Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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.
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
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
Those who can't, teach
As a university professor, I can assure you that there are a large number of folks in academia who could, but prefer the freedom of not having to. Personally, I'm pretty happy about being able to get up at 9am, go for a nice long bike ride, take a shower, wander in to the office, work on a grant proposal for the afternoon, kick around a few ideas with my graduate students, lecture, and then wrap up the day with a glass of wine and a few eager to please co-eds. How can you beat a life like that?.. Did I forget to mention that consulting gigs pay $75 - $150 an hour.. What a life..
Be kind, courteous and respectful of the tech support person with whom you are dealing.
It's a really simple thing but it does a few things...first, it makes the tech support person actually feel like a person and that gives them more incentive to help you or help you find someone who can help you. Second, and this is often overlooked, if you are nice to the person on the other end of the phone it will often make the experience less stressful and less negative for you, as the caller.
I know these are simple things and most everyone would realize them on their own, but I also know it's easy to forget these when dealing with tech support that in general sucks and is difficult to get in touch with.
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!
From the article "We're still looking for the cheapest way to answer the stupidest questions," he said. "If you go out of the script, they have no idea how to react."
This quote exemplifies the real problem that tech support faces. People computting beyond their means. I used to work tech support for an ISP. Our install software was good, Our POPs were fairly stable. Yet we still had a large call volume. The problem was the LUSERs that kept calling, and calling, and calling. Some of these people had call history logs that contained thirty to forty entrys, none of them due to anything we had done. I literally spent 15 minutes one night trying to get a woman to type her password in the same way twice.
Why this is important, These people cost money. Every minute they are on the phone money leaving the company. We had a 800 number and of course I was getting payed. We figured it out one night that if a customer was on the phone with use for 10 minutes that wiped out our profit on them for the month. With aditional months getting wiped out ever 11 minutes. Some of these customers had call logs that indicated 15 to 20 HOURS of time on the phones with us. They had wiped out their profits for the next ten years and the profits of thrity of forty other poeple also.
What tech companies have woken up to is the fact that these people make up, at worst 10% of your customer base, yet they burn up 50 to 60% of the profits a company makes.
In a defensive measure companies are trying to ditch them. Unfotunatly people with a real issue of need are ditched with them also. This is a sad state of affairs, yes, but then the level of support required to maintain this level of helpfullness is destructive to the company.
No other industry in america is expected to provide this level of support. Not car manufactures, VCR manfacturers, nobody. They are expected to replace defective product, which everyone should do, but GM does not have to have a help line to explain to idiot customers that the reason their car stopped after 300 miles is that they did not put any more gas in it.
The level of support we see now is due to the tech companies brutally shedding this dead weight. It's harsh, and unforgiving, but it needs to be done. The tech recovery cannot begin while we struggle with all the dead weight we must carry
As a further note, if you think these comments harsh go work a hell desk position. You will develope an abiding hate for human kind quickly. I am still puzzled myself on how most people managed to have ancestors smart enough to evolve to come down from the trees, let alone learn to walk upright.
Papa Legba come and open the gate
I've worked in various support organizations, and feel compelled to share my recipe for a good support team, and some of the factors that I know first hand can contribute to a bad one.
1. Managers must EITHER know the product being supported, OR at least have the mental capacity to understand what the product is used for and slowly learn the product itself. (The best tech manager I ever had started off as an analyst, and knew the software inside and out. She knew what could and couldn't be done, and kept up as new modules were written. It was a dream to work for her.) If you're hiring a manager of techies and they can't do the job of the people they're managing, they aren't qualified.
2. Hire intelligence not flash. If a guy is a moron but speaks well on the phone, there's no way he's going to be a good analyst. There are classes at community college to teach public speaking and diction to your "nerdy quiet types" (not to mention clubs like Toastmasters), but nobody can make you smarter than you really are. In these situations, I would refer the flashy not-smart guy's resume to the SALES department.
3. Pay a good salary. Not a "competitive" salary, a good salary. Just because Joe Blow is paying $27k in a slow economy doesn't make people happy to be offered $27,500. In six months when the economy is all the way back, the $27k (and $27.5k) people will simply quit for more money elsewhere.
4. Train your people. Yes, you should be hiring people with experience and brains, but that doesn't neccessarily tranlsate to instant productivity on what your company is selling and supporting. (ESPECIALLY if you're talking about specialized proprietary software.) Effective training is the difference between success and failure for software support folks.
5. Tell the truth. Don't layoff 30% of the staff due to "economic hardships", then anounce record-breaking profits the next week. Besides being ethically questionable, it's in poor taste, and kills your team's morale faster than a 44 magnum.
6. Recognize achievements. This seems trivial, but I worked for a guy for about 7 months who didn't say ANYTHING positive to me, ever. Not once. People are VANE. When they feel like they've done something special, they need recognition for it. It's a simple fact of human existence.
