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The "Glory" Of Tech Support
AFCArchvile writes: "Have you ever wondered just what goes on at your DSL ISP's Tech Support center? East Bay Express Online has an article written by Erika Donald, a staffer at the Pacific Bell Internet Call Center: 'Finally, the customer is transferred to me. "Are you a supervisor?" he demands instantly. Since the beginning of the month, everyone in the call center has been transformed into a supervisor. Brian sleeping at his desk is now a supervisor. Ian with purple hair gelled into points is a supervisor. Ron who begged not to be made a supervisor is a supervisor. I am hoping next month, whoever decided to make us all supervisors will make us CEOs.' This is an almost Orwellian tale that should send a wake-up call to all the DSL ISPs."
*brrt* *brrt* *brrt*
Hello, EastBayExpress, how may I direct your call?
Tech support, please!
Thank you, let me transfer you.
EastBayExpress technical support, how may I provide you with excellent service?
Yer site is down!
Pardon? Our what site?
Yer news article about tech support is down!
Down in which way? Yer web server, news article, about how tech support is hell is down!
Oh, what makes you so certain it's not functioning normally?
It was featured on /.!
A public service for testing server fortitude, and some articles of interest, too.
Well, we can send a technician out to your site, but probably not for 48 hours, and there will be a $70 fee for checking your line.
Say, did I get transferred to PacBell?
Yessss... How did you know?
A hunch.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
as an ex AOL and ISP tech-support guru, i can tell you that the reason tech support is usually shitty is because tech support people are either A)treated like shit, or B)don't know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Back at AOL (am i violating my NDA here?) we used to fuck around all the time to try to ease the boredom of monotonous "i can't sign on" calls. Sometimes i thought it would be amusing to be irish, maybe indian from time to time. (there's nothing like getting called in by a manager you didn't know was listening in, only to be told "nice accent asshole").
However, most of these people doing tech support are 30 year olds who just can't get a better job. Some are immigrants, some are just slackers. But the only ones who actually know what they're doing (i.e. not reading directly from a big black binder) are the younger ones, and they don't give two shits because they know they should be earning better pay. It wasn't uncommon for those of us who knew our shit to fall asleep on calls or put people on hold to run over and see what our friend was up to. Half of the calls i took, i would forget the problem, come back from chatting 5 minutes later, and tell the customer one of several canned answers i had for that sort of thing. (usually: "you need to delete and reinstall AOL ma'am")
BTW - when you hear the words "that's a good question, let me put you on hold while i check" - it means your tech is tired and he needs to go grab a smoke while you listen to John Denver's Rocky Mountain High as played by the Norman Smithson banjo Quartet..
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
That's DOCTOR EVIL. I didn't spend three years in evil medical school to be called MISTER.
(I couldn't resist.)
No images, just the text, but it works.
http://dotslash.dynodns.net/00/12/05/165241/cover_ 120100.html
You do have a good point...tech support is not that hellaciously difficult of a job, especially when you think about third world children working jobs that ruin their health.
But on the other hand, if tech support should be so easy for the technicians on the floor, and they shouldn't complain about having to do so much, why does the management and contracters and what not find it so hard to hold up their end of the bargain? I am sure that if most techs were asked, they would say that being lied to by management is worse then the treatment they recieve from customers.
For example, when I worked tech support, this was the incident that caused me to quit my job: I was in the middle of a call, and my headset begin fading in and out...so I put the customer on hold and grabbed a headset off a desk next to mine. (I didn't have a regular cubicle...most of us didn't. We sat where there was an open seat.)And went back on the call. I finished it off, and then went on to the next call. Of course, the man who was sitting next to me came back and wasn't too happy about me taking his headset. After going through the process of requisitioing a new headset, I asked management what I should have done for a failed headset while on the phone...and I was told I should have put the customer on hold while I went and requistioned a new headset.
If technical support is so easy, why is it so hard for the management to even give techs the tools they need to do their jobs?
