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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?"
Yet another thing Microsoft has forced the world to get used to...
Those who almost can, support
Those who can't, teach
Those who really can't, manage.
Last year I had a data T1 fail, so I called the Business Support Group. Got a tech on the line and explained the trouble. He asked if he could put me on hold and look into it; I agreed and he put me on hold.
After 5 minutes or so, my phone rings, so I park the line on hold and pick up the second call.
It's the same tech from Verizon calling to let us know that our circuit was down! I explained that *I* was the one who just called him and he became extremely confused (as if he wasn't before).
That was something else, lemme tell ya!
---
Information wants...you to shut your pie hole.
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.
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.
Check out the good old Rinkworks at
:)
http://rinkworks.com/stupid/cs_stuptech.shtml
Of course, most of the Computer stupidities deal with stupid users (and they have some really funny stories), but the above page is about "role reversal" and stupid tech support being a pain for a computer-literate user seeking help.
There is a section about stupid salespeople as well
What would you like to see improve about tech support?
How about some training and a fair wage for the poor bastards that work in the call centers?
I used to work as a support whore for Verizon DSL -- that is, until my entire call center was laid off. The jobs were moved to another center in Canada, where Customer Service employees were handed a database full of canned answers and told that they had to start handling tech support calls.
In the meantime, the actual trained techs like myself were all out of a job. And the other center that was on the same level as us - same training, same subcontractor, same call queues - took a savage pay cut.
The technology economy of today is based on some seriously thin margins - and frankly, once a company has your money, they are happy to screw you out of decent support to save a few bucks.
--saint
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.
There used to be a time when you could call up the phone company and get a person on the other end. No so anymore. Software companies are falling into line with other industries who have realized that fixed-costs are the easiest to trim. As profits gets slim, customer service gets slashed. Charming to the least.
When I was a kid, we only had one Darth.
Im surprised many places function as well as they do, to answer the question "What would you like to see improve about tech support?" I would like to see less dependence on Contracting agencies, more direct hire and less middle-men between the person inside the company or department who needs a tech and the person getting in contact with the potential. Anymore if you dont already know someone on the inside of a company your chances of getting hired are slim-to-none. This is especially true when it comes to tech support, anywhere from call center work to desktop support guys. This is not good for the company's or the techs cause it can create such a lack of compatibility between skill-sets and needs. If more company's were willing to go out of thier way and direct hire instead of relying on a contracting agency, whos primary concern is usually the margin they will earn from getting thier tech hired and is going to feed said company anything they want to hear to make that happen. Misrepresentation is the bane of contracting agencies, and the standard practice in most cases.
... is that the hiring process, in most cases, doesn't include determining if the candidate can actually DO THE JOB. (That is, do they have enough experience?)
Case in point: Here in Winnipeg is a company called "Convergys" -- they do tech support for several ISPs throughout North America. One of my friends recently got a job there doing phone-based technical support for Shaw. Now, this individual knows computer basics, but has NO clue what a router is, what IP tables are, DNS servers...
Most places hire people based on "can you read from this script?", which simply isn't adequate.
I had a horrid issue with a motherboard, lets just say I am now short one RAM chip and am in the possession of 80GB of data with a corrupt parition table in the front.
Couldn't get ahold of anybody who spoke sufficent english who was able to understand that I wanted anything outside of the regular RMA. . . .
d*mn fucking offshore tech banks. . . . >: |
Need help treating your acne? Come here!
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
This is an actual quote from my phone call to NextGenTel (Norwegian DSL providers) hotline:
Me: "Hi, I'm having problems getting online here. The router WAN lamp flashes, it can't connect"
Her: "Do you have the correct settings?"
Me: "What kind of settings, it comes with a Cisco router, shouldn't it be preconfigured?"
Her: "Yes, but you have to do some adjustments on you computer as well."
Me: "Yeah, the TCP settings, I know".
Her: "Amongst others, yes. Now click on the start button, and go to Settings.."
Me: (interrupting) "Uh, wait, I don't use Windows."
Her: "What.. Do you have a Macintosh?!"
Me: "No, I use another operating system.. OpenBSD."
Her: "Huh!" (silence)
Me: "UNIX."
Her: "Well, then I can't help. You must send our support group an email describing your problems in detail."
Me: "I would if I could, but I can't get online!"
Her: "Oh, yeah.. that's right.."
Later on I discovered that the problem was their fault: The didn't have enough capacity for all the new users, so I had to wait 14 days (felt like ten thousand years) before my ping requests finally received some echoes.
Maybe a bit OT, but I had to get it out.
-skurk
www.6502asm.com - Code 6502 assembly or.. DIE!!
... is that the people hiring, in most cases, don't want to pay tech support people an engineer's salary. If the person can do much more than read from a script, they're overqualified, and won't be happy with the job or the salary.
The only good thing I've heard from any tech support was from IBM. Another pal has a Thinkpad, and when he had a problem, IBM just sent him an empty padded box with shipping paid for, he sent off his Thinkpad, and within 4 days he was working on his repaired laptop.
Apple will do this too. I have a colleague with a Powerbook. The poor guy's kind of a clumsy dolt and only marginally computer literate. Anyway, he ran into a hardware problem (a bad ribbon-cable connection to the monitor) and Apple had his machine back to him within a week..
I have found that online forums like MaximumPC's forum are very helpful. There are many users on there who answer questions just for the fun of it. Any person that posts a question on there usually gets 5-10 responses within half an hour.
I think that it's better than waiting on hold on the phone!
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
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.
One company I work with has an intra-company tech support for all the agents. The problem is the tech support sucks POO POO. The hold times are insane. Once you actually get a person, it is just a level one tech who can just look at the 10 page trouble shooting manual. If its not there, you get a problem number and a level two tech will call you back. Sometimes, that can takes DAYS. One time I was told a level 2 tech would call back by 5 our time, we waited till 7, called back and found out everyone had gone home. Teh support also will lie to you as well, which is always fun.
Being tech oriented, I try to avoid calling tech support like the PLAUGE. However, some times I have to and it drives me bonkos. There needs to be a code word that lets the person know, "Okay, he doesnt need to hear: Click Start, Settings, Control Panel."
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I've had a realtek nic for over 2 years. Never a problem with it. I support realtek, 3com and intel nics for a living (in addtion to other things). I have seen many problems with intel and 3com nics. i rarely see a problem with a realtek. the few problems I do see with a realtek are probably user error as the physical port gets burned out. The computer detects the ethernet adapter ok, but the hub does not detect a connection. Hmm, wonder how that happens... try maybe plugging a phoneline into the nic.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
"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.
