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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?"
Google Answers has reasonably good tech support for popular programs. It's even possible to get an answer without losing $4, since other users who are unsure that their solution will work may add a comment rather than claiming to have the answer. In that case, you're only out the 50-cent listing fee.
Another advantage of Google Answers is that you get to vent your frustration publicly instead of to a poor tech support worker.
The shareholder is always right.
Being a transitioning tech from Windows to Linux, I do rely on Microsoft's tech support from time to time. I have noticed a steady decline in quality of service over the last couple of years.
For example, I have an ongoing issue with a client that is bordering on insane. They're running Windows 2000 Small Business Server, and twice they've had a blue screen of death while rebooting the server.
Having talked over the issue with 7 different technicians, not only do we not have a solution, but there's conflicting advice. Also there are patches that are not available to the public because they're still not "prime time" (took 7 months for a hot fix to be made available for another problem with licensing. Seems that if Windows 2000 Pro workstations connect to SBS 2000 server, the licenses get gobbled up until no one else can connect, even though there's only 7 computers connecting to a 10-licensed server. The patch still doesn't work properly).
It's a scary thing when a client is afraid to reboot the server in fear that they will be down an entire day. Thankfully in North America Microsoft will fix business servers that are down for free (MS Business Critical Support 10888-455-7422), so at least their weakening support is on their dime.
Maybe we'll solve the problem next time the server BSOD's (8th tech's a charm!?!?) Or maybe the customer will let me move them to Linux.
Ruby on Rails Screencast
I worked for Dell, and we had a 17 minute Average Handle Time (AHT) goal. If we spent more than 15 minutes with a customer, a flag would go off up at the Supervisor on Duty's desk, and someone would come by and have us put the customer on hold. Several techs were not knowledgable at all, but were so frustrating for the customer to deal with that they would give up. Thus, the worst techs had the best call times. Other techs would focus on getting the cust off the phone by dispatching parts.
One man, about 70 years old, would call in about once or twice a week (looking back through the call logs), and he was simply inept at using the computer. This man had been sent a video card, sound card and motherboard. This was a simple case of techs not wanting to deal with this guy and his lack of aptitude.
ClientLogic is just one outsourcer, there are others. Some companies, like Dell outsource to multiple companies, while maintaining their own base of techs, usually for their more valuable customers. We were given home and small business. Laptops, Servers and larger companies were handled by Dell directly.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
"The 27,000 respondents to the unscientific poll reported longer waits on hold and less knowledgeable technicians. It is also taking longer to find fixes. An increasing number said problems were never solved. "
I wonder why..
On the company side:
Chopping Block Gods are hired to find where the fat in the company lies. Mr/Mrs. Chopping Block plugs a couple of numbers into his/her overpriced calculator and finds that the tech support people are working only 80% of the time and therefore 20% can be cut.
Mr/Mrs. Chopping Block tells management this and says they can probably save the biggest money by getting rid of the more experienced (read: overpaid) techs since everyone is reading from a script anyway.
3 months later you have an overworked call centre with clueless staff. The place is no longer fun to work at and the turnover rate goes up. Big surprise. As morale goes down you find staff taking longer breaks, more sick days, etc. The cycle continues.
On the consumer side:
Mr/Mrs "Informed" Consumer scans all ads in the newspaper looking for the absolute cheapest price for their pocket computer. He/she first finds the cheapest company that offers a pocket computer since they're all the same, then finds the cheapest model made by that company, then the cheapest store to buy it from.
Mr/Mrs "Informed" Consumer does not consider how the prices got so low and may not ever have to as long as a) they don't need tech support, b) their product doesn't break. If either of these happens, they are in for a nightmare experience.
I'm not necessarily saying that the cheapest products have the worst tech support/warranty scams running (some save money on big ad campaigns), but the cuts DO have to come from somewhere. Unfortunately, some of the cuts come from the quality of life for people who have the misfortune of working at one of these companies.
Later when I became a MS Exchange consultant (1996) I was calling about a corrupt message store. The guy on the phone didn't know anything. That was the last time I called.
>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..