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
The ideal question would be:
"what seems to be the problem"
The clueful answer would be:
"I can ping my IP, can ping DNS, and can ping any $isp server, but I can't ping Microsoft, yahoo, or Google."
an optimal, but unclueful andswer would be: "th' internet is broke. You need to reboot it."
Unfortunately, you run the risk of hearing:
"I started connecting to the internet in December and everything was fine until My nephew Kevin used my computer. He's a Hacker. I could tell because he looked at www.hackers.com. Well, anyway, he changed everything on my computer. It used to be this really pretty blue color, but now it's just black and says lilo:. He gave me instructions, and I follow them. I type in "loosur" as my user name and "diebitchdie"
as my password. He said its inportant to give out this password to whoever I talk to. Anyway, I used to like Windows 95 but now I don't anymore because now when I load it - he said I could load it by typing startx - it gives me this big, ugly picture of a foot and I really don't like feet that much will you help me get rid of the foot? And also, I hate typing startx every day when I start my computer and can you help me get rid of the user name and password too because well, I can live with looser, but diebitchdie has got to go because its really vulgar and I think he deserves a spanking for using such language and I'm embarassed that I have to say my password is diebitchdie when my computer used to be so friendly. And also, what is a kernel? Also, Why do I have to take cookies when I don't want them and what is a static route? And don't you think he deserves a spanking? and how can I lock hackers like my nephew out of my computer and WHY AM I BEING CHARGED $19.99 A MONTH WHEN I HAVEN"T BEEN CONNECTING FOR 6 WEEKS?"
I used to do tech support for a certain sound card manufacturer (hint: they liked to sue aureal alot). Now while they weren't anywhere near as draconian as pac bell sounds, there were certainly several situation that made me extremely angry about the company in general. I worked in email support, and as a result had some autonomy. We were expected to experiment with our hardware, to understand whats going on. Well, a new set of NT drivers are release. So we test it out on our NT machines. Install, watch BSOD appear. It wont even boot now. We try with several other machines, same thing. We run over to test lab to show them, and they have no idea whats causing it. In fact they never figured it out. Instead, they pull the drivers, and leave me to explain to all the NT customers that we cant help them unless they have their emergency repair disks. The company also had a tuition reimbursement program, however getting HR to get you on the program. After 2 years of working for $7.00 an hour on the hope that I could get them to pay for some of my computer science classes, I burned out. False benefits, and poorly tested products are no way to keep competent tech support.
"My head hurts, My feet stink, and I dont love Jesus." -Jimmy Buffett
James, who sits down the hall and runs the whole East Bay Express website on his iPAQ.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Much of that is how I imagined it would be, although it is much different to the call centre I sit near (we mix IT with non-IT types).
The "Hotcube" is made to sound very Big Brotheresque, and it may well be that way. I don't like that things are run that way, although I can understand the need to pro-actively manage call centre staff (don't tell the guys I work near that I said that though!
More worrying is their "health break" - law in the UK (Health and Safety in the workplace) says that people using CRTs (probably extended to any monitor by now) must be allowed to take a ten minute break every hour - which is four times as much as given to the guys at PacBell. I mean, I've probably averaged 12 hours a day every day of my life for the last 9 years using a CPU, and I take a break more than 5 minutes every 2 hours to rest my eyes - and I'm used to it and I get a lot of flexibility about posture, etc.
How did companies manage before call centres were commonplace? Did you have to write in and wait weeks for issues to be resolved?
All in all, it's a shitty job - I'm glad I have a job that lets me be flexible in my approach to the working day, that I don't scurry towards the door to get away from after 8 hours, that doesn't fill me with dread each morning, and that I actually enjoy.
~Cederic
No doubt! I worked at another SBC call center, at One Bell Center in St. Louis. We used to get calls from PacBell people ALL THE TIME. Some of them were terribly cluless. I remember one induhvidule who called me frantic, "My screen went all blue, and it says it's beginning a physical memory dump!"