Dell: good
At&t: poor
Qwest: criminal
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.
A few examples of GOOD customer support experiences, to let people know some companies still care:
I had purchased a copy of OS/2 3.0 from a friend. It was a boxed copy, still had all of the registration cards, manuals, etc. OS/2 did not like my sound card, which was a cheap SB16 clone. I called IBM tech support, and was rather horrified to know that I was a known OS/2 custoemr in their records (despite never using it before, not telling them about it, and my friend never tellng them about me. Odd) Anyway, the support person that I spoke with actually had a clue, and ironically shared a story about how he promised himself he'd never buy IBM again because of bad tech support in the past. Anyway, it two phone calls over two days, but IBM eventually had me download an experiemntal driver from their website and said that if that did not work, they would conference to determine whether they had to fly a tech to my home to solve it, or if there were a way to solve the problem more quickly. All this over a $50 copy of OS/2!
My new HP USB scanner (4100C, I think it was) didn't work in my computer because there were two basic types of USB controller: The Intel one and everyone else. I had everyone else. I called HP tech support who, after about an hour, could not solve it. The tech eventually spoke with someone else and found that it was a known problem with my USB controller. Now, the company that I purchased the scanner from, Future Shop in Boise, ID. (USA), had gone out of business so I was pretty convinced I was SOL and out of $200.
The HP tech then asked me if I had a working parallel port or SCSI controller. I did, so he offered to send next HIGHER scanner to me provided I sent the old one back, and that it would take 6-8 weeks to deliver.
Well, 5 weeks later I called (6-8 weeks is usually a BS figure they give for safety so you don't bug them) and asked where the scanner was. Apparently the last guy had forgotten to ask for my credit card for collateral in case I did not send back the old scanner... So he sent the next higher up scanner after the one they already offered to send. A 6100Cse. So, I was getting a $400 scanner as a replacement for a $200 scanner. Not bad.
The next day the scanner arrived, sent priority overnight and with documents explaining who to call to have my scanner picked up on HP's bill.
That pretty much won me over to HP, other than their crappy PCs. I was very impressed at how far they went to solve the problem.
Cisco:
I have a friend that works for a telco in Pocatello, ID, USA. To make my point clear, let me give you some quick background: Pocatello has a population of about 45,000 people. It is in Idaho, one of the physically largest states in the USA with one of the smallest populations. The total population of the whole state barely exceeds 1 million and there are zero major cities within several hours.
There was a problem with a Cisco router and my friend's work. Bad power supply, IIRC. He called Cisco about it and they had a replacement part to him TWO HOURS LATER! They had actually hired a taxi cab to deliver it that much faster. How they got a part to such a podunk little backwater town in two hours amazes me to this day. The have no offices anywhere near.
DirecTV also has great support (the support guys get in trouble if they don't solve your problem--if they don't, ask to speak to a supervisor).
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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.
I'm fairly senior tech guy. I can sys admin and I can code. (I'm a better coder but that's besides the point).
I would take a guy in a call center. That job stinks. It's an entry level job that tries to serve senior level people. It's not a surprise that it doesn't work out well. The only way to fix it is to pay very well.
That model works in consulting. You give some comforts when you travel (the job is worse) but you get paid better. In support, you have to deal with more crap but if you get paid better you'll take the job.
That which does not kill me only makes me whinier
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.
As a rule, they offer no telephone support. All of their support is via email, or a web form in case your email is down. They usually respond within an hour, and always within 24 hours. The people who respond are actual techs, and they actually have the power to fix things if they're broken.
One of the nicest features about their support web form, though is that after you ask your question, there's a little choice control, with the question: "Please select your general expertise in the area of this request:", with options ranging from "Please explain everything to me carefully" to "I have a good understanding of this stuff" and even "Not to be rude, but I probably know more about this than you!".
What a difference it makes! They don't waste their time reminding me to check my caps lock key when typing in my password, and similarly they don't confuse a newbie by talking about IMAP vs. POP3 (they support both, BTW, which rocks!).
I really like this model - I would be willing to give up phone support from any company if their email support worked this well.
And I highly recommend DreamHost for all of your web-hosting needs. And that's not just because if you say that "dmazzoni" referred you, I'll get a discount!
Always review with the tech-support person on the phone (or in person) and make sure they understand the importance of your problem.
Everyone who calls into a call center has an "important" problem. Trying to play the "this is important" card is the surest way to get your issue slammed to the back of the queue to rot. I hear five dozen times a day how important someone's problem is (and only take about 15 calls). Have enough sense to realize that the people in the queue ahead of you have problems that are important to them as well.
Game... blouses.
If they paid decent, and let people DO more than just 'read from the script', end users would get better support and people may find the position a bit more fulfilling. Maybe not MUCH more fulfilling, but we won't know as long as people are only allowed to read from scripts, will we?
creation science book
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.
1. Overall product quality: down
2. Tech support: largely useless
3. Marketing: too expensive
4. Clue factor at 90% of tech companies: 0
5. Experienced IT staff: laid off
6. Salaries: down
7. Benefits: gone
8. Investment: way down
9. New ideas: not approved, obstructed, suppressed
10. Average workday: 80% meetings, 20% e-mail
11. Profit margins: thinning
12. Search for new qualified staff: failed
13. Money spent: incalculable
14. Projections: bleak
15. Likelihood of reaching anyone except a receptionist at any company: 0
Now, how do we know this is directly and completely the fault of management? They are the only people STILL EMPLOYED.
When was the last announcement of several thousand managers being laid off? BZZZT Time's up!
Each of these things is NOT happening in a vaccuum. At some point, these problems have to be fixed or all businesses are going to have problems.
(and here come the apologists... sigh...)
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
but you don't have to be a genius if you have good reference librarian skills.
A good tech support person ought to be able to fix common problems by ad libbing. If they don't know the answer, then they shouldn't give up, but rather should begin researching what they need to know in order to solve the problem (or determine what the problem is for that matter).
A good call center would collect and organize this research and put it in a format that is easy for everyone working there to search.
The only other thing they'd need to do is pay the tech support personnel well and not overwork them. Then people will actually want the jobs and you'll have no shortage of quality employees.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Having worked in the OEM reselling business, I can tell you that 'front line' tech support people vary greatly depending on who will be calling the line.