I don't really see any inconsistency between your self-described life and the original poster's premise. It's easy to claim that you "could do it" when you've never tried. And lay off the co-eds, dude.
From the article "We're still looking for the cheapest way to answer the stupidest questions," he said. "If you go out of the script, they have no idea how to react."
This quote exemplifies the real problem that tech support faces. People computting beyond their means. I used to work tech support for an ISP. Our install software was good, Our POPs were fairly stable. Yet we still had a large call volume. The problem was the LUSERs that kept calling, and calling, and calling. Some of these people had call history logs that contained thirty to forty entrys, none of them due to anything we had done. I literally spent 15 minutes one night trying to get a woman to type her password in the same way twice.
Why this is important, These people cost money. Every minute they are on the phone money leaving the company. We had a 800 number and of course I was getting payed. We figured it out one night that if a customer was on the phone with use for 10 minutes that wiped out our profit on them for the month. With aditional months getting wiped out ever 11 minutes. Some of these customers had call logs that indicated 15 to 20 HOURS of time on the phones with us. They had wiped out their profits for the next ten years and the profits of thrity of forty other poeple also.
What tech companies have woken up to is the fact that these people make up, at worst 10% of your customer base, yet they burn up 50 to 60% of the profits a company makes.
In a defensive measure companies are trying to ditch them. Unfotunatly people with a real issue of need are ditched with them also. This is a sad state of affairs, yes, but then the level of support required to maintain this level of helpfullness is destructive to the company.
No other industry in america is expected to provide this level of support. Not car manufactures, VCR manfacturers, nobody. They are expected to replace defective product, which everyone should do, but GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
The level of support we see now is due to the tech companies brutally shedding this dead weight. It's harsh, and unforgiving, but it needs to be done. The tech recovery cannot begin while we struggle with all the dead weight we must carry
As a further note, if you think these comments harsh go work a hell desk position. You will develope an abiding hate for human kind quickly. I am still puzzled myself on how most people managed to have ancestors smart enough to evolve to come down from the trees, let alone learn to walk upright.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
If you know your stuff, you ain't gonna be working on phone tech support.
That's what I throught at first. Then after 6 months of working in a convenience store to try to pay back my student loans and do things like eat, I got a call back from the local telco. So now I'm a T1 tech support guy. It's not what I want to be doing and I'd like to think I am very overqualified for the position, along with half of the people there. But I'm in an area with a an IT slump and it's the only job vaguely related to IT that I was able to get after finishing school. It beats working in a convenience store for a couple dollars above minimum wage.
Putting those resources online to let you solve your own problems really is the better solution.
The place I work for has made a big push to get most of the information online. The website has most of the stuff we go through on the phone, but a lot of customers (picture your computer-illiterate grandmother type) prefer to speak with somebody rather than go through the 'net. That and if your connection's down, it's kinda hard to look it up online.
I do phone tech support for a certain PCS carrier. The company who hired us to do it pinkslipped all of their tech support for this area and sent them to another city to train their outsourced replacements. Imagine how motivated they felt? You should pink slip after they train their replacements not before! They'll know they are being replaced, but they aren't sure. It sucks either way, but at least their replacements will be slightly better trained. None of my coworkers or management seem to be that knowledgeable or that well organized.
I think the only reason they are still in business is because I know that at least one of their competitors has even worse tech support. They don't have tech support on weekends.
Customers get very frustrated when the services they ordered don't work, and when we tell them it could be several days before we restore it, you can imagine how annoyed they are.
I do the best I can with the limited tools I have at my disposal for those who do get me. Other departments misdirect calls to our dept all the time then we have to transfer them back to the main customer line and tell them to ask for the right dept.
And yes I am a bitter underemployed IT worker who was used to having a real job.
I once worked for a company where the Tech Support organization reported to Sales/Marketing. I thought it was odd at first, but there were a lot of advantages. If you put Tech Support under an Engineering organization then the best Tech Support people always get moved into Engineering before long, leaving only script readers manning the phones.
The Marketing/Sales organization always had access to Technicians who really understood the product. Engineers tend to blow smoke about the capabilities and shortcomings of the products. Sales could also tap the best Tech Support people for pre-sales technical support.