"Okay ma'am, could you look behind the system and tell me if it physically ejected any chips?"
"Okay, hold on - let me check!"
No joke. This actually happened. For real.
The other issue is NEVER and I mean NEVER mention Scott Adam's name to anyone at the Camino Ramon facility. This building is second in size only to the Pentagon, and Scott used to work there. We call it the "Death Star" for obvious reasons. Word on the street is that some people there tried to sue Scott because the dilbert characters were too much like them in real life! Yikes! Who's actually admit to that???
Fawking Trolls!
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Jed Babbin
Anyone who ever has to do with users should take a read through:
http://techtales.com/
Funny as hell, and you can submit your own stories.
Have fun,
Jason
Here's a mirror of the text.. formatted a little better. *grin*
End of lesson. You may press the button.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
I know what the problem is, yet they dont even understand when I tell them what the routing problem is. It's not like it's a hard problem.. Most of these people dont even understand what a router is, I know this because I was told that "Windows is a great router!" the other day, and then the same lady asked, "How does your Eww-nucks" (funniest mispronounciation) work for you?
Case in point, most tech support people are stupid because they think it's an easy job. The good people have to pick up the flack from the idiots, and also the irate customers who just had to deal with one of the idiot support people.
The same tech support building I worked at also had Apple tech support (about 400 people in that center) - if the queue times reached over 1 hour most of the people would wait for 3 minutes of silence (if the customer didn't hang up) then release. Because it "cleared the queue" -- those who stayed on the lines had to deal with people yelling about being cut off an hour ago.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
So First they were looking for Friendly geeks, but they cost to much.
Then they were looking for friendly geeks with out a lot of experaince, but they tend to leave the company because they get badly mismanaged by management.
Then they start to look for people with any computer experaince, and then train them.
This becomes truly misinterpreted over time, and they hire a lot of losers who just don't get it.
Then they decide to hire people at a higher wage, hiring them at a higher wage then some people with a year or more in the company.
This causes many of their best to leave the company.
Then Service is so bad, that the Tech leads who take Supervisor calls have to add regular Techs to the tech lead line.
And Now the Tech lead line is so overwelmed due to incompetence that they make everyone a supervisor, to take the supervisor calls.
Does any one else see a trend here?
Why is it stupid people get to make the rules that smart people are suppose to follow?
BTW: after working in it for over 3 years I am now considered over qualifed for most of the help desks in my area.
TeTalon
UNIX is "user-friendly", it's just particular about who it's friends are....
"I see stupid people they're everywhere, they walk around like everyone else they don't even know that they're dumb."
TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.
TeTalon
You are either a part of the problem, or a part of the solution, which are you.
having been former tech support (for @home even) i have always been constantly amazed at the hoops that both the customers , and the employees are made to jump through.
For example, in Comcast's division of @home .. if you score less than 90% on a random montitered call's QA (quality assurance) you are immediatly disqualified from ANY bonus pay that month. So, if you forget to ask "is there anything else I can help you with today?" EVEN if the customer (who has been screaming at you for the last 5 mins about how he is going to get a lawyer becuase his cable service just shut off when his wife backed into the green box outside - dont laugh .. true story) hangs up .. you are expected to say those words .. just in case.
call center people were written up for being 30 seconds late to work. And also penalized if they stayed more than 5 mins overtime. (it was more benificial to hang up the phone (and then say "is there anything else I can help you with today?" ) and log out on time . .than to actually FIX a problem and wind up going over.