If the tech support line is set up so end users can call in when they have trouble, the people on the other end of the line will be the clueless idiots we all know and love. This is because the average customer calling in will have their problem solved by one of the following manners:
- reboot the machine and/or redial
- reinstall the software or drivers
- fix the configuration (i.e. RTFM)
These are certainly the vast majority of the issues and so when non-clueless people phone with a real issue, the chance of getting it solved by people who only know how to fix the above three is very low.
On the other hand, for support that is designed for vendors, it is a different world. When a vendor phones a supplier for support, you can be fairly certain that a tech from the vendor will be phoning and that this tech has eliminated the obvious problems already. Because of this, support for vendors tends to be very good. Having dealt with supplier tech support myself, I can say that wait times are low (usually less than 2 minutes) and the competency of the person you talk to is high.
The bottom line is that unless the end user gets smarter (highly unlikely) we cannot expect much help from the front line mainstream tech support personnel.
I hear you. I recently bought a Dell Powedge 1400SC for use as a company webserver. The thing will randomly lock up. I've gone through 2 different flavors of Mandrake, as well as RedHat 7.2, and it still likes to freeze every so often.
Support likes to say it "must be a software problem."
3 OSes later, I don't think so. I ended up pulling one of the DIMMs, and that got rid of a lot of my segfaults (I was having a TON), but it still locks up.
Just gimme hardware that works.
Nah. What surprises me is that they aren't already using prison labor. Its dirt cheap, the prisoners can speak better English than someone from a foreign country, and what are they going to do if they get fed up with their job, quit?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
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.
My experience with Dell hasn't been too bad. We had an insprion fan that started to go out and make a horrible noise in the process. The only thing that I had to do was call Dell, inform them of the problem, and then they had a tech onsite to fix it within two days. I guess it depends on the warranty option you are buying, but I think that we just purchased whatever the standard business warranty was at the time.
:P
Compaq hasn't been too bad either, we don't have onsite service with them, but when we did have an Armada m700 power problem (IIRC, the batteries wouldn't charge in the device) they sent a prepaid box to ship the laptop off to a service center. Then after about 3 days, we got the box back and the laptop had been fixed. The turnaround time was so quick that I thought that there was some kind of shipping problem
Hmm, there's probably some money to be made in a service that would match new-users-with-a-problem up with knowledgable-users-who-know-how-to-solve-that-pro
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made, with the possible exception of the FEAST chip made by SMC. The 8139 supports bus-master DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.
For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four packets queued for transmission at any one time.
Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol levels.
It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it.
On the bright side, the 8139 does have a built-in PHY, although rather than using an MDIO serial interface like most other NICs, the PHY registers are directly accessible through the 8139's register space. The 8139 supports autonegotiation, as well as a 64-bit multicast filter.
The 8129 chip is an older version of the 8139 that uses an external PHY chip. The 8129 has a serial MDIO interface for accessing the MII where the 8139 lets you directly access the on-board PHY registers. We need to select which interface to use depending on the chip type. ~
I doubt that offshoring will not help in the long run. Let's say you cut the costs in half. That's still a bunch of money you are paying out that does not result directly in new profits. Management will always begrudge that money and they will start to squeeze the offshore techs the same way they did the Western ones. The customer's needs should be better aligned with the business's. It is the misalignment that screws up tech support.
The school provides tech support in the form of "Residential Computer Consultants". These are students, one per dorm, that other students can call if they have problems. Sounds great, right? It would be, except that they're a bunch of clueless dolts. Case in point: last month, a friend of mine's girlfriend was having troubles with her HP box. Seems there was a hell of a lot of noise coming from the back of the machine. The RCC had been and gone, reluctant to open the case and having no theories as to the problem. Upon arriving, things became apparent:
The noise started when the machine booted.
If one actually listened close, the sound seemed to come from the graphics card.
She doesn't have an onboard graphics card. Ergo, her card probably has a fan. Hmm, that noise reminds me of when the fan died on my old 133.
Taking things to their logical conclusion, I opened the case and observed that the fan was vibrating (removing the card killed the noise, hmmm).
Some tightening of the screws later, things were fine. It took me maybe 10 minutes at most.
Moral of the story? Don't call tech support. Call some geek buddy. Chances are, they're had your problem before or worked with someone who has. They'll probably fix it for free out of pity, hell, they might even donate excess parts they might have lying around. I have before. Even better, for the geeks, it's a great way to pick up girls...
~Chazzf
No statement is true, not even this one.
Yeah, the standard is two sets of three exclamation points!!! !!!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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 once called their developer support hotline for assistance:
MS: What options did you choose in the AppWizard?
Myself: I don't use the AppWizard. I code everything by hand.
MS: (long pause) You can do that?!!
"In fact, of the thousands of readers who said that they had e-mailed questions to manufacturers about their malfunctioning computers, only 25 percent reported that the answer they got back actually solved their problem."
Competence costs money. It's easier to be incompetent but able to show the management where you've saved XXX million dollars in support costs.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Here's the transcript of a conversation I had with Gateway a year or so ago. The chats at the beginning were conducted with a piece of software called "e-Gain" that's designed to help techs be more professional in online chat and allow them to type less. The net effect is that the customer feel patronized and like they're talking to a bot.
y ea r=2001&month=03&day=19
http://www.fahrvergnugen.net/journal/index.php?
(be gentle, it's only a K6-3)
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
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".)
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.
you mean that if i just pretend to be a true computer illiterate i can get enough free hardware to build additional box's for no cost?
woohoo where do i sign up!
Blame management, I do.
How anyone can claim to support their product on "linux" when what they really mean is "if you're not running RH5.2 or 6.0 with a Gnome desktop environment, we don't want to know", I dunno. I guess it's because manglement think "this will mean we can program a monkey to do Support", when what they should really do is train their internal staff in the product set and have folks knowlegeable about the OS as well; thereafter, a good escalation process back into Development where they can research these things at source level.
At the first job, we had a puppet micro-manager, whose sole line seemed to be to get crib-sheets that you could "just press a button" and send to the customer... those of us running support for both the US and UK offices single-handedly for a week were less than impressed...
~Tim
--
Rushing on down to the circle of the turn
What's going on above them, usually they are the last to know about changes or marketting decisions, yes they are to blame as a group for not having the initiative to better this situation, but then again, some companies will fire people "telling the truth" because they simply don't want to hear it.