Sales/Marketing in this organization also had the Technical Services arm. People from Tech Support could be called upon for custom programming, configuration and consultation with customers for hire. Sales/Marketing was intensely interested in these areas as it helped them design products. It may have led to some products being in somewhat of a kit form, with the real capabilities being revealed through programming, but that was actually a plus. Everybody benefits from having programmable, flexible products.
Sales/Marketing has the most stake in Tech Support, as Tech Support works with the same customers that Sales/Marketing does. A customer who is unhappy with Tech Support is going to take it out on his Salesman. You might as well put the Sales organization into a position to actually do something about bad Tech Support. I've seen many companies where the Salespeople implicitly air the internal dirty laundry about Tech Support, complaining about how they can't get anything out of them, but promising to take it to the highest levels. Better to have the Sales people working together with Tech Support rather than as finger pointers.
Finally, if you think about it, it made Sales/Marketing realize that supportable products was the best way to get and keep customers. There was less Sales/Marketing blaming and rushing Engineering and more working together to get out a product that could be supported.
I've not seen that hierarchy elsewhere. This company had other problems, but that was one of thier highlights.
I've worked in various support organizations, and feel compelled to share my recipe for a good support team, and some of the factors that I know first hand can contribute to a bad one.
1. Managers must EITHER know the product being supported, OR at least have the mental capacity to understand what the product is used for and slowly learn the product itself. (The best tech manager I ever had started off as an analyst, and knew the software inside and out. She knew what could and couldn't be done, and kept up as new modules were written. It was a dream to work for her.) If you're hiring a manager of techies and they can't do the job of the people they're managing, they aren't qualified.
2. Hire intelligence not flash. If a guy is a moron but speaks well on the phone, there's no way he's going to be a good analyst. There are classes at community college to teach public speaking and diction to your "nerdy quiet types" (not to mention clubs like Toastmasters), but nobody can make you smarter than you really are. In these situations, I would refer the flashy not-smart guy's resume to the SALES department.
3. Pay a good salary. Not a "competitive" salary, a good salary. Just because Joe Blow is paying $27k in a slow economy doesn't make people happy to be offered $27,500. In six months when the economy is all the way back, the $27k (and $27.5k) people will simply quit for more money elsewhere.
4. Train your people. Yes, you should be hiring people with experience and brains, but that doesn't neccessarily tranlsate to instant productivity on what your company is selling and supporting. (ESPECIALLY if you're talking about specialized proprietary software.) Effective training is the difference between success and failure for software support folks.
5. Tell the truth. Don't layoff 30% of the staff due to "economic hardships", then anounce record-breaking profits the next week. Besides being ethically questionable, it's in poor taste, and kills your team's morale faster than a 44 magnum.
6. Recognize achievements. This seems trivial, but I worked for a guy for about 7 months who didn't say ANYTHING positive to me, ever. Not once. People are VANE. When they feel like they've done something special, they need recognition for it. It's a simple fact of human existence.
Oh, and last but not least:
7. MORALE, your greatest friend or worst enemy. If your team is feeling low, they're going to do shitty work. (Or, rather, perform at just high enough level not to get fired.) Don't let them get low! If you live by rules 1-6, you'll always be maintaining high morale, not "turning around" low morale. (Three guesses which is easier, the first two don't count.)
Who did what now?
Lots of people don't seem to understand this. And this is how it is all through the industry. People call in and expect to speak to someone who knows every detail of their system and network inside and out, from 3rd party hardware to BIOS switches to operating system specifics to IP addressing to client/server configuration, etc. I don't know everything about Windows because I don't support it, I support the specific piece of hardware with our name on it. Ditto your router, switch, service provider, etc. You want somebody who knows everything there is to know about your network and systems and will configure anything and everything for you, fine, go hire one. Their hourly rates are 5-10 times what mine is.
And if you have a question on some obscure technical detail of the product, it may not get answered right away, because I'm not an engineer. If you're trying to do something unsupported and are nice about it, I'll try to help you, but if you call up and act like a dickhead from the get-go, you aren't gonna get crap, as I'm under no obligation to help you. Being a condescending jackass isn't going to get you anywhere.