We were expected (for less than 25k a year) to trouble shoot everything from ipstacks and regestry problems- to router errors, all the way down the line to .. 'no mam ..please use the RIGHT button on the mouse .. its the one furthest away from your thumb if your using your RIGHT hand.) All the while trying to calm down pissed off customers (sometiems rightly so , sometimes ONLY becuase they had $$.
and then there is the idiot factor. People are written up for the most assassine reasons .. just to make an example. I was always in the top 5 (of 120+ people) for sales/tech assistance. yet one day I myself was written up becuase i refused to call a customer Dr.So-and-so. (the only reason i refuesed is because he had stated to me that he would report me to my supervisor if i didnt stop calling him *MR* so-and-so. I figured anyone THAT irrational, wasnt going to listen to my suggestions anyways, gimmi an old lady over a DR anytime .. at least the old ladys are willing to read manuals, and TRY.)
man .. just thinking about those poor souls still stuck in tech support reminds me why i NEVER bother them with my problems. I would rather learn it myself, then force them to read the canned scripts they are told to use in place of 'I don't know'
There is SOO much more i could say .. but i *like* my job now .. so im gonna get back to it ;P
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
If you yourself are at all talented, you quickly realize that you are getting customers who have called others in your call center only to have a terrible experience because your coworkers are by and large average, hence not very good at being excellent.
:)
I know what you're talking about. Unfourtunatly, actually providing Customer Service usually goes against the business case of trying to get your call & Wrap time down. I actually lost my job because I was being too helpful!
Still, I view being released from that call centre as one of the best things that ever happened to me. So it's not all bad.
Syllable : It's an Operating System
When I started in Tech Support, 8 years ago, I was told:
"You either learn out, or you burn out."
He was talking about front-line support. I still to this day don't understand people who can survive more than 6 months in a front-line position without losing it and gunning folks down. I learned out. The rest of my career has been as a 2nd line, 3rd line, or QA.
I can say one thing about this PacBell story. First of all, you've got to make your customers happy. If some guy's got a problem, and it's not YOUR problem, you tell him, right away. If your contract with the Telco won't permit it, then that's bullshit. If it's their problem, then they should be taking the heat. And the calls. #1, tell the customer the truth. If you give them a lie about what the problem is, then they're going to get more and more irate, and as they get more irate, they become more EXPENSIVE (make more support calls, go higher and higher up the chain of authority, etc.).
If your company has made a deal with a third party where their problem is not one you can fix, but you can't send the customer to them, then it's fiscally a bad deal - your company is expected to bear the expense of taking calls on problems that are beyond the "support boundry"? That's major suckage. The management chain, if they're worth anything, will come to recogize the problem, and ask their seniors to resolve it. You can make a clear-cut loss analysis based on it; "these types of calls account for X dollars of our budget." If the managers can't or wont do this, they're worthless.
For the front line guys who are treated like the ones in this story, I feel very sorry for you. When I was on front line, we weren't watched that closely. We did our jobs, we were treated like adults. The people in this story are being treated like prison inmates. The lesson to the managers should be: employee turnover is bad. Treat employees like dirt, and you'll have high turnover - man, especially in a labor environment like the bay area. People will walk, and go somewhere where they can get paid twice that and be treated like a human being. Maybe they're not qualified for that at the time you hired them - but they will in six months. You can mitigate that by hiring lower quality people, but in the end, it will translate to dissatisfied customers.
Also, support people should be given the authority to resolve problems - like the billing issues. If some guy has no service for two weeks, then the support guy should be able to credit the guy's account. Otherwise why bother, you're just wasting time answering the customer's call. Of course with my PacBell DSL problem, I was out for two weeks, phone line problems which ultimately were a combination of CO wiring problems, and problems INSIDE my house. The tech they sent to my house found that my phone lines were distributed too much - so what we did was use the black/yellow pair for the DSL signal and put a filter on the red/green pair at the NID. Black/yellow were connected to my primary line ahead of the filter, so there was a straight signal run to my office that was connected to the black/yellow pair, and the rest of the phones in my house were on red/green, and didn't need the little filters, because of the filter at the NID. They credited my account for two weeks because the service was down due to the CO switching problem. Now it works great.
