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ISP's Slapping Techs For Lending A Hand
Mike writes "Broadband Reports is running a story about how several large ISP's have reprimanded, even fired techs who offer support in BBR's forums in their free time. BellSouth is the latest ISP to forbid any official tech support representation. Instead of sculpting PR guidelines for techs to follow, they're
scaring them into submission."
In related news, Linus Torvalds, head honcho of the Linux kernel hackers, recently fired a half-dozen developers for going above and beyond normal code writing. Linus found them in multiple IRC channels offering computing support in their free time, which was a clear violation of the Linux team's No Assistance or Help (NAH) policy that was adopted in the mid-1990s.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I worked for a dial up ISP, I did techsupport, I would aways go way out for the customer and I would help fix all the problems they were having with out service. ALot of times I got offers to go to their house and fix their computer, but I always told them I couldnt. But I also Build and fixed computers on the side and I recommended this ISP to alot of people. So one time on the phone I was talking to someone I build a computer for and I guess the manager heard me talking about the computer I built for them over the phone, and word got to the owner and I was fired. They also got mad at me for telling people they needed a new HARDWARE based modem. I had alot of calls that people complained about disconnections and slow connection rates. SO I would recommened them to buy a USR hardware based modem, for some reason the ISP I worked for didnt like this so I would always get in trouble. Im glad I dont work for that company any more, they were more into making a profit then helping their customers.
Oh well..
keanmarine.com
The ISPs don't want the potential liability of having their employees giving out anything other than the "company line," whether in an official capacity or not. I can't really say as I blame them. What if ISPTechA is posting on BBR and the advice he gives leads someone to wreck their hard drive? What if ISPTechB makes an offhanded comment about how ISPTechA sucks goat nards?
.sigs about how "the opinions of this post are that of the author and not the employer." Some companies handle it that way, and some are a bit more draconian by forbidding non-official contact across the board. But it all boils down to liability.
You've probably seen plenty of usenet posts with long
I have had SBC DSL since they offered it. I was an early adopter and paid for it heavily with downtime and mysterious router issues. Add to that I actually signed up for static IP addresses and bandwidth guarantees and I feel into the black hole when it came to support.
The techs working undercover on Broadband Reports helped me out and since then, two years, I haven't had a single issue.
This raises the interesting prospect of if they weren't available I would have cancelled and taken my business elsewhere. Where I am located there are multiple companies and solutions available, so I am lucky.
99.9% of the techs on the boards do it for their own gratification. I call it the Samaritan Effect. It's what online support used to be back in the days of the BBS and message networks. Personal handholding on issues that others could learn from.
Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.
The techs enjoy it because they find, gasp, satisfaction that they are making a difference in their jobs. Most of those folks are not customer facing getting their orders from ticket systems, etc. It provides them a chance to make a difference.
Yes, there are negative implications on doing this, but for the most part it works. Providers should read the Cluetrain Manifesto for more exposure to what they should be doing.
You know, when when I first read some of the semi-near future cyberpunk stuff (like SnowCrash and Gibson's "bridge trilogy"), I thought the way the future was being portrayed was simply taking things to an absurd level with excessive litigation and examples of corporate bad-citizenship. Now everywhere I turn it seems like the predictions are spot on and the bleak realities that we read as fiction are slowly becoming truth. As much as I like SciFi that paints the future as full of Shiney Happy People, I think the reality is that we'll all end up living on a bridge or in subway tunnels someday...
"Where quality is like a dead stinking rat - you just can't miss it."
Must have been a slow news day. I love it when people report on an ongoing trend as if it is "New" all of a sudden. What is their next news flash? That moisture, when it falls from the sky in the form of rain, tends to get things wet?
I worked for a dial-up ISP for several years. In 1999 they closed our forums so that the techs could not answer questions that way. The only way after that to get tech support was to call us or to send an E-mail. No public forums allowed. At the time it was justified by saying that we were only following an industry trend.
What this article should have pointed out is that the shutting of access to a help forum has more to do with the disinegration of the item being supported. You only restrict access if their is a problem. This is a bigger indicator that the broadband networks are overloaded and are starting to self destruct more than it is a new indicator of customer service. Look for some major system failures in the next year (like anyone with any industry knowledge didn't already know that).
Papa Legba come and open the gate
Is the key and operative term used in the article. It makes perfect sense for these companies to want to have some control over what will get said by THEIR employees and hence as THEIR _Official_ representatives. There are lots of techs out there who are quick to say/write/post things that are offensive/incorrect - policy guidelines notwithstanding, and there's no good way for these companies to retract/correct them. How many times have _you_ dealt with a surly/incompetent/incoherent tech that reflects very poorly on their company ? Could you imagine the company having a policy that, say, only fluent English speakers are allowed to post, without that company being open to lawsuits ?