And of course, there's the customer that's angry because no XP drivers are going to be developed for a product that was discontinued 3 years and he picked up on eBay for $10. And the customer who is upset because when he talked to his service provider or OEM, they told him everything was fine, or that the problem is with our product, and won't listen to any instructions as a result.
Yeah, there're customers who are unhappy with the support they receive. But this isn't because I'm incompetent or we're trying to screw them. We support what we support, and we do it well. 95% of the people I deal with on a day-to-day basis understand where our boundaries lie and are quite happy with the support provided. Yeah, it's not like that with a lot of other companies, but the fact is, a lot of the people bitching about bad support wouldn't know good support if it bit them in the ass.
(Of course, I make an exception for cable companies, as they generally have horrible technical support, but I wouldn't really expect the billing guy to know how to push a firmware update anyway.)
I used to do tech support for Erols Internet.. shortly before RCN bought em. This was a while ago, and yes pay sucked, but it was a start. Doing Tech support is a good inroad into the industry, atleast it used to be. It taught new IT people patience, and how to find a solution to a problem if there was no canned response available to resolve the problem. But like I said, this was a long time ago, when most companies actually had their own tech support call centers.
I find these days, companies are either outsourcing, or completely dropping the tech support call centers, or merging tech support with customer service (which in the past really only handled billing and non technical related problems) Todays support/customer service groups are almost completely useless, their call volume gets higher, while companies are either cutting back on staff, or no longer hiring as their customer base increases.
What this does, is put increased pressure on support staff to resolve a problem, or dump it off on someone else as fast as possible. When I say dump it off on someone else.. I mean blame say MS (if your an ISP), or anyone other then youself to get them off the call.
Hell, even back in the day, as a senior support person who dealt with escalated issues, I was repeatably bitched at for taking too long to resolve an issue since I tend to go that extra mile to make sure a problem was resolved before finishing the call. But the company would rather I give a customer a solution, and tell them to try it and end the call, if that did not work the customer had to call back, and sometimes wait for hours on hold in the queue.
Alot of bad tech support is from clueless people having the job dumped on them, but I suspect most of the problems come from teh fact, that the company VP's see tech support as something that they can live without, and would rather pump cash into sales and marketting, and deal with problems later. Which results in low support salleries, which in turn results in very high employee turnover, as no one wants to sit in a very high stress job and get paid peanuts. This in turn results in a knowledge base drain, where the people who actually did know something leave for greener pastures, and the only people left are those who are not as knowledgable but can read from scripted solutions, which rarely work.
Anyways, enough of my ranting, I'm no longer in tech support due to the crappy pay, companies not willing to train their support people so they could possibly further their career within that company. I personally think that if companies invested in their employees (specifically support), those people would stay within that company in most cases, and that would result in better service.
But VP's only see the bottom line, and to them tech support is a drain on their funds, so they will always try to cut corners there, which is why support will always suck
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
There's a simple reason for the lack of good support for companies out there: companies are unwilling to spend the money and give benefits to retain good tech support employees.
:D
Raise your hand anyone out there who's worked some form of tech support/help desk in the past. I have. And just about anyone who has will tell you that 1) It's HARD WORK. even for those who know what they're doing. 2) it's DRAINING work, especially emotionally. Hours upon hours of abuse from some moron who put in his own phone number instead of the phone number he's supposed to dial, and being told you HAVE to fix problem X with program Y because its YOUR FAULT that it broke wears on a person.
The stress leads to burnout. the burnout leads to quitting. The quitting leads to massive overturn, which leads to a scramble for new employees, who are rushed out with improper training, etc etc. It's a vicious cycle.
Here's another reason:
Any call centre type environment works on a lowest common denominator level. The tech support workers who DO know what they're doing are lumped in with joe blow who wouldn't know a modem from his ass; extremely disgruntled knowledgeable employees desert in droves for a job that will actually get them some respect ASAP. The low pay and high stress means that for the most part, only people desperate to hold down jobs apply. Call centres are desperate nowadays and take just about anyone who can fill out an application.