Oh, and last but not least:
7. MORALE, your greatest friend or worst enemy. If your team is feeling low, they're going to do shitty work. (Or, rather, perform at just high enough level not to get fired.) Don't let them get low! If you live by rules 1-6, you'll always be maintaining high morale, not "turning around" low morale. (Three guesses which is easier, the first two don't count.)
Who did what now?
There's a simple reason for the lack of good support for companies out there: companies are unwilling to spend the money and give benefits to retain good tech support employees.
:D
Raise your hand anyone out there who's worked some form of tech support/help desk in the past. I have. And just about anyone who has will tell you that 1) It's HARD WORK. even for those who know what they're doing. 2) it's DRAINING work, especially emotionally. Hours upon hours of abuse from some moron who put in his own phone number instead of the phone number he's supposed to dial, and being told you HAVE to fix problem X with program Y because its YOUR FAULT that it broke wears on a person.
The stress leads to burnout. the burnout leads to quitting. The quitting leads to massive overturn, which leads to a scramble for new employees, who are rushed out with improper training, etc etc. It's a vicious cycle.
Here's another reason:
Any call centre type environment works on a lowest common denominator level. The tech support workers who DO know what they're doing are lumped in with joe blow who wouldn't know a modem from his ass; extremely disgruntled knowledgeable employees desert in droves for a job that will actually get them some respect ASAP. The low pay and high stress means that for the most part, only people desperate to hold down jobs apply. Call centres are desperate nowadays and take just about anyone who can fill out an application.
No, i'm not saying that every tech support agent is like that. there are SOME who enjoy this work, and all the more power to them. But it's not easy, and it's not going to get any better. Career advancement potential is limited and so are the pay and benefits.
I think I've ranted enough for now so i'll just leave off there and let someone else pick it up later
Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo - H. G. Wells
8) Customers have unreasonable expectations about what tech support can and cannot do for them. Quite a few people call tech support when they should be paying Professional Services or the company consulting department a VERY large amount of money. 9) Many 'higher ups' assume that tech support don't know how to do their jobs; at a lot of companies, one email to a VP or so can get you thousands of dollars of consulting and product customization, after the poor tech support grunt explains that no, they can't write code for the customer. Examples of certain things, maybe, but no, not entire modules. 10) Most tech support departments aren't run as teams; Mary might know that anybody using OS A with software version B is going to get problem X, which is resolved by doing action Y, but if Mary cannot communicate this to the other techs, what's the point? 11) The customer is NOT always right. Managers need to back their techs up. I've personally spent DAYS repeating 'you're missing a semi-colon in your config file' to a given customer, only to have them escalated all the way up to the president, who sends a LEAD DEVELOPER to the site, who calls three minutes after going on-site, and says 'They had a semi-colon missing in their config file.' 12) Rein in your sales people. I've suggested time and time again that every call a tech support grunt takes, where the customer is irate because a product doesn't do X, but were LIED TO by the sales person involved, should result in the sales commission being taken away from the sales person, and given back to the client. 13) QA should be run side by side with tech support. QA often has REAMS of data on known issues, that tech support people wind up hearing about from customers, and spending weeks tracking down. 14) QA should be held accountable for BASIC FLAWS that are let through testing. And yes, developers should be held accountable for BASIC FLAWS that are in code that has been marked 'complete' and issued to QA, unless QA routinely handles non-complete code. Nothing sucks more than the deluge of calls that you get for the first month after a new release, as people call up and start explaining that half of the New Features! bullet points are simply wrong.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
I have worked tech support, at one level or another, for my entire career. By that I mean everything from on site, or in shop repair of electroincs in the military and civilian life, through outsourced customer help desk for a still major PC vendor, through building suppportable updates to corporate systems, through global reach network support for a major bank.
My experience is not comprehensive, but I do have a few insights.
Don't make your first line customer support center into a profit center. I know, it costs money to run a fl customer support center, especially when you consider the hardware involved, but also payroll. Consider that a help desk generally hires temporary employees at $10-15/hr, (I suspect that they are paying the temp companies $20-30 per hour for these people) and for a large PC vendor, there are between 100 and 200 people taking calls 24 hours a day. It does add up quickly. On the other hand I have seen fl techs bill people for 10 different incidents in a single 20 min call, each incident costing $35 or more.
Scripts (when written correctly) should help a fl either help you solve the problem, or get you to the right people. Howerver these scripts are written by people, who generally get their information by talking to the engineer of whatever project installed the piece that is to be supported. As a result, they are specific to that component, and rarely take into considerations interactions with other system components or even other software that a user may be working with. A good tech will recognize this, and be flexible enough to come up with his or her own set of questions to add to those in the scripts. However it is a rare tech support organization that will set up tools that such a tech support person can use in this way. On top of that if the tech is good, he or she is often promoted out of the tech pool to manage the lesser techs, or occasionally teach them. What happens when you pull the cream of the crop out of the interface to your customers? Your customers get the dregs as their first contact.
