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Tech Support Getting Even Worse
ehiris writes: "Came across an article on CNN about tech support falling out of the useful category. The interesting quote: 'In part, the problem can be blamed on tech companies' attempts to cope with shrinking profit margins and a bad business environment.' Bad tech support makes life hard and new technology becomes undesirable to the general public. Which company has the best support? What are they doing well? What would you like to see improve about tech support?"
They make a good point in that article. If you know your stuff, you ain't gonna be working on phone tech support. Quite often, the guy on the other end of the phone knows no more (usually less) than you do about the product. They have a wide selection of resources on the product that might help though.
Putting those resources online to let you solve your own problems really is the better solution.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Quite simply many people won't pay for a quality, well supported product. If they can save $5 they will buy from an irreputable company with lousy support. Maybe you are one of these people. Do you have an Intel or 3Com NIC in your computer or a Realtek? You get what you pay for.
All of these companies have lots of money to trumpet their products. They roll out new ones every few months, and spend a lot of money to keep them rolling.
I remember when I used to buy computers from DEC in the mid-80s. You would get a genuinely impressive series of well-indexed and comprehensive manuals. When you couldn't find the answer there, you could call technical support and talk to a technically capable person. If that person could not help you, they would put you through to an engineer.
I also remember the first day that I got put through to a clueless, script reading, customer support representative at some anonymous call center when I called DEC. After that, I bought PC clones from Gateway or PCs Unlimited (eventually Dell). The only point of ponying up the big bucks was for the extensive documentation and support.
DEC tried to become a different company via changed marketing and survive. It died. You cannot abandon your customers and survive.
Because Microsoft has forced us to accept the fact that computers don't work and need to be rebooted/reformatted/whatever several times per day. Since people are used to the fact that computers break, companies can have bad tech support, and it won't reflect poorly on them because computers naturally can't be expected to function well.
My original post was not intending to be funny or a troll; I was completely serious.
The decline in tech support is nothing new. For quite some time, I've argued to management and coworkers that the only kind of technical support worth having is per-incident support, where the company providing support gets paid only if the issue is resolved successfully. "Gold" and "Platinum" support contracts (where you can get help as much as you want) still send you through the same tedious process of explaining your problem, receiving instructions whereby you, the customer, spend even more time diagnosing the problem, following up to the company, receiving still more diagnosis instructions, ad nauseam. Personally, I'm sick of bothering to isolate a test case, telling the company the version of their software I'm using, only to be told to mindlessly upgrade to a newer version that allegedly fixes the problem. The last time I was told this, I asked the company in question if they could try my problem scenario in their environment with the proposed new version. They said "no". Their expectation is that I will take half a day setting up an environment, installing a new version of their software, setting up my test case, and making a determination. Paugh!
I'm willing to bet that if the support vendor got paid when and only when my problem was resolved that I'd have received very different answers and a willingness to actually solve my problem.
The idea that only big companies with high-priced products can offer good support is stupid. The company I've spoken of sells a very expensive database product with even more expensive support. If the support isn't per-incident, there's simply no incentive to do better.
Those who can't, teach
As a university professor, I can assure you that there are a large number of folks in academia who could, but prefer the freedom of not having to. Personally, I'm pretty happy about being able to get up at 9am, go for a nice long bike ride, take a shower, wander in to the office, work on a grant proposal for the afternoon, kick around a few ideas with my graduate students, lecture, and then wrap up the day with a glass of wine and a few eager to please co-eds. How can you beat a life like that?.. Did I forget to mention that consulting gigs pay $75 - $150 an hour.. What a life..
Be kind, courteous and respectful of the tech support person with whom you are dealing.
It's a really simple thing but it does a few things...first, it makes the tech support person actually feel like a person and that gives them more incentive to help you or help you find someone who can help you. Second, and this is often overlooked, if you are nice to the person on the other end of the phone it will often make the experience less stressful and less negative for you, as the caller.
I know these are simple things and most everyone would realize them on their own, but I also know it's easy to forget these when dealing with tech support that in general sucks and is difficult to get in touch with.