No, i'm not saying that every tech support agent is like that. there are SOME who enjoy this work, and all the more power to them. But it's not easy, and it's not going to get any better. Career advancement potential is limited and so are the pay and benefits.
I think I've ranted enough for now so i'll just leave off there and let someone else pick it up later
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
Unfortunately, I have to concur with your observations.
It's frustrating to see truly talented and superior tech. support people slowly burn out underneath a system that doesn't recognize their value.
One of my good friends did phone support for a large financial firm for 6 or 7 months, and all of his co-workers quickly figured out he was the sharpest one there when it came to difficult-to-solve problems.
Unfortunately, the call-center manager was under strict order not to pay anyone more than a fixed salary cap that was unreasonably low. Therefore, he had no way to reward my friend for his hard work. He tried doing everything he could think of, including taking him out for Friday night happy hour and buying all the drinks and food - but let's face it -- that doesn't exactly pay the bills.
Then, management changed, and the new call center manager wasn't even made aware that my friend was doing an above-average job. Even if raises were eventually offered to the group, he would have been stuck in a rut for another 6+ months just to re-prove his value to the new boss! (The new guy wasn't even technically minded. He said many times that he "really had no clue about any of this technical, computer stuff". He was simply a "people person".)
8) Customers have unreasonable expectations about what tech support can and cannot do for them. Quite a few people call tech support when they should be paying Professional Services or the company consulting department a VERY large amount of money. 9) Many 'higher ups' assume that tech support don't know how to do their jobs; at a lot of companies, one email to a VP or so can get you thousands of dollars of consulting and product customization, after the poor tech support grunt explains that no, they can't write code for the customer. Examples of certain things, maybe, but no, not entire modules. 10) Most tech support departments aren't run as teams; Mary might know that anybody using OS A with software version B is going to get problem X, which is resolved by doing action Y, but if Mary cannot communicate this to the other techs, what's the point? 11) The customer is NOT always right. Managers need to back their techs up. I've personally spent DAYS repeating 'you're missing a semi-colon in your config file' to a given customer, only to have them escalated all the way up to the president, who sends a LEAD DEVELOPER to the site, who calls three minutes after going on-site, and says 'They had a semi-colon missing in their config file.' 12) Rein in your sales people. I've suggested time and time again that every call a tech support grunt takes, where the customer is irate because a product doesn't do X, but were LIED TO by the sales person involved, should result in the sales commission being taken away from the sales person, and given back to the client. 13) QA should be run side by side with tech support. QA often has REAMS of data on known issues, that tech support people wind up hearing about from customers, and spending weeks tracking down. 14) QA should be held accountable for BASIC FLAWS that are let through testing. And yes, developers should be held accountable for BASIC FLAWS that are in code that has been marked 'complete' and issued to QA, unless QA routinely handles non-complete code. Nothing sucks more than the deluge of calls that you get for the first month after a new release, as people call up and start explaining that half of the New Features! bullet points are simply wrong.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
This is one of the reasons why customer support is so awful with high-tech products. In order to deal with the complexity, the companies have to simplify the situations in which they spend time helping customers. The troubleshooting scripts that the reps use are not designed to find out how they can help you, they are designed to find out if there's anything about your setup that they don't support. Said another way, tech support is not designed to help you, it is designed to determine how *not* to help you. This is the entire goal, which you will know if you've ever had a real problem. Real problems take much much longer to help with (days, weeks....), so to eliminate costs, the Customer Support architects try to eliminate as many ways of helping as possible.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Demon Internet actually has pretty good technical support. I've always got onto a real person within a few minutes (normally less than 1 minute), and though they only officially support PC/Mac, they'll try and help with anything.
Last time I was talking to them, it was because of problems connecting from my Ericsson R380 smart phone, and Zaurus PDA. About as unsupported a combination as you could get, but the guy on the end still tried his best to support me (as it turned out, we tracked it down to a problem with my phone, which still persists, which gives a good excuse to get a P800 to replace it).
I'm a number, not a free man!