There's also the fact that tech support is perceived like a receptionnist, Executives point of view: We need them, but they aren't "valuable assets". So who, that is competent enough and knows his stuff very well (and wants to help) will settle for a low-pay and crappy condition job with no gratification?
Usually they take some interns or people that just finished school to do this, Most of these people don't have real job experience and they take 3 months to a year or two to realize that they have a crappy job. Most that stays are doing so because they don't know better, but the real competent people soon realize that they can do better, have better conditions, job and pay. Executives don't acknoledge that and they loose all their competent people (minus one or two that will be kept as group leader or trainers and will get ok conditions). And by the time the employee knows his stuff very well and knows how to answer most problems and get the "feeling" of the problem and not just looking up questions/answers sheets, they switch jobs because of what I just mentionned before, so basically they have a high cycle rate and almost no knowledge from the start.
To sum it up: You get what you pay for.
And to answer the question, one place you get very good support and tools is with National Instrument. I use their labview software and the tech support are knowledgable staff with CS degree or similar. Why are they doing this? I have no clue, but at least these people knows their stuff.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
The trend nowadays is that a majority of major corporations are using offshore call centers, specifically located in India, to handle most of the calls. Talking to these people, you wouldn't even realize that they are not American. The reason this trend is picking up is that India has a great abundance of cheap labor and has a high population of highly technical people. In addition, it is rather cheap to do this with Voice Over IP. Typically what happens with these tech support is that, as many of you have mentioned, they read from a well prepared script. Any question that they can't handle, they pass on to "Second Level Support" ... ie back to the real support at the home office.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
The only reason you need tech support any more is to get an RMA to return something. Everything else is useless. Woe to you if its a software problem because 9 times out of 10 you'll get a "we're aware of that and working on that fix for the next release.."
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.
When times are tight, a middle management hit squad is set up to look for dead wood (by definition "the other guy"). If you've got a bunch of 20 year veterans on customer support, it looks like a real smart move to lay them off and outsource it the lowest third party call centre bidder.
My employer did that about a year ago. As I said, it looked real smart - at the time. Something that occurred to me was that the same management cadre that laid off the guys with 20 year relationships with our most valuable customers were probably not the same clique in charge of tracking customer churn, or listening to the wails of the sales guys as word of mouth kills them before they get a foot through the door.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
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!
But it helps that I *am* a tech support guy. I have frequently lied to the tech about what I see, I just quote what they want to hear from memory. I have led other people through the same kinds of procedures so often I can see the screens in my mind.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
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.
We sound a problem (ie: the antivirus forced us to use a compromised Sendmail version, no SSL and the NEED to use Red Hat). After solving all the issue ourselves (slackware, sendmail 8.12 and ssl where "unsopported") they wanted us to send them all the answers. Is this what we expect to receive from paid services or software?
I'd rather preffer using free solutions. I'd have contributed back if the haven't charged us $900 for 1 year use of this product.
From: Byron Go (TS-PH)
To: Federico
Subject: RE: InterScan VirusWall
Date: 03 Mar 2002 12:47:34 +0800
Dear Federico,
Greetings.
I know that this may sound inappropriate but is it possible for you to send me the sendmail.cf, submit.cf, sendmail.cf.delivery and submit.cf.delivery?
I have been trying some things out but I am not sure what I'm missing. I am hoping that your 'assistance' could help me create the appropriate sandwich configuration for VirusWall with Sendmail 8.12.
Thank you very.
Sincerely,
Sincerely,
Byron James Go
Trend Product Support
Gateway Team
TrendLabs
-----Original Message-----
From: Byron Go (TS-PH)
Sent: Sunday, March 03, 2002 10:37 AM
To: Federico
Subject: RE: InterScan VirusWall
Dear Federico,
Thank you for the reply. I will have to be honest with you.. We have been encountering the 8.12 problem since the sandwich config is only for the
8.9 to 8.11. The startup for the 8.12 is different and so far, only linux consultants and gurus have been able to let it start correctly. I will personally study the startup scripts for 8.12 and work out a sandwich configuration document that can properly start sendmail 8.12 to be disseminated in trend.
Regarding SSL, this is a current limitation in the v3.6 of VirusWall. v3.6 doesn't have
the 'internal' capability of supporting SSL. However, I will make a feature request for that. Whether it is already be implemented to v3.7, which will be released in a month or two, or will be implemented in the future, I'll let you know.
I hope this reflects a positive action for trend.
Thank you very much.
Sincerely,
Byron James Go
Trend Product Support
Gateway Team
TrendLabs
unfinished: (adj.)
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 did a RMA with Compaq for a customers Presario (dead MoBo).. While i was working with the lady i found out that the extended warranty had expired a month ago, so i asked them is there was a grace period for renewal. She said yes so i asked for renewal. Beep, beep, beep, i get transferred to their warranty dept and coughed up 100 bucks for a new hardware warranty. Then beep beep beep back to the same techie then processed the order and sent a P3 Coppermine 800 to replace the one that croaked (PII 700). I got the package next day fedex with prepaid waybills.. The board worked, the new processor worked. The customer was extremely happy... Pity i didnt get to keep the broke board, they wanted it back..
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
I work at a small ISP (only about 10K customers or so) in Wisconsin. I have the luxury of not having anyone count my call time... I can spend three minutes with a customer, or thirty, and nobody cares.
:-) and that's ok, because I also have the most customer compliments.
I have the highest call length average in the call center ('call center' being a euphomism, since there are only 5 fulltime techs and 10 employees
I truly enjoy my job, I like helping customers, and it shows. I'm never flustered, no matter how upset the customer. I am good with computers in general, good at sales, programming, etc... but my true talent is in Customer Support. I could work in Customer Support (of some sort or another) for my entire life and be satisfied, hehe.
As long as I don't have to do paperwork... I literally PAY one of my coworkers to do my paperwork for me, I hate it so much. If I can't type it, I won't do it.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
1. Leave your number and someone will contact you shortly. (This is for expensive 24/7 coverage)
2. Please use our Web site for automated help. (Humm, Net connection down...)
3. We sold that product to another company, you can contact them at...
4. Sorry you reached the wrong department, and again, and again.
6. We are only open 9-4pm EST, closed on weekends.
7. Your product id doesnt match your record in our datebase..
8. Please upgrade your product support to super duper gold plus, with cherries on top.
9. Our product is not ment to be used that way.
10. Tech on Call (Sorry, im out dinner, it will take me an hour to get to a computer..)
11. You can only use product X with our product Z, but we will gladly port it for the cost of your first born child.
12. Honest, this will do exactly what you want!
And the most common!