Having worked at various ISPs doing tech support over the last few years, I've got a few interesting insights.
1) Too many companies emphasize quantity over quality. By quantity, I mean the number of calls you take in a day, or average call times. At some places, if you can't resolve an issue within 15 minutes, you're required to end the call, even if you could fix it with a little more time. This is stupid, because customers will call back, get someone else, and have to explain their problem again, which wastes time and costs the company money. Companies need to be less afraid to let go of techs who can answer a lot of calls in a day, but rarely actually solve anything, and more afraid to lose good techs who know what they're doing.
2) Interdepartment communication in most large companies is terrible. Very often, the only way to get something done is to make friends with people in other departments, and ask them personal favors, because following procedure might get the issue brought up at the next manager meeting, but it won't go anywhere from there, because it's not important enough to make a big deal over.
3) Immediate supervisors of tech support agents usually know how to encourage and motivate their teams, because those people were probably promoted from tech support themselves. The manager one level above them may have a general idea what's going on. Anyone above that is absolutely clueless, and has no concept of what's happening on the floor. Immediate supervisors are powerless, and their managers have little actual power. This means the people in power don't know anything about tech support, and people who know about tech support have no power. It's a direct inverse proportion.
4) Management assumes that tech support should be in an isolated box; they don't need to know about what's going on in the rest of the company. Thus, marketing comes up with a new advertising strategy, and tech support doesn't know about it. Engineering releases a new software version that works differently, and tech support doesn't find out until customers tell them. This goes back to the communication issue above, but it's more than just different departments not talking to each other - it never occurs to anybody that tech support needs to know about anything happening outside of tech support. Tech support needs to be given a little more respect - if you respect them, they'll respond to that.
5) What's up with long hold times? If a hold time of over five minutes for any department is not an unusual thing, you need to hire more people! The company is losing customers (or just losing money, as customer service gives away free service to bribe customers so they won't leave) just because the hold times are so long. Sure, you need to take steps to ensure that techs aren't needlessly wasting time, but once those steps have been taken, it's time to increase headcount. Sure, it costs money, but how many customers can you afford to lose? You don't want techs sitting around waiting for a call, but usually there's something productive they could be doing. How about cross-training people so they can be moved between a couple departments as needed, as call volume demands? That way you don't have to keep hiring and firing.
6) Many companies throw techs out on the floor with inadequate training. Usually they'll get a training class, but it's not enough to absorb everything they'll need. As long as it's clear who they can go to for help, this may be OK - it only takes about a month on the floor to figure out what's going on, and as long as the tech isn't spreading misinformation or causing problems, that's fine. New techs should not be held to the same expectations as seasoned techs, though - they should be held to the same standards of quality, but if it takes them longer to get an issue resolved because they have to ask three people for help along the way, there's nothing wrong with that.
7) Monopolies don't have to care about any of this.
I'm not sure I buy this. If your supporting hardware and software for end users part of your mandate is to provide easy to use devices. If your company only sold stuff to peopel who knew windows they would sell abotu half of what they do now and you'd be out of a job.
... is because no one wants to pay for it.
Think about it - everyone thinks short-term, and buys on price. Does ANYONE buy a PC because of the excellent support anymore?
Look at the cheapest Dell desktop you can buy. What was cut out? The support. They only offer 90 days. How many people buy no-name crap at computer fairs and the like, or questionable goods from Ebay, since it has the cheapest price, and then attempt to get Microsoft to answer the phone when it doesn't work?
Why are companies outsourcing to crap outfits? Product support has become something that is a checklist item that never turns up in reviews, for the most part... which is not surprising, since companies like Dell and Gateway pay the bills at the reviewer's magazines. Ever wonder why the biggest advertisers always get the best reviews? Has PC Mag ever said a negative thing about Dell or Microsoft?
So companies find the cheapest way to pay tech-support "lip service" to their customers. This means that some half-asleep foreigner with a good American accent is going to answer the phone call... after a half hour on hold.