- their hardware is high-quality, and usually has a very easy way for the user to add RAM or an 802.11 card (little doors you open with a quarter and there's the RAM slots, etc) ... you call up and they fix your problem, pretty much no matter what it is ... you can buy an iBook for $1100 + extended warranty and be certain that it will last you for the next three years (unless you abuse it) ... helpful, polite, working hard to help you out ... consumer products are iMac (desktop) and iBook (notebook), and pro products are Power Mac (desktop) and PowerBook (notebook), so it is easy to know what model you have, and find out what features and capabilities it has ... easy on the eyes, easy to navigate ... Dell blames Microsoft, Microsoft blames Dell, but Apple takes responsibility for all of their users ... completely plug-and-play if you have a Mac-compatible device, which is most of the brand-name stuff out there, and almost all of the USB and FireWire stuff ... many of the things that aren't compatible are things you don't need (since all Macs have Ethernet, FireWire, 802.11, TV out, etc. built-in, there's no need for that kind of stuff as add-ons) ... Mac OS X 10.1.4 means Mac OS X 10.1 with four patches applied ... put two Windows 2000 machines side-by-side and tell me which one has the more-current set of patches and fixes ... it's hard for most users to know what versions of Microsoft stuff they're running) ... I know people who complained directly to Steve about some support issue and got quick responses and then had the issue fixed ... since Mac OS X 10.0, many of the improvements to Mac OS X are just what the users asked for and Apple provided it
... the original AirPort Base Station had a problem where a capacitor would blow at about 15 months of use and it would stop working, so Apple just replaces those no questions asked when you call up.
... they're a great, great company these days, with fantastic products and a wonderful platform. It's like having your own personal computer consultant going that extra mile for you.
- their OS just doesn't crash (and it's running multitrack audio software and high-end video editing, DVD burning, other heavy realtime desktop apps)
- the OS and included apps update themselves (and it really works, and all the user has to do is say "go ahead" when they're asked if they want the updates) and Software Update keeps a log of each update so you can see what a machine's history is right from the Software Update panel
- for $200-300, they'll extend your warranty by two years with free phone support the whole time
- their phone support is great
- their product lines are easy to understand
- their Web site is excellent
- they don't blame somebody else when you call tech support
- it is easy to add or remove applications (no install is necessary), each app has its own preferences file in your own home folder (which you can trash to make the app like a fresh install), and apps are actually folders that hold all of the executables, libraries, graphics, audio, etc. that the app needs, so many things that you'd need tech support for on Windows you don't need it on the Mac (registry stuff, DLL hell, uninstalling apps)
- there are easy troubleshooting steps you can take, like booting with a certain key combination to see a screen with all of your bootable drives, or booting with T held down makes the Mac pretend to be a FireWire hard drive, so you can hook it up with FireWire to another Mac and admin the hard drive (install the OS, apps, get data, whatever) if the machine is not booting (for example, when the video system failed in a PowerBook, I booted it with T held down, plugged it into my Power Mac and copied all the data off the PowerBook in about 10 minutes and sent the PowerBook for service and it was back in two days)
- installing new hardware is dead easy
- their versioning and the way they name things encourages easy understanding for even the non-technical user (they use three numbers
- Macs have security built-in such that viruses and being hacked are not nearly the concern that it is on Windows (in fact, the most-common Mac viruses and security exploits all run on Microsoft software, mainly MS Office and IE)
- Apple executives, even Steve Jobs, have public email addresses and they all read their mail personally
- There are numerous feedback avenues for Apple products where you can make suggestions or detail where the product didn't meet your expectations, and they really take this stuff to heart
In short, Apple has done a lot of hard work to make their systems reliable and easy to use so you don't need tech support, but if you need tech support, it is excellent. They replaced two products for me in the past few years that were totally out of warranty as well
Couldn't recommend Apple more
I had a dell laptop (Latitude), and I called dell for tech support. I got the usual run around where I tried to convince them I am a technically competent person. Naturally, they percedded not to take me at face value and asked me irrelevent questions that had nothing to do with my problem (my com port was literally dead, I needed a new motherboard, and no Windows setting was going to fix that.)
One of the many questions they asked me was if I had ever dropped my laptop. I foolishly answered yes, since sometimes I would pick up the front about a quarter an inch to release the cd-rom drive or battary and then let it drop.