13. I cant figure it out, let me get with the developers...
I have found that the on-line tech support, usually in the form of FAQs (which should be called DQTKWOTs ... dumb questions that keep wasting our time) generally don't help the situation at all. Part of the reason for this is that I am quite capable of figuring out everything that can be figured out on my own, with whatever information about the product that is available. Sometimes my diagnostic efforts simply need certain kinds of information they left out of the (ever shrinking, and more going the FAQ way) paper manual, and haven't figured out to put on the web site. I do give tech support the benefit of the doubt due to my own level of knowledge and skill. But I am quite unhappy when I email support and ask a very specific, deeply technical, question, and they fail to pass it on to the engineering team (because its beyond what tech support has information on). I have never gotten a response saying "Sorry, that is company confidential information which we are not allowed to release". Instead I usually get...
I actually got a form letter like that when I was reporting a problem of being unable to access the web site at PayPal (sent to both support and webmaster). That's just dumb.
At least we can still get personal service in the confessional booth. But I worry how long even that will continue.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
And if not having Master/Slave properly set isn't one of the first things that you suspect when a customer has installed a new drive and things go wrong, you probably aren't yet knowledgeable enough to be working tech support.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
What surprises me is that they aren't already using prison labor. Its dirt cheap, the prisoners can speak better English than someone from a foreign country, and what are they going to do if they get fed up with their job, quit?
To contrast, the people in prisons aren't terribly bright and, if anybody found out, there'd be a backlash, as the company would be percieved as handing jobs to convicts that free citizens could perform.
Indians are another matter. There are a lot of educated, english speaking Indians, and paying them engineer's wages (for India) is cheap. You get better support and a lot of loyalty. There is still the problem that you're exporting jobs, but I suppose you could paint people who oppose that as anti-globalist wack-jobs and racists.
Long term, this sort of thing will raise the standard of living in India and southeast asia, lowering the advantage for companies doing this. The problem then becomes how to deal with a world where there are no places to get cheap labor. We may see a return to colonialism in Africa or more aggressive automation in the next half century.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
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?
I couldn't help by reading the comments, but think of this earlier story by Slashdot staff, depicting Cisco delivering the best damn support of the industry ! Way to go Cisco !
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for life.
Keep him stupid about the technology he is using and sooner or later there are going to be far more asking for help then is capable of goving it.
I have earthlink screw up and bill me for multi-connections (which I physically cannot do) and it took way to much to get them to finally figure out it was their fault (after a half dozen or so false solutions they gave me)
But the worse part is that they billed my credit card and when I asked for charges to be reversed that said they credited my account....only it wasn';t the credit card account but the earthlink account.....Which I never agreed to pay them that far in advance, or pay interest on such charges.)
A one point I let customer service send me to tech support who sent me to customer service who sent me to tech support (It was my intention to see how many times this would happen before they caught on.)
Next thing I know I was disconnected.
The total experience cmmunicated to me that earthlink has gone totally brain dead and that lack of any mentality is spreading to ISP earthlink has aquired (Also have a mindspring account that began becomming brain dead in tech support too..)
The problem was in fact on their end and I even watched as more than once their tech people proceeded to scan my system without telling me. Now that's worse than brain dead....that's smelling rotten. For who would want such brain dead help messing with your system?
The problem is not going to get better, for by the inherent nature of creating false constraint in the way of unneeded complexity, it can only get worse.
Anyone having problems dealing with web pages that have CSS added where it really isn't needed?
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.
Actually, prison labor was used by one company during an earlier economic slump back in the 1980's. Phone calls went like:
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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?
Part of the problem is that the products are designed so badly that there are many things they simply don't do right. So too often it simply cannot be fixed at all. No support script, no brilliant but rare techie, can have a hope of getting it fixed.
The reason these things are too often designed bad is because marketing (via CEO) puts pressure on engineering to release products before all the designs are fully implemented and tested. Or the engineering department itself is understaffed (Most CEOs prefer to hire more people into marketing than in engineering, because engineers are more likely to tell it the way it is, while marketing people are better at lying and brown nosing). The result is a crappy product, with poor documentation (for both the customer and the tech support people).
Unfortunately, the business climate requires this sort of practice, especially when it is growing rapidly, as was the case in the late 1990's. You have to release products quickly for no reason other than to prevent the customer from buying from the competition (which is certainly going to have similar problems, do to the same business pressures). The problem here is the business success models favor making the early sale and shipping garbage.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Might as well insert an ad here for Protonic. It's basically volunteer run tech support, and is surprisingly effective. I signed up for it a few weeks ago, and it's quite good fun. The users seem to appreciate it too. Worth a look.
I don't really have the perseverence for programming, I don't have the work ethic for long projects, and I am not self motivated enough to do most jobs that have you working on your own.
But Support... I can program, I can manage servers, I can do networking (I was sole techie at a very small ISP for 6 years), but I would RATHER help Susan from Spokane get her ISDN line up and running again. I would RATHER teach 84 year old James how to view a picture emailed to him by his granddaughter. I just get such a warm fuzzy helping people use their computers.
And I'm lucky to be working at a business that allows me the luxury to take the time and help where I choose.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
IMO, the best way to cut support costs is to increase quality! So many companies release their products too early, filled with bugs. This makes problems more difficult to troubleshoot (adds to the list of possible problems), and obviously makes calls more plentiful.
If you have a high quality, you can hire fewer, but better, support people. They will be less frustrated, and it is easier to keep a small group well trained.
The only athletic sport I ever mastered was backgammon - Douglas William Jerrold
Their tech support, though, is without equal. When they had a bad run of hardware on a new device last year that resulted in many devices cracking, they exchanged hundreds of devices for people at no charge. HandEra has a few people who frequent the various User Group mailing lists and occationally answer questions, or in some cases will even respond to someone's problem with "Yeah, that's a flaw, email [tech support guy's name] and have him exchange it." They're that personal, and they actually do. I've had to send a device in before, and if I got it in the mail by Tuesday I generally had it back before dinner on Friday. That's the travel time for BOTH directions. Amazing.
The reason they can do that, frankly, is because they're so small. Large companies don't have the time/money to train decent tech support people. At a smaller company, they can spare the developers for an hour a day to train tech support people, or even BE the tech support, so you're talking to someone that really knows what they're doing rather than someone who's NEXT job will be "would you like fries with that?"