Fact is that if you want good support, you pay for it - either in the product's price, or afterwards. Well, no one wants to pay for it the product price anymore.
Tech support should be an option that people have to pay for - either the screwdriver guy in the neighborhood, a local third-party, or as an add-on from the company that sold you the gear in the first place.
ambitious people with vision
pulling a check clockwatchers
morons who non-technical management hired with the learning capacity of anesthetized anchovies
Those that fell into the former category worked hard to get out of the repetitive work of support. They stuided and built the bridges to get out. Why? Because being a support person simply does not pay enough. If corporate america thought it important to keep their customers in contact with proficient people they would do things to help make sure they kept the best in those jobs!
Some Advice
Catapulting youself from Tech Support upwards is only possible within a corporate IT department.
If you are at a Big Ass Call center (IBM owns many in Colorado) and you don't want to be a sell-out service lever manager corporate dicksnot, your best strategy is to get into the highest level of technical support and then join another corporation.
At Big Ass Call Centers they focus on metrics and business jack-off garbage. In a corporate IT environment (generally) they care about quality solutions.
Maybe, in part, the shrinking profits are because of bad tech support. Nothing makes me want to drop a product faster than bad tech support. On several occaisions I've called Oracle GOLD Support with a problem and the gotten the response: "Oh, that would be a known OS problem. You'll have to take this up with the OS vendor." Who, of course, blames it on the RDBMS software.
Another problem might be the propensity for PHBs to demand that you call for Tech Support on problems you could solve for yourself with a bit of time. This would tend to flood Tech Support with fairly trivial questions and tempt those who manage Tech Support to man the front line support with less skilled techs.
I presume you're tech-savvy: if you're calling them, it's because there's a problem on their end, right? Your goal is to convince them to fix it. But their goal is to pester you and do nothing to help, mistakenly assuming the problem is on your end. They are your enemy. If their questions are irrelevant, don't be afraid to lie to them. Give them the "standard" answer they want to hear.
Remember: no matter what your network really looks like, you are running Windows 98 on a single PC. You do *not* run Unix. You have never run Unix. In fact you have never ever heard of it. Don't be afraid to feed them as much BS as necessary, if it will persuade them to move their asses and fix the problem with their network.
I have worked tech support, at one level or another, for my entire career. By that I mean everything from on site, or in shop repair of electroincs in the military and civilian life, through outsourced customer help desk for a still major PC vendor, through building suppportable updates to corporate systems, through global reach network support for a major bank.
My experience is not comprehensive, but I do have a few insights.
Don't make your first line customer support center into a profit center. I know, it costs money to run a fl customer support center, especially when you consider the hardware involved, but also payroll. Consider that a help desk generally hires temporary employees at $10-15/hr, (I suspect that they are paying the temp companies $20-30 per hour for these people) and for a large PC vendor, there are between 100 and 200 people taking calls 24 hours a day. It does add up quickly. On the other hand I have seen fl techs bill people for 10 different incidents in a single 20 min call, each incident costing $35 or more.
Scripts (when written correctly) should help a fl either help you solve the problem, or get you to the right people. Howerver these scripts are written by people, who generally get their information by talking to the engineer of whatever project installed the piece that is to be supported. As a result, they are specific to that component, and rarely take into considerations interactions with other system components or even other software that a user may be working with. A good tech will recognize this, and be flexible enough to come up with his or her own set of questions to add to those in the scripts. However it is a rare tech support organization that will set up tools that such a tech support person can use in this way. On top of that if the tech is good, he or she is often promoted out of the tech pool to manage the lesser techs, or occasionally teach them. What happens when you pull the cream of the crop out of the interface to your customers? Your customers get the dregs as their first contact.
Let your tech support become name recognized by your customers. Note that is not a "force" that is a 'Let'. Customers generally feel better when they "know" who will be at the other end of the line. As a customer, I am far more forgiving of my tech support person not knowing the answere to a problem I have if I can identify with them. If you have a policy that allows your tech support people to be asked for by name, or who are assigned to your customer's ticket while they are on shift, customers will not feel like they are getting the run around.