I don't blame these companies a bit for wanting to be able to control what their company says and how their company is portrayed. The article says nothing about the companies prohibiting the techs from posting in an unofficial capacity.
I can sort of understand this. From my skimming of the article, it looks like the employees were offering their time in an official capacity while off hours. This is somewhat of a no-no, because then the employees are presenting themselves as representatives of their employer, during a time which they are not at work. This could potentially cause all sorts of problems for the company, since the employees won't be working within the offical support model framework that the company uses. (eg: Solution for X is Y, etc.)
This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.
I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.
Techs who provide support in a non-authorised manner and therefore unsupervised manor should be prohibited from doing this.
I personally have seen incorrect information posted on BBSs. Yet if the poster IDs him/herself as an employee of company X and that incorrect information causes damage the company could be liable. The article says "So instead of spending twenty minutes drafting clear corporate policy on public forum relations protocol, some companies clamp down on such activities; sometimes brutally." No they took there 20 minutes and elimiated a potential legal loophole. Running a proper BBS forum would take a lot of resources and I can understand why a corportaion would want to clamp down on this.
This isn't the evil empire. This is CYOA. And considering the amount of stupid and incorrect information that can be found out there I don't blame them on bit!
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Recently, I had a very interesting conversation on the phone with the Verizon Residential DSL support people. So I call up; I realize (due to factors of age and gender) I don't "sound like a geek" but I am. After a few minutes the tech realized he was conversing with a fellow techie, and we worked together to solve my problem (him using Verizon's proprietary tools and me using RoaringPenguin's pppoe and standard Linux TCP/IP tools). He was quite nice and we even had an ongoing side-discussion about running Linux on the PowerPC architecture while we worked to solve the problem.
Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...
It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.
They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
Kindness is one thing, good business practice is another.
For example: a licensed tech provides off-time support in a relatively unofficial capacity, which causes the user to do something that royally screws his connection/hardware/software/downloaded pr0n/etc. User calls official tech support and demands retribution, seeing as how one of the company's techs told user to do something that "broke his stuff."
I've been in this situation before, and it ain't pretty for anyone involved, no matter how good the tech's intentions were.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for kindness and helping others. But I also understand the corporate position of "no unofficial tech support by official tech supporters."
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.
Sprint PCS squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.
When she left the newsgroup, here is what she said.
It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.
Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.
And that won't change any time soon.
Remove the caps and hold to a mirror.
And apparently, the above post is what happens when our communities save money on things like "teachers" and "textbooks."
Moderation totals that amuse me for one of my posts: Flamebait=1, Insightful=2, Funny=2, Overrated=1, Underrated=1
Besides the legal liability and misrepresentation that a "rogue tech" places on his employer, he also screws the tech support process for the user the next time he/she decides to call in for real help.
Succesful helpdesks, specifically in the level 1 & 2 enivronments, rely on scripts. These scripts are written so that an escalated ticket (one that level 1 cannot handle) arrives at the next level of tech support with that user environment "clean" - that is, level 2 assumes that level 1 has already made sure the user's environment is in a kind of "virgin" state.
When a higher level tech jumps in on a problem from level 1 (such as in these forums) they almost always prolong the length of the customer's next call to tech support because of user assumptions and level 1 ignorance of the support history. While some problems may be solved completely within the context of a forum, the majority of users will at some time in the future call tech support again. This raises costs and decreases the availability of support for the rest of the userbase.
BTW I talk with Optimum Online techs on the BBR forums and Yahoogroups all the time. They are careful not to engage in tech support out in the open, and speak only in an unofficial context. They're extremely helpful and hundreds of users appreciate their unofficial support everyday. If you want a model of how to keep your more advanced users happy while limiting liability and misrepresentation - check out the impromptu support model they've created there.
With war and hatred so predominant these days, it's hard to believe that during the Holiday season, people are actually discouraging kindness.
Okay, let's take a step back for a minute. First of all, this is DSL, not saving the whales. The terrorists haven't won just because these guys can't post.
The truth is, running a company is hard. Wouldn't you rather have your job for the "Holiday season" that some free webboard tech support?
Part of the problem here is that it can be dangerous to have your employees posting as a representative of your company without any standard of what can or cannot be communicated safely.
It appears from this article that that some companies are setting up a policy that forbids this sort action by their employees. In a large company, this can be necessary. How well do the managers know their employees? Are they just spouting off about how much they hate their employers? Are managers going to scour the web for these people's posts?