Let your tech support become name recognized by your customers. Note that is not a "force" that is a 'Let'. Customers generally feel better when they "know" who will be at the other end of the line. As a customer, I am far more forgiving of my tech support person not knowing the answere to a problem I have if I can identify with them. If you have a policy that allows your tech support people to be asked for by name, or who are assigned to your customer's ticket while they are on shift, customers will not feel like they are getting the run around.
I have yet to see a ticketing system that has built in data mining tools that will help a tech support person find similar problems and what their solutions were. In almost every case I have ever seen, a ticketing system has been a management tool used to see who is taking the most calls, and who is closing their tickets in the least amount of time. If you mean for the tool to be useful to the tech, on an other than individual ticket by ticket basis, that tool has got to have some built in help for the tech.
Lastly follow through on support. Just because the customer claims that the problem appears to be solved, does not mean that it has been resolved. Schedule some time, or some people to follow up on a high percentage of tickets, and find out if the customer is satisfied. You don't have to ask page of questions on how the problem was handled. Start with the question, "Is the problem you encountered solved to your satisfaction?". Listen to the response. If the response is anything less than a hearty and happy "Yes." then you should start asking how the process can be improved, and so on.
One problem when it comes to problem tickets, and escalations, is that no-one in a tech support queue types as fast as the customer speaks. If you recite off an error message, or a dozen field headers that are coming back with garbage, your tech support person will probably not be able to include them in the ticket. As a result, if the ticket is escalated to second level support, they probably will not have the data. If it is important to you that the data get into the ticket, take your time and make sure that the fl tech gets the informaiton completely in the ticket.
This should be the tech support mantra I think:
"I understand that for you, this problem is very important. It is preventing you from doing your job right now, and very well may be preventing your company from earning the revenue that is paying me. I also understand that not everyone that you have spoken with in the past has held this view. I also understand that the fact that you were on hold for one or more hours has made you feel that we do not take your problem seriously. I want you to know that the perceptions you have had in the past are not the perceptions I would like you to have going forward."
Then again, I could be wrong.
-Rusty
You never know...
Let's see what you've just barfed out shall we?
Wrong! Every single company I know of who has outsourced support has dropped support levels to the lowest humanly possible. What happens if my problem is not on the flow chart? What happens if god forbid it's unusual and actually needs to be fixed too? What happens if I need to talk to a developer or an engineer? where are those in the outsource company?
When support gets outsourced the customer looses bigtime. When they call all they get is scripts read at them. How useless is that? Do a search on google and try to find the story of ex-employees who worked as these outsourced workers. Read them. It's so pathetic it's hillarious. Until you're forced to talk to someone like them.
On the other hand, I know which companies don't outsource because when I call, they know about the product very well, they don't read scripts at me and they can always just walk over to a developer and ask a question.
No affiliation... My arse! Their website doesn't even work yet. This falls in the shameless plug for obscure and evil company dept.
In other words... Now we're gonna get scripts read at us by a person who we can hardly understand and is getting paid much less than minimum wage here; doing a job they can't do well because they're not part of the group who designed our product. Nice.
Oh! How cheery you are. How jovial this issue is.
I hope the parent get's modded down. It's crap and sleezy. If it comes to that, I hope we have no person-person support at all, fuck it I can read scripts myself, I don't need to have them read at me.
Liberty.
Grin... Oops, I guess the adolescent, or dirty old man, in me got loose for a second there..
The truth is, you're generally correct.. There are a lot of academics who've never bothered to try. They spend their days in the library or their offices trying to prove that when the stars align just right, there might be a chance that some phenomena will occur. On the other hand, there are a lot of professors that I've had the pleasure of working with who were very productive in industrial positions and returned to the academic world simple to improve the quality of life for their families.
A good friend of mine was an up-and-comer at Boeing and decided that the money wasn't worth it if he missed watching his two daughters grow up.. Another colleague has recently decided to return to academia. He has headed successful projects for the government and is currently running a successful business but feels that it's time to help prepare the next round of engineers.
Those are just two examples.. My choice was a little different. I looked around and interviewed a little as I finished up my degree, but decided that I would be a lot happier in an environment that is driven by the pursuit of crazy ideas.. Yes, the results of those pursuits have to be published, and you'll never achieve tenure without obtaining a sizable chunk of external funding, but the university doesn't really care what you study as long as you meet the above requirements.. That freedom allows me to study topics ranging from neuro-physiology to turbulent fluid dynamics..
I still may not meet your definition of someone who tries, but whoop-dee-doo.. To each their own, right?