I have yet to see a ticketing system that has built in data mining tools that will help a tech support person find similar problems and what their solutions were. In almost every case I have ever seen, a ticketing system has been a management tool used to see who is taking the most calls, and who is closing their tickets in the least amount of time. If you mean for the tool to be useful to the tech, on an other than individual ticket by ticket basis, that tool has got to have some built in help for the tech.
Lastly follow through on support. Just because the customer claims that the problem appears to be solved, does not mean that it has been resolved. Schedule some time, or some people to follow up on a high percentage of tickets, and find out if the customer is satisfied. You don't have to ask page of questions on how the problem was handled. Start with the question, "Is the problem you encountered solved to your satisfaction?". Listen to the response. If the response is anything less than a hearty and happy "Yes." then you should start asking how the process can be improved, and so on.
One problem when it comes to problem tickets, and escalations, is that no-one in a tech support queue types as fast as the customer speaks. If you recite off an error message, or a dozen field headers that are coming back with garbage, your tech support person will probably not be able to include them in the ticket. As a result, if the ticket is escalated to second level support, they probably will not have the data. If it is important to you that the data get into the ticket, take your time and make sure that the fl tech gets the informaiton completely in the ticket.
This should be the tech support mantra I think:
"I understand that for you, this problem is very important. It is preventing you from doing your job right now, and very well may be preventing your company from earning the revenue that is paying me. I also understand that not everyone that you have spoken with in the past has held this view. I also understand that the fact that you were on hold for one or more hours has made you feel that we do not take your problem seriously. I want you to know that the perceptions you have had in the past are not the perceptions I would like you to have going forward."
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Let's see what you've just barfed out shall we?
Wrong! Every single company I know of who has outsourced support has dropped support levels to the lowest humanly possible. What happens if my problem is not on the flow chart? What happens if god forbid it's unusual and actually needs to be fixed too? What happens if I need to talk to a developer or an engineer? where are those in the outsource company?
When support gets outsourced the customer looses bigtime. When they call all they get is scripts read at them. How useless is that? Do a search on google and try to find the story of ex-employees who worked as these outsourced workers. Read them. It's so pathetic it's hillarious. Until you're forced to talk to someone like them.
On the other hand, I know which companies don't outsource because when I call, they know about the product very well, they don't read scripts at me and they can always just walk over to a developer and ask a question.
No affiliation... My arse! Their website doesn't even work yet. This falls in the shameless plug for obscure and evil company dept.
In other words... Now we're gonna get scripts read at us by a person who we can hardly understand and is getting paid much less than minimum wage here; doing a job they can't do well because they're not part of the group who designed our product. Nice.
Oh! How cheery you are. How jovial this issue is.
I hope the parent get's modded down. It's crap and sleezy. If it comes to that, I hope we have no person-person support at all, fuck it I can read scripts myself, I don't need to have them read at me.
Liberty.
I've had pretty good experience w/ Direct TV. There was an access card problem with one of my recievers and the tech support person stayed on the phone with me for almost an hour and a half working out how to diagnose and solve the problem.
Needless to say, I kept offering to hang up and call back.. (Some of the steps took 15 minutes for the sat to sync up and stuff..) She said, no thats fine.. your satisfaction is more important than our call times.
Needless to say I was very impressed they were will to deal with me.
In a small company, developers and support are often the same people. That's where you get really excellent support. Our provider domainfactory has the best support I have ever seen. They're a small bunch, but its customers routinely give raving reviews of their service. That's how we chose them and I hope they can keep up their support as they grow.
Along the same lines, my own company ej-technologies tries to provide an excellent service to its customers and evaluators. We sell a Java profiler which is a complex product and requires a lot of support. And guess what - it pays. People whose problems you solved come back to you and buy something. High quality support is a great confidence builder.