It's true, it would be nice if this were allowed to continue, but I certainly understand why for liability's sake most companies don't want to be involved. This certainly doesn't warrant front page slashdot news. I know we all hate corporations, but often times companies get big because their the best at what they do, or at least good at making money while doing it.
Some day you kids will go off to college, and then, you might even have to get a job at a corporation, too.
Jesus, people. This isn't microsoft sacrificing babies in the parking lot every morning.
Employees volunteering time falls under a very gray(well actually not that gray) area of the Fair Flabor Standards Act(FLSA). The general consensus is that empolyees cannot volunteer time to their employer: almost always this falls under the definition of Hours Worked. The ISP is most likely worried that some point down the road their Tech (who was originally doing this of their own free will) will demand compensation ( and the requisite overtime) for their "voluneered" hours.
You know if I was the employer, I would do the same thing.
The Department of Labor Elaws has some easy to understand interpretations of various FLSA previsions.
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
Although I despise the current ISP mentality (let the customers burn to hell -- it's worse than getting sued), I partially understand their position.
The main problem is that some people just do not have the correct "attitude" and a disgruntled employee (rightfully or not) might cause severe damage to the "corporate" image.
OK, OK. You must be thinking now: "But not helping also damages their reputation!". And I couldn't agree more. I think they should "pre-screen" the employees that can do that, or employ some similar process.
I speak from past experience. In a previous job, we were in charge of fixing a broken Oracle Database (poor backup schemes and a disk failure -- you get the idea). The development team sent a programmer to "help us out". The management team on the branch office where the problem happened was already demanding answers (who? why? How can we avoid it?). We were kindly explaining everything to calm them down (a new backup policy, redundant hardware and all). Everything was going in the right direction.
Later on that day, in the middle of a big meeting to discuss the problem (with the aforementioned managers), Mr. Programmer does some quick queries to an yet to be fully restored database and says "Well, I say that this database is completely messed up -- I don't trust this data anymore...".
Needless to say we had to counter his false and invalid arguments with some facts. Took us some good hours and a lot of paperwork.
That is the danger of having someone without any tact representing the company or a group in a "delicate" situation.
--no idea of europe or asia, etc, but in the US our government and our corporations are infested with peter principle managers. People who have gotten promoted to that position where they can't get promoted any longer, ie, they suck at that level but were probably great one level below. The deal is they don't get put back at the level of their competence.
funny story kinda. Once I was made city manager of this company. I hated it. I was great and quite happy at my previous position, acting as a project strawboss/hands on worker. Loved it. Was offered the management position, significant more money at salary so I tried it. It was terrible. So many times it was quicker for me-on the clients nickle-to just "do" a problem rather than try to explain to someone how to do it. I thought this was good customer service, granted, it dropped our billable hours slightly and occassionally, but the industry we were in was/is extremely competitive and it helps to retain established customers and keep them happy. The customers loved it, my bosses hated it, sometimes I would cost the company x amount small bucks on a particular job, but to me at least the brownie points seemed like a decent tradeoff. We lost zero customers under my watch and I got all good reviews and feedback. The bosses hated it ordered me to "manage" only which was a useless expenditure on a lot of smaller jobs, it meant standing around doing nothing a lot of the time. I hated it, prefer working to slacking. Anyway, after a couple of months I went in and demanded my old job back, and they did it for me but were amazed, I mean dumbfounded that anyone wouldn't just keep the superior paid position, it was such an alien concept to the "money is god" types. They had never even seen anyone do that. In short I demanded to not be a peter principle victim, or to participate in it.
Oh ya, the company basically collapsed a coupla years later, none of the bosses got along with each other, they kept losing customers, etc. I was right, they were wrong, but they were the owners. Ho hum I found other work same field easily.
How this applies to bell south and these other ISP's is-this is *probably* what's happening. Internal politics and back stabbing and greed lead to too many rank foul bosses in levels of decision making where they have no ability, no skill and cause problems. I mean, for real, harassing employees for trying to help customers on their own time and for free? ISP's don't charge for tech support as far as I know, seems to me these employees were saving the company money, and also creating more satisfied customers. And this is wrong?
There were many reasons the grand telephone monopoly was broken, customer complaints were right up there, and the baby bells are apparently infected with the same retarded mindset and lack of intelligence. Too many bosses in positions of incompetence.
Hope the fired techs start their own businesses (community WISPSs perhaps?), bell south doesn't deserve quality employees. Let them hire and keep on the clock drones and robots, lead by drones and robots, then let them go broke and collapse and be sold off for pennies on the dollar, let someone else give it a try. the techs actually got a good headsup of who they work for, now they can start looking for better quality humans to work for.