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I've actually had uniformly good tech support from my cable ISP (Rogers, in Toronto, Canada).
This surprised me too.
The wait time for support can drag on to quite some length, but in all but one case, I was talking to a fully-clued person on the other end, with real ability to prod the network from their end.
The one other case was someone only marginally clued, but who was still polite and as helpful as he could manage.
It might just have been fluke, but whatever it is, I'll take it...
Look around - the market is dominated by specific brands and product series, which don't have any competition. MS Office, Adobe Photoshop etc. have a firm grip on the market and other products are not even granted a closer look. People don't even mind paying more for products of inferior quality, as long as they are "compatible" with what is considered the "standard". So, it's just logical that companies invest more in sales & advertising than quality assurance. :-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Back when my family got its first PC, a 1993-era 486, we bought the standard Microsoft mouse with it. It works for a while, but by spring 1994 it had developed a problem where the pointer would "stick" on screen when moving horizontally, as if it hit the edge of the screen. (It only happed in Win 3.1, though, not in GeoWorks Ensemble. Hmmm...) So, I called Microsoft.
Over the course of the next two months, we bought mouse cleaning kits (didn't fix it), downloaded new drivers (didn't fix it), had MS send us a new mouse (didn't fix it), changed mouse pad (didn't fix it), and otherwise, well, couldn't fix it. Finally, I called MS tech support for the 119th time and explained the situation again. The rep. on the other end replied, and I quote:
MS Tech Support Rep: "Well, I suppose if you don't like it you can just take your business elsewhere."
The next day we went out and bought a Logitech mouse. It worked flawlessly for years, and we have used nothing but Logitech mice since without the problem ever recurring. This is also when I first began to dislike Microsoft, long before the question of business practices or monopolies came into the picture.
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
I have to agree- even if the person is not as knowledgable as you, they generally try pretty hard. Remember, these are not telemarketers. If you are nice to them, they tend to give a crap and will even get off the phone for a minute to go talk with a co-worker who may be an expert in the area. One exception- Microsoft's tech support. I had to spend a good 10 minutes just proving I legally owned Visio 2002 just 30 minutes after I bought it because of an install issue. Credit card reciept, license #, actually CD straight from the box- no shit.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Yes, you should send them the answers. Seeing as how you're using unsupported versions, you're not entitled to complain about not receiving support. However, since you have the answers, giving them to Trend would probably change your versions to supported. And help out others in the process. Oh yeah, and you don't lose anything in the process. What's the problem with that?
After sitting on the phone for over two hours with D-link, talking to three different people (including a supervisor), explaining that I set up wireless routers several times a week for a living, and that this defective part needs to be RMA'd, I was told they'd have a tech call me back. One would think that RMA'ing an obviously defective product would be cheaper for the company than letting me sit on the phone with someone who has a double-digit IQ, only to have a "tech" call me back at a later time, when they'll end up having to RMA it anyway.
In any event, my boss has already decided we're using Linksys from now on, and it's been 3 business days without a call back from this mysterious "tech". Needless to say, I had no problem understanding where this article was coming from.
The one bright spot in all this was the fact that I spent two hours on wednesday doing nothing but chit chatting on the telephone, sitting on my arse while getting paid.
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
When people talking about "Tech Support", most often forget about the "Built-In Tech Support".
So what's that "Built-In Tech Support" all about ?
Intuitive-ness !
That is, something akin to MacIntosh's GUI, or (once upon a time) Compaq's way of packaging their hardware in a box.
If a company takes great care on the "Built-In Tech Support", that is, make the unpacking, and installing process INTUITIVELY, as the case of the (once upon a time) Compaq, or the intuitive GUI of MacIntosh, the need for EXTERIOR Tech Support (that is, the call in, hand-held session Tech Support) will be lessen.
It's often the tech developers' fault that the tech support comes at the high level need. That is because, the developers don't care enough about how their product will do to the users, that the users got confused and / or annoyed, then they (the users) call in and screaming at the poor Tech Support people.
I've participated in many software projects and developed enough softwares on my own to know that if you DO NOT CARE ABOUT HOW YOUR SOFTWARE WILL APPEAL TO THE USERS, you will get TONS AND TONS of ANGRY USERS, demanding to know HOW THE HELL THIS WORK, and WHY THE HELL YOU MAKE YOUR SOFTWARE SO DARN DIFFICULT TO USE / UNDERSTAND ?!
One time there were people (users) demanding why my software runs so SLOW, and after asking the users why they say my software runs "SLOW", I came to realize that the users EXPECT everything to appear on the screen, AT ONCE !
I learned my lesson
I know, it's kinda cop out, but if that means making users happy, I will do it.
In addition, letting users see SOMETHING ON THE SCREEN rather than wait for the ENTIRE RESULT AT ONCE is part of the Built-In Tech Support.
My software is no longer consider "SLOW", because the users get to see "SOMETHING" on sceen. It's little stuff like this that matters.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I work for Stream, an outsourcer who handles other companies tech support. I am on a very high profile contract of which if I said the name of the company you would instantly recognize it. We have certain metrics we must attain, such as an average handle time, etc. Most of our techs on my contract are competant. My handle time is less than half of the contract specified metrics and I take double the amount of calls of almost everyone else. Not because I "punt" (as we call it), but because I know what I'm doing and I fix issues very quickly.
These are my big pet peeves when taking a customers call:
1. Rambling on and on about how you're not technical and not computer literate. If you were you probably wouldn't be calling me.
2. Repeating yourself during your explaination. I'm a very smart individual and I generally get something the first time you tell me. You do not have to say it 4 and 5 times.
3. Spending 10 minutes to explain the issue. I don't care if you had five issues before this. No it is not necessary for you to tell all of them to me. No I do not care what you did to fix the previous issue. Just tell me what it is and shut up, if I need information I will *ask*!
4. Going ahead of me and doing the wrong thing. No, I did *not* want you to restart your computer before we changed the sittings requiring you to restart your computer.
5. Bitching about warranty. The warranty starts when you buy the unit. Just because you sat it on your shelf for a year and a half and just started to use it does not mean your units one year warranty is still good. Just because you have never called before in 4 years does not mean the 90 day free tech support warranty does not apply to you.
