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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?"
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
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?
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
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.
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