eventually the wave passed, and things calmed down. Our new product lines actually took off later, the company grew rapidly, and eventually got acquired and absorbed into a well-known Industrial supplier.

But for a while, we’d still get the occasional rogue call from someone wanting Bluetooth help.

This lady would not give up.

Oh, and then there was the one woman who called constantly (sometimes daily) to scream that our app (we didn’t have one) was downloading PDFs to her phone, and that if we didn’t stop it, she’d call the police.

One of my coworkers actually spent an hour on the phone with her the first time, being incredibly kind and patient.

There is always one.

He eventually concluded she was, in his words, “probably just a nutjob.” (Technical term.)

Sometimes ranking your website on Google can lead to more problems than sales.

Let’s see what the people in the comments think about this story.

People will call anywhere when they need support.

It is hard to troubleshoot Bluetooth.

You never know how your company will be found.

Small companies have to work with what they have.

Sometimes a website works too well.

If you liked that post, check out this story about a customer who insists that their credit card works, and finds out that isn’t the case.