6. Incompetance. I realize you may not be the most technical person in the world however I do expect you to know how to use a mouse, how to read a serial number and how to count. "But I told you, I don't have a last 6 digits, there are only 14 digits!", "No I never called to get return authorization, I just put it in a box with a letter and shipped it to you, it's not MY fault you can't track it, how am I supposed to know you have to call in first!"
There are many more. If you want to know why tech support is horrible it's because the job is shitty and the support person - in the most part - does *not* want to be talking to you because all he/she ever hears is bitching, moaning, complaining and whining.
-- iCEBaLM
WHAT? We've lost about $6000, because WE had to self support us (hire someone knowlegeable). The prodcut didn't specify it was not Sendmail 8.12 compatible, not that it wouldn't run on anything other than RedHat, nor that SSL was unplanned. I ve'd have known on advance this wasn't support we would have found a better solution.
In fact, we had a RedHat server and was more trouble than installing it under Slackware.
I contribute to free solutions and am happy to help when something does not work. For a paid, supported product, i expect a profesional answer and a working solution.
Trend had a bunch of customers unable to use the product when they upgraded to sendmail 8.12, and the solution must come from us? NOT SO. Hire someone and solve the customers problem.
unfinished: (adj.)
How much value do you place on knowledge of:
.htaccess and how to upload, and how to design a website, and how to keep the kids away form your porn and why alt.kiddieprn is not on our news server and turn off fuckin zonealarm and no you're being hax0red and we are currently having an outage and I'm sorry your DSL speed sucks why dont you get your fucking cats away from the phone cords, and why do you have 3 hardware firewalls on your 1.5Mbps ADSL sir and please stop spamming on our network no I wont instruct you how to harvest mail addresses and I'm sorry but your domain name has expired no we didn't know because you never listed us a technical contact and desperately trying to remain friendly while helping people that think turning off the monitor is rebooting their PC and I see that you don't have your OS CD and I'm sorry but if you formatted your drive you won't get that email back and 5.1.1 relaying denied and you can't send 10MB files through our mail server and it appears that we are not your ISP please call them not me and let me get this straight you want an additional subnet that is physically separate from your internal LAN that is also logically separate that begins before the demarc point but you don't want to purchase extra IP's and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHA and the reason you're mail is not working is because your domain host is not pointing your MX to your Exchange server on your DSL line and you think the problem is our DNS cache and you're the network admin at your company HAHAHAHAHA and you're an MSCE then why the fcuk are you calling me to config your 2k dialup settings HAHAHAHA and I can see that you haven't even bothered to run a fucking trace to the destination IP because it is clearly a problem that originates with you because your 192.168 address can't even touch the LinkSys gateway you have in your office and again I see that you are the netadmin so you keep telling me and who in the flaming blue christ set up your network well why the fsck are you caling me instead of them oh I see it;s because our support for your unsupported fuckup is free whereas you would have to pay the assholes you hired to setup your lousy NT box $40 and hour minimum to fix your shit and on and on and all the other shit that I have to deal with in any given day?
win95 and 98 and ME and 2K and XP and OS8 and OS 9 and OSX, and linux and FreeBSD and Apache and IIS and CGI and PHP and qmail and sendmail and SSH and FTP and POP and SMTP and DNS and HTTP and TCP and UDP and HTML and ASP and ICMP and mail readers and IE and Netscape and Opera and routing, subnetting, addressing and OSPF and BGP and Cisco and Juniper and CAT5 and Cat3 and domain names and contact handles and domain tranfers and *SQL and Coldfusion and Javascript and right-click and left-click and open a new window m'aam and drivers and Modems and routers and DSL and Wireless and ISDN and PPP and PPPoE and NAT devices and nslookup and traceroute and ping and dig and whois and
Apparently the net value of tech support is zero because it comes free with your internet connection.
There are still a few companies doing good tech support. With all the comments here about crappy support, I figure I ought to weigh in with who is doing a good job.
1) Adaptec. I bought a DTC SmartRAID VI Century controller off eBay. The card is probably a few years old, but I have no idea. I got the sucker into my machine and the card wouldn't finish its POST. I tried all sorts of things, but couldn't get it resolved. So, I called adaptec (which bought out DTC a while back.) After a little while on hold, I got a tech support guy. He was very helpful and walked me through some steps and troubleshooting. (The problem ended up being that on my mobo, if video was set to AGP init first, the BIOS didn't init PCI devices properly. I have dual videocards, so I set my PCI to init first. Wierd I know...) Anyway, they were very helpful. They didn't care that the card was old, or where I got it, etc. They just helped me with my problem. You can bet that future SCSI card purchases will be Adaptec cards for me.
2) Maxtor. Where I work, we get dead hard drives on PCs from time to time. Maxtor has always been the best... I call, explain that I am a tech, and tell them what the problem is. They don't give me the scripted run-around about this or that. They acknowledge that I know plenty about PC systems and have already determined that the drive is bad. They immediately issue an RMA.
As far as software goes though, the only good experience I've had was with Microsoft support. They tend to do a good job, at least in my experience. All the rest I've ever talked to are pretty much a joke.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
And you still have lost that amount if you keep the fix to yourself. There's no loss to you in reporting the fix.
Okay, I'll give you SendMail 8.11 and only working with RedHat as requirements that should've been mentioned. Or was it before SendMail 8.12? It kind of sounds like it was from the email exchanges. In that case, you've only got the RedHat bone to bitch at. Nobody ever states whether a particular feature is unplanned! Now, if they said SSL support due in version 2, or whatever, then you could make a complaint about that.
You got your solution, it just wasn't the one you wanted. The solution was SendMail 8.11 and RedHat.
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.
I believe this, but I also know the entire management paradigm is built around the idea that you don't have to be an expert in XYZ to manage people who do XYZ. You have to be an expert in managing.
I'm trying resolve the two ideas, but I can't -- just being a generic management dweed somehow seems inadequate in a technical environment, yet somehow ultimately someone has to make strategic decisions involving specialists without knowing a zillion specialities.
Or is this just one of the fundamental conflicts of management?
Huh? Marketing people never blow smoke and we all know how much they understand. They understand things like sales, markups, flattery and, "have you tried rebooting your computer? Oh, I see. We don't support that product anymore, the new version only costs $250." But I suppose it's better to put tech support under people you say are dishonest than it is to put them with people who can answer questions when they have to. What the heck, the sales people try to be polite, that's good in tech support when they can't tell you how to fix the problem or tell someone who can.