Why was my service down for two weeks? Support hold-times were very high (1-2 hours), so I couldn't get through, and when I did, nobody could figure out what the problem was (I tried not to involve them in my individual computer setup, because it had nothing to do with the problem, I was sure. I have Macs, and I know Macs scare people - but Macs had nothing to do with it, because I was using a LinkSys router - it was the modem that failed to connect.) but the big time waster was, waiting for a tech to be assigned to come out. Actually, originally getting set up took 2 months to schedule, after many phone calls and emails asking them to set it up, nobody could tell me if I was in the 11k' radius of the CO or not.
The bottom line is - it sounds like PacBell has a product with a high demand, so they and their partners who provide the service have little incentive to provide good service, because the alternative is the Cable monopoly, and they have no competition either. So basically, at a high level, nobody gives a shit if you sign up for DSL or not. So they hire idiots to man the phones, provide them with no tools or pathways to do their jobs, and audit the labor so tightly that it looks good on paper.
I don't see any of this changing any time soon.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
I worked in second level tech support for roughly two and a half years. I saw all the problems which the helpdesk for one reason or another could not resolve. Yes, this was internal technical support, but there were still people who did not know how to use a mouse... just far less of them.
I don't for a second envy what the helpdesk had to do. I didn't even care if they just gave up on a difficult user and said "I've passed the ticket along, somebody will give you a call in roughly an hour." And by difficult user I mean those "call me doctor" fellows. It is much easier to deal with people like that in person anyways.
I would even defend the reputation of the helpdesk because of the difficulty of their jobs.
But what would drive me absolutely insane are the few people who get in there who are simply incompetant. End users who go in with no problem (litterally, the network is down, DHCP is down, something like that) and after hours of "troubleshooting" come out with a toasted protocol stack.
I think the main culprit of this kind of thing is the application of metrics to individuals. If you're told that you have to meet 80% resolution, and you're encouraged to make it as high as you can, then you wind up with five customers who spent four hours... DHCP came back and their protocol stack was rebuilt at about the same time... and had thier 'problem' resolved. And your failure to resolve drops.
What's really fun is calling first level support and to have them lead you through a script, while you're telling them that the DHCP server is down and the Network team is working on it.
I guess my point is, just like there are stupid users, there are stupid techs... and in the case of those misinformed of corporate structure... stupid managers.
Yes, I've told management about this already.
Perhaps I read something wrong:
/. who know what it's like to put in 36 hours straight and most of them, I would venture, are young but they have a decent work ethic. They deserve every cent they make and probably much, much more. Unfortunately, I think they're a small minority for the age group.
"Back at AOL (am i violating my NDA here?) we used to fuck around all the time to try to ease the boredom of monotonous "i can't sign on" calls." and "It wasn't uncommon for those of us who knew our shit to fall asleep on calls or put people on hold to run over and see what our friend was up to. Half of the calls i took, i would forget the problem, come back from chatting 5 minutes later, and tell the customer one of several canned answers i had for that sort of thing. (usually: "you need to delete and reinstall AOL ma'am")"
Sorry, but that's slacking in my book. Someone who was trying to resolve the problem would work to actually resolve it.
I'm not arguing the monotony of the job. I know what it's like to have some raving asshole, moron on the other end of the line where all you want to do is reach through the phone and strangle the misserable bastard. I know it well... I worked on a support desk for a few months until I started to not care anymore. I promptly got out but *never* did I once put someone on hold to goof off just to come back and give a canned answer or pass them off to someone else. I now run the network operations for a publicly traded company. We have a call center of about 100 staff (non-tech related). Something close to 75 of them are worthless and almost to a person, under 30. I watch these people go out of their way to not do their jobs. They do it because they know that someone else will pick up the slack. Worst part is, IT'S A GREAT PLACE TO WORK! I mean, really, it's a nice environment. Best I've ever seen. We don't time, monitor or pressure the call center staff in any way. They get generous breaks and other 'sanity checks' and the staff level is maintained so that the normal call volume per operator is around 20 calls/day at an average 10 minutes/call. Yet they still spend most of the day chatting it up with their neighbors, surfing the net and making personal calls while the average time in queue is 7 to 10 minutes. It drives me nuts. My company really goes above and beyond to provide a good work environment and it gets shit on for it.