I work in support for a large internet equipment manufacturer, and here is my take:
When on the job, I can represent myself as a technical support representative from my company, and when I am not on the job I cannot make that claim. Its that simple.
I can still offer support, assistance and advice, but there is no way I'd support anything outside of my work structure and still represent myself as doing official work (i.e. claiming I'm a support rep).
I don't do this for my company's sake, I do it for mine -- its called CYA... coverying your ass.
Sorry if I get modded down, but people should at least hear this, even if they don't agree.
In addition to the liability issues that would be redundant to bring up, there is the issue of identification.
You don't see people who work for Schwab or Fidelity offer "good sumeritan" advice online for financial services. These guys should know better even if they haven't signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Do you think your doctor's insurer for malpractice would like it if a doctor began diagnosing people outside the scope of his work environment?
These types of people can do what they do anonymously quite easily over the net, but yet they choose to identify themselves as currently associated. A pseudonym or anonymous claim of credibility as "formerly employed" or "technical consultant to" would be sufficient identification to those who would be consumers of his assistance.
I've seen it both ways, though. When I did tech support for an OEM (outsourced, though), one guy I know got led out of the building and fired immediately for posting opinions and disclosures on legitimate problems with certain system configurations and the unlawful actions the OEM was doing to stall and prevent customer returns on the defective product until the engineers came up with the solution. This info (even though unlawful) was considered to be proprietary and a breach of trade secrets according to the outsourced vendor. He got fired without due process and was unable to fight back because he was under the age of 18 at that time.
My bet is that there is more behind the scenes going on than this story reports and that because reporters are lazy, they got the sensational side of this in their back pocket and just let 'er rip.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Again a possilbe gray area. Generally a salaried employee is still eligible for overtime unless they fit the "White Collar Exemption"(Here are more common overtime exemptions).
7 .htm:
The two best fits in the whitecollar exemption are(from http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs1
"Administrative Exemption
Applicable to employees who perform office or non-manual work which is directly related to the management policies or general business operations of their employer or their employer's customers, or perform such functions in the administration of an educational establishment; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment in their work; who either assist a proprietor or executive, perform specialized or technical work, or execute special assignments; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption; and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above (40% in retail and service establishments).
Professional Exemption
Applicable to employees who perform work requiring advanced knowledge and education, work in an artistic field which is original and creative, work as a teacher, or work as a computer system analyst, programmer, software engineer, or similarly skilled worker in the computer software field; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment; who perform work which is intellectual and varied in character, the accomplishment of which cannot be standardized as to time; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption (except doctors, lawyers, teachers and certain computer occupations); and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above."
Now IANAL, but there is a great deal of room for interpretation in there. A front-line (or even higher up) tech support person most likely doesn't meet the adminsitrative exemption (beacuse they won't be seetting management policy) and possibly the professional exemption
The FLSA is a big complex mess designed to stop employers from screwing employees. Sometimes in the process they limit worker's choices too. People run into this same issue in other areas too. Volunteer firefights in many counties have to resign from their volunteering position if they take a within the Fire/Rescue department of that county (even if there is no overlap between jobs). The problem is that in general many "volunteered" hours to companies aren't voluntary.
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
I used to work for ClientLogic, who along with Compaq and TAG (The Answer Group), handled all of the tech support for Bellsouth FastAccess (DSL). The DNS entry for BBR/DSL Reports had been removed so that we couldn't get to their site (unless we used the IP address...). We were told we weren't allowed to post anything related to Bellsouth FastAccess on BBR at all.
Of course we were also told to lie to our customers and tell them that we worked for BellSouth. We were told not to schedule installer/techs earlier than 3-4 days unless the customer was angry, then we could send one out in 24 hrs. We also had the usual stuff like not recommending any brands over others.
Promotions were dependent not on whether we went above and beyond, but if we could get the customer off the phone in a certain amount of time. Our target was 16 minutes total handle time including our opening spiel and verification (1-2 minutes) and ACW (after call work, 1 min) of entering notes about the call. If you averaged about 16 minutes you were meeting the requirement, but you should be about 12 minutes to be "good". Anyone remember OfficeSpace's "flair"?
Half the tech support calls I took were people complaining because the previous agent told them to download new drivers from the website using dialup since they were calling because their DSL was out.
We were supposed to be there to help people, but our "metrics" were about how fast we handled the call and whether we mentioned the "Connection Manager" which didn't actually manage your connection, it was basically spyware and slowly evolved into being able to backup/restore your internet settings... but not drivers etc where we really needed it, and it didn't make a connection to FastAccess like all the customers thought.