They told me that my warentee was void because I *dropped* my laptop! I said bullshit. After some intense arguing, they went back to their taped copy of the conversation, where I specifically admitted to dropping the laptop "half an inch", and the dell support policy said that anything up to a full inch was ok. They gave me such a hard time about it. That soured me against dell tech support for a long time.
I still own a dell laptop (good machine), and every once in a while I have to call them because of some obscure problem. They still ask me all the standard questions. So annoying. Sometimes, I wish I could just yell "Look, here is the problem. Fix it.", but my mom taught me to be polite, so I usually have to go thru 5 good minutes of crap before we can actually talk about the problem.
Lawrence Lessig is my personal hero.
Exactly. Although I am certainly not a kernel hacker or a UNIX guru, I have worked as a SysAdmin for four years and believe that I am more than a competant IT worker. But as the only job that I can find right now is tech support, I find myself reading scripts off the moniter to people all day. I often want to deviate from the script and tell them the REAL way to solve their problem but that would get me fired. So I sit there reading questions from the script, squirming in my seat, wanting desperately to shout out "All you have to do is click the security accounts tab and uncheck anonymous connections!!" but I can't. My job is to read from a script. :(
Isn't that being a little, umm, narrowminded?
I'm sure that Microsoft has poor tech support, but I'm also very sure that Microsoft is not the only company that does. There are probably dozens, hundreds maybe, of companies with even worse tech support.
To blame only Microsoft for industry-wide poor tech support is rather biased and narrowminded, IMHO.
Just my 2.55861 JPY.
AT&T Broadband? Long Distance? IP Services? Wireless?
:P
:P
Gotta tell us which one.
I've been working for AT&T Wireless for about 6 months and it's the first call center that I've worked in that did *not* bitch at us about call times. The goal is to get the problem resolved on the first call. It's refreshing to *not* have a manager over your shoulder saying "You've been on that call for over 9 minutes. What the hell is going on?" They also do try to keep us with up to date training, which is another thing that's cool for a call center to do.
The only people that are a pain in the ass are the ones that worked for MCI.
Anybody that's ever worked for Worldcom/MCI is a total pain in the ass.
As has been pointed out several times, working the phones is a terrible job. Overworked, underpaid ($10-$15/hour? Yeah right, I make $8 and I've been around a while), and under constant pressure. AHT (Average Handle Time) is expected to be short. 15minutes per call is the norm. Billable Utilization (that is, the percentage of time you're actually on the phone vs. waiting for a calling or receiving training) is expected to be as high as possible.
Oh, and lets not forget that you're chasing a moving target. I work tech support for a major computer manufacturer and the upgrade cycles mean a new product ever 3 months with new sets of issues to deal with. Do they train us? Do they work with QA? Of course not. So we're put on the spt, essentially having to *research* the damned issues ourselves, all the while keeping the call time short.
But it gets better. My major computer OEM also has devised this brilliant marketing strategy called OST. This has got to be the most unethical thing I have seen in a long time and I am simply not going to play ball on this one. OST = Opportunity Sales Transfer. As in, we are supposed to convince EUs their problems will be sold if they'll buy an upgrade from our company. And our company just happens to charge TWICE the going rate for the same product. It's a dirty pressure tactic and I wonder if it is even legal. We're techs damnit, not sales people. We should *never* be placed in a marketing position. It is not our job, and a potential conflict of interest since many issues (especially slow performace on your typical overloaded PC) can be resolved with some very simple, FREE steps. But instead we're expected to push an overpriced memory upgrade. Blah.
Basically, all these damned policies, plus the fact that because 1st level support is a horrendous job you do have high turnover rate means you get crap support across the board. I honestly can't say I love my job, but I need the money.
Basically, to fix the tech support, you need to get the standard wage back up where it was 2-3 years ago so you can attract more qualified people. You need much more investment in INTENSIVE training, with consistent RETRAINING because the tech industry IS a constantly shifting target. And you definitely need much better communication with all the departments. And tech support contractors need to stop focusing on easily measured metrics like handle times, number of calls pushed through, etc, and more on "second tier" metrics like percent FCR (First Contact Resolution) and percent Issue Resolution. Those two are the biggies from an end user point of view.