I'm part of that twenty-something generation. My entire staff is under 25. They all bust their asses off each and every day and I take care of them for it. I pay them well, they get more comp days than I can count and I never question them or dock them if they need to leave early. All I ask is that they work and be there when I need them. It works. They don't take advantage of it nor do they complain when we have an emergency and they need to stay until the wee hours of the morning.
The problem, which is also my point, is too many twenty-somethings have little or no work ethic and will never be successful, nor do they deserve to be, until they do. Most of them in the tech field don't even qualify as script kiddies because they're too lazy to pilfer someone else's hacks but they want to work in 'computers' because they think it's an easy, fat paycheck. Guess what, reality sucks. There are plenty of real sysadmins reading
It was related to me that in a certain call center they got bored one night and decided that everybody would be named "Bob". I wasn't there when it happened, but it was part of the lore, and it seemed just as plausible as anything else.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What can you do? Put a "Press 1 if you are an idiot, Press 2 if you're l33t." menu tree into the system?
I agree that that would never work. Tier 1 could be provided with a list of important words and phrases only a clueful person would use. It's not perfect since sometimes the clueless will get lucky or use a phrase they heard a clueful friend use once, but it's something.
For example, if someone calls and reports the status of everything on your 'KISS' list as in "I have a dial tone, the router indicates a line fault. I rebooted the router and get the same thing. Traceroute doesn;'t go anywhere, I can't ping the router". There's a good sign the person is clueful and needs tech support rather than handholding. On the other hand, if they say "I think the internet broke when I stepped on the phone cord", they need the handholding.
Yeah, but even the supposedly clueful can have miss the obvious. Do you do any programming (it's sad that I have to ask that these days on /.)? Ever spend 4 hours poring over your code to realize you typed bra instead of bar? Brainless moments even happen to the smartest.
The best thing to do is when you are describing your problem, explain to the tech support person what you have checked on your end. That way, the person you are talking to can determine if they are qualified to help you, or if you need to transfered up the ladder.
One thing to avoid is trying to diagnose the problem on their end. You can give them the evidence that you've gathered, but avoid drawing conclusions. The support person may assume you know what you're talking about when you are way off, and this can lead to lost time spent trying to fix something that isn't broken.
Also, remember that you are speaking to another person, and don't lose your cool - angry people get the worst quality tech support.
--
Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Of course I never worked for "the man". But even indie ISP's have this stuff. It's a little more friendly and you can actually have 15 minute breaks.
The rules of tech support
1. Always assume the customer is lying.
2. Always assume your company lies to you.
3. Never test for more then one variable at a time.
4. Learn to smoke. The deeper and raspier your voice is the better. Nobody fucks with you when they think you're 35 and 6'4".
5. Never show fear.
6. The customers is stupid. If he knew anything he wouldn't need to talk to you. Never deviate from this stance.
7. MCSE ALWAYS need to be smacked.
8. Some people want help, some want to abuse you. Don't take it personally.
9. You won't last more then 18 months. Keep the resume updated.
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
That is an average of 15 minutes per call with 2 15 minute breaks in an 8 hour day. I'm sorry, but come on and get real. I never had to worry about my stress levels or take health breaks. It's an easy job, you sit at your chair and talk to stupid people. Most of the time the call is Tech support is not for people who can't handle being yelled at though. But, that's in the job description. Those people who have to complain and cry over it should go be florists or something.
I was average 40-50 calls a day, in an 8 hour time period. I had very high scores on success rates and was promoted into being the lead tech, and every person under me was the same because I told them the same thing I said above. Those who didn't like it got transferred or quit. Dont work in tech support if you can't handle it, but dont expect sympathy. That is like a police officer getting pissed off about having to write tickets because it makes him feel bad.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.