I used to work phone tech support for a very large and famous chip company. I supported PC cameras. It was horrible. I had no problem with dealing with the customers, it actually made me feel good to get grandma's camera working so that she could video conference with her grandkids! I worked for a large subcontracting company, and they were the cheapest bastards on earth. My lab machine to do test calls was a P166 with 32MB of ram. (keep in mind i quit just after this last Christmas!) the minimum specs for the camera I was working with was a 266Mhz P2 with 64Mb of ram. Customers had to connect to us over a modem line because the company did not want to open up the correct ports on the firewall to let the connections through.
The worst part though was the subcontracting company's only focus was that we get our average call time under 14 minutes. Sounds like a lot of time, until your walking joe NewUser through his registry deleting keys. All the company seemed to care about was call times. I can't tell you how often (and frustrating) it was to get a customer calling in on their 10th call, all of them right around 15 minutes apiece. To see that the last tech sent them to upgrade their audio drivers, when they obviously had a video problem. When I'd question the other techs, they'd say "I had to get them off the phone, my average call times this month are getting high, and its not likely that they're going to get me again!" I couldn't stand it. Our job was to help customers be happy with their product, at least in my opinion, and the suits were only interested in making a buck.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
So highly trained UNIX God me has to explain to the f-ing windows idiots how to mount a cdrom. The instructions are in our huge manual. They are are on our great tech site. But no, they call me and I have to waste my time walking them through the steps in the manual. RTFM.
I know that this is what I get paid to do, at twice the tier 2 salary but WTF. Helping the great unwashed masses to lusers is killing me. We are pure UNIX, if you don't know 'nix please trust me when I tell you what to type. Or better yet, just open port 22 for me and get out of my way, I'll fix your damn machine faster that your poor excuse for computer skills can explain the wrong problem to me. If I can't I'll get all the info I need to send it to the tier 4 and dev guys. You'll have your answer tomorrow and a hotfix within a week. The fix will be in the next patch.
The reality is not that tech support is getting worse, we can get great people really cheap these days. Our occasional opening (2 currently) are always popular. But with customers who think just because I know our product like my own child, I will instantly understand where it fits into their network or the idiosyncrasies of M$'s latest protocol. I've memorized all the important RFCs, I have read our manuals (and quote them often), know the details of TCP/IP, routing
It is an employer's market, fire the idiots because there are boatloads of good people to hire who need a job through no fault of their own. Train them and remember that burnout comes fast in front line tech support. I still like tech support, I just don't want to answer the phones anymore. Please let me go back to escalations only. I only like the really hard problems.
Um I don't know what Tech Support you work for (probably AOL or MSN they are useless) but here it is fix the problem no matter how. We also fix many people's problems with other companies (for a price). Also for all of you who bash Tech Support try it for a week and then you will have a better appreciation for the crap you have to go through. From the people who know everything (that is why they are calling you) or the clueless (those Tech Support jokes are no joke, they actually happen) and of course the friend who knows everything that tried to fix the computer and now nothing works.
It's funny how everybody on Slashdot bashes M$ but can you imagine the poor bastard that has to support it (me but I have to eat and stuff). Here is hoping the economy turns around so I can get a better job. Just my $0.02
The best tech support, bar none come from Adtran the maker of CSU,s DSU's.
They offer a Toll FREE suppport phone number, which usually gets routed to a knowledgable tech in less than 5 minutes! And I have even had a tech help me with a Cisco router configuration to fix the problem.
In the last 20 Years I havent found anyone that can top them. When I spec an external CSU it is ALWAYS Adtran, because their tech support is the absolute best.
Second runner up goes to the small company Slim Devices, www. slimdevices.com maker of an incredible ethernet based MP3 Player. No 800 number, but prompt responses to emails again with an eagerness to get the problem resolved.
If a small company like SlimDevices can provide good tech support why can't others?
Another problem is that the tech can only be as smart as the person on the other end of the phone. If the person making the call is clueless then the tech is unlikely to get enough information to truly solve the problem anyway.
For example, guy calls in and says, "the internet is down." That can be so many differen things it's all but impossible to troubleshoot. Especially if they don't know what a modem is and they think their computer is a CPU.
Mod up this guy as a TROLL