End users in turn need to understand that there isn't a 10 minute fix for every problem. Many problems on Windows PCs can only be resolved with a format/reload because, well, Windows SUCKS. Also, free tech support's focus is on functionality, AS IT SHOULD BE. You want a tutorial? Pay for it. Go RTFM. Leave the techs to the real teching work of figuring out how you horked your system, or whether or not a piece of hardware has failed. And keep in mind that some failures really require a bench test to be properly identified. People get amazingly bitchy when told they have to bring their computer in for service. I mean, hello? We're not God. We can't just magically hit a few buttons and make a burned out power supply start working again. And over the phone we can't tell if your motherboard has fried in the process. And if your expecting a tech to come out and fix it, think again. Onsite replaces parts, but to send onsite techs out to actually troubleshoot would be financial suicide. That is a service that BUSINESSES get when they create a few million dollars worth of business. Joe blow with his $800 Super Special Marketroid Deluxe Winblows PC isn't going to get that level of service, period. So stop pestering us for something unrealistic and things will be a lot less stressful.
i work 'tech support' for the 3rd largest cable internet service provider. we have the most sophisticated phone queue monitoring system available. last year our queue exceeded 5 minutes on hold less than 6% of the time (the entire year!). our tech staff is highly trained, and well paid. we have the ability to on-site technicians, and manage over 100 individual markets in the US.
the problem is not the support, it's the users. they aren't satisfied, because they don't understand why we can't help them in many cases. people call for printer support, application support, or support when they don't even use our products. they call with early pentium computers, using windows 98, with a USB-NIC, a freeware firewall installed, and more software loaded on startup then i even use. they are rude, and uncooperative...or they want something for free. most of them seem to think we're here to teach them how to use their equipment. customer satisfaction has gone down because the consumers have become lazier, and in many cases it seems less intelligent. over the past 5 years i've watched the curve of user intelligence slip more and more, while we as a call center get better and better.
in my opinion, if you want better support for your purchase, do your research before you buy it. make sure it will do what you want it to do, and make sure you're willing to pay the price for the product. don't expect us to take a loss because you made a mistake.
the odometer lives!
If you got me randomly you would get 240+ undergraduate college hours (Poli Sci/History/Comp Sci), and a varied computer history: DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, Unix, Linux, mainframes, Novell, TCP/IP, PHP, Perl, C/C++, Cobol, Fortran, Pascal, Oracle, MySQL.
I actually have enough "clue" where I was able to help one of our students fix the damage Gator did to her machine BEFORE I read in CNET about Gator using pop-up downloads on unsuspecting users. You have sinned by overgeneralizing, which requires some mighty big assumptions on your part and you know what they say about assumptions... What is so great about your job? Are you a system/network admin who lives in a data center or NOC? Or a programmer who is chained to his cubicle cranking out code? Or some IT manager, ruining dreams and aspirations of the programmers, admins and techs alike?
I am a hardware/software tech at a large community college. The job has its ups and downs but the best part is a varying routine and casual atmosphere (jeans and Hawaiian shirts are what I usually wear).
Early in the semester you spend a lot of time supporting students and as the semester progresses those calls go down then instructor calls go up. Later in the semester you start doing other projects in between prepping for the next semester.
Some days (like today) happen to suck -- WindowsUpdate/Symantec: lather, rinse, repeat. Other days rule -- coding dynamic pages using PHP/MySQL and going to Slashdot to do a little IT "research"
Some days you get to set up the LCD projector for a presentation for some event. Other days you drive to one of the other campuses to train one of the instructors how to effectively use a piece of software. Other days you download and install the newest SSH or PHP to prevent a potential exploit from bringing down your server.
Sure I get paid less, but I don't have to specialize so much I do the same thing day in and day out. I like the flexibility of my current position so much that I know that I would have to make substantially more money to work in many other IT jobs out there.
Besides, I like two weeks off *PAID* during Xmas break and one week off *PAID* during Spring break...
A man who wants nothing is invincible