Tech support needs to be it's own organization with heavy ties to engineering and lots of good advice for marketing. A good tech support group can educate marketing like it does the real users of software. It can also make nice bug reports and helpful suggestions of what customers want from their sofware. Marketing people need to be concerned with the sofwares cost and capability relative to competing software. They might contribute to sofware design by making reports on why people prefer other software and what they like.
This really makes me laugh:
Sales/Marketing was intensely interested in these areas as it helped them design products.
Did your company have an engineering group? What did they do? The other problem with that company you used to work for is that it might have been driven entirely by marketing.
The whole problem with propriatory software is that things other than performance and suitability to a particular purpose can be trumped by marketing concerns. That's how you end up with a ten year old OS that STILL has bugs and always will but will also always lack basic funtionality like grep. If it did not break, no one would ever buy a new one says marketing. Hmmmm, gotta spend a billion dollars on XP cause it sucks? Ha, ha. When you have honest engineers in control the company may stay small but it will produce an honest, useful and continuously improved set of programs. Do a quick Slashdot search on ID Software for how things should work. Just look at MicroShaft to understand what happens when greedy morons with MBA behind their names run things. Or think of how bad things got when that dope from Pepsi took over Apple. 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.
If you don't give tech support a place to go, they will work for someone else. If your training sucks that bad, and it's driven by marketing, and it does not encourage and reward personal growth, it will fail and you will be working somewhere else. Oh wait, you don't work there anymore do you?
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
They made us lose time and money. The told us to weaken and revert to NO SSL and no Sendmail 8.12 (sendmail as root, no antispam, etc).
...". I found it irritating, we lost time and money.
If they make you wait in McDonalds, they offer you some simbolic free coke or whatever (i don't care). In this case, they just stated the email with "I know it may sound inapropiate but
That comes after literaly FIGHTING with the product to get it working.
Also, i do NOT find it usefull if a product that is supposed to enhence your (Windoze) security it forces you to weaken security in you secure box (Linux). It's not funny sending plaintext logins to a box where you actually have shells under those same accounts (thus SSL).
Also, RedHat my ass. If they call it Linux, it should suport Linux, not RedHat. When did this all started I don't know but I don't like it...
As for Sendmail, we what can i say. Go ahead, revert to a weaker version of sendmail because the guys haven't learned how to EVEN CONFIGURE IT at least. Then why am I even talking to this support personel?!?!?!?!
I don't need you to agree with me. I just KNOW a big corporation the size of Trend, that is providing antivirus solutions to other big corporation should know what support is.
Anyway, the post was to ilustrate how bad support can be, even for a company that is supporting high cost, corporate products.
unfinished: (adj.)
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.
All through last year, and the first few months of this year, the President if the company I work for has been raving about how much we are gowing, how much revenue is up, and so forth. Then, I got the smallest raise I have gotten, dollars and percent-wise, since I started with this company, citing slow business, low profits, etc. At the same time, the president is extolling my virtues, and how much they need me to my family, who happen to be friends. Anyone out there that would NOT feel shit on in this situation?
Needless to say, I am polishing the ol' resume.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
As I am sitting here right now serving the masses of idiots, I can fully identify with what you speak about.
I feel this problem will burn itself out as more computer literate people are released into the marketplace and more computer illiterate people die.
Let's hope so.
I think the main problem is that computers are 102371 times more complex than the most advanced car. I mean, think about it; you put the key in, turn it, and then there is one wheel, some pedals, and maybe a lever or two. It's natural and simple, so easy anyone can do it. Yet there are still fucks who CAN'T drive and who kill people and keep insurance rates high. And I would bet this is the same 10% of the population that calls tech support when their caps lock key is on.
Really, I hate to say this, but I'm starting to agree with the Scientologist's notion that we should do away with the bottom 10% of society. Sometimes when I'm working here, I wish I had a button I could press while I'm explaining what I mean by "task bar" that instantly sterilizes my customer.
Ah, one can dream. Shit, the phone.
Cool! Amazing Toys.
I'm not sure I agree about HP providing good support. I had a 4100C also, and when they told me that the chipset in my USB controller card didn't work, I asked for an upgrade. They said they couldn't do that, I should just go out and look for another USB card with an OPTi chipset or some such nonsense. Why should I have to buy a $40 card when it's a problem with HP's scanner?
Their method of obtaining support was difficult. Forget calling. THey have e-mail forums which, depending on the product line, might be frequented by postings from an HP tech support person. If you're ever thinking of buying an HP printer/scanner/computer, read some of these forums first. My aunt has a Pavilion laptop, apparently there were some BIOS upgrades that turned it into an Omnibook accidently which in some cases would turn the laptop into a paperweight.
After a couple of these experiences, my conditioned response is to avoid HP. So maybe that's another area of improvement... consistency. Why does Sivar get an upgrade to a 6100Cse scanner and I have to go change my hardware?
He then said, and I quote:
I worked for a computer company for three years. I cannot say what company (moo), but I can tell you what is was like. We were constantly being told that we were an expense to the company, while sales people were being given luxury vacations and other things for sales volumes. About 20% of a class of new technicians made it past their first year - most burned out by then. Come the fourth quarter if profits were not where they should be, there would be layoffs. To maximize the bottom line, the techs making the most money were usually the ones let go. Then in January, new technicians were hired and trained. That is why tech support was at it's worst right after the big Christmas rush.
In a past life, I worked as a phone tech at Dell. Looking out at the 400+ techs around me, there was definitely a *large* disparity in technical skill, uptake, and general troubleshooting process. For those looking to receive quality support, my main recommendation is to act like a decent human being when you call, instead of an arrogant jerk. It's very rare that a technician actually enjoys working on the phone, and it's even doubly rare for the strong techs that know they could be doing more complicated work. The job is not fun. The pay is miserable. A little bit of politeness will get you a long way, and if you get a tech on the phone that obviously doesn't have a clue, just hang up and call back -- it's best for all involved parties. For the technicians out there still on the phones, carry with yourself the two rules I was once taught: 1) Hey, I still get paid. 2) When I go home, *my* computer works.
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!
cat5 UTP : T568A = green striped, green solid, orange striped, blue solid, blue striped, orange solid, brown striped, brown solid. Min. 1 twist per half inch, max 100 metres end to end between terminal equipment. Rated for 10-1000Mbps ethernet. T568B just switch the orange and green.
Cat3 UTP same thing, gauge is less, only rated for 10Mbps ethernet. Min 1 twist per inch.