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Consumer Reports Discovers Tech Support Sucks
fuzzykitty writes "CNN just posted an article about how commercial software is filled with bugs and customers are used as an army of unpaid testers. It also goes on about the lack of good technical support. Best quote: 'I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market,' LOL"
Well, speaking from experience of working for ATTBI I know that no matter how much a tech knows there is very little that he/she could have done to help you.
Call times aside, you had a strict list of things that you could help with and nothing outside of that.
Powercycle, check connections, restart, release/renew, send to Tier 2. That's how it worked. Anything outside of that was considered in excess of what you were allowed to do and you were dinged on points for it.
ATTBI techs were trained to "get you off the phone", whether that meant to powercycle/reset remotely and get you online, or sent you to tier 2.
It's not a lax hiring process either. They just have an incredibly high turnover. Either people don't come to work, come in late, or just hate their job so VERY much that they leave, they lose people FAST.
I've worked in a customer service department (for MCI, no less) and I can tell you that it's not always the case that customers don't get the help they need -- but that they don't get the help they think they need.
Example: "I want you to credit me for all my charges for the last six months, since you told me which calling plan I was on but I misunderstood! And I want a courtesy extra credit of $50!"
Customers, sometimes, want the moon and the stars and neither customer support nor tech support nor any other department have the authority to fulfill whatever request they have. In the case of tech support, I have no doubt that many of the problems stem from the customer's inability to adequate explain their difficulty to the person on the phone -- and then the situation is escalated later as a resolution was never obatined.
The coolest voice ever.
http://www.rackspace.com/aboutus/awards/cve.php?CM P=BAC-9P115W302611
.. fanatical support.. (insane/fanatical.. same diff)..
actually
But.. the point being, these guys seem to have done it right..
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
customers are used as an army of unpaid testers.
Yah sure, I don't want to generalize here - but people who have never published software for a large number of users probably ought to know that even a large number of beta testers will always oversee a significant number of bugs if the software is appropriately large. That's because with our current development tools, both free and commercial software is always prone to any number of strange bugs, some of them even only detected out in the field under strange circumstances.
Even if you test very thoroughly, there are always bugs (even obvious ones) that slip through, it's just a matter of probability. And we're going to have those problems for some time to come, until software finally moves to higher-level development for which we do have neither the technology nor the technique yet.
But the realization that tech support is bad? OMG, just thinking about tech support makes me cringe! (Allright, maybe that's because I'm from Germany, where tech support is not only *always* grossly incompetent but also employs *only* people with the most insulting manners - I believe Germany is the world's leader in that respect!)
The article says that about 1/3 of people never get the help they need. Quite frankly, I'm surprised that number isn't much, much higher, but that is beside the point. I think were you to ask the tech tech support handlers , the callers can be diveded into about 3 catagories:
1) Total beginners - the ones who need to be told to click on the start button, then on settings, then on control panel, etc.
2) People who have some experience and can navigate through the settings, but don't want to know the inner workings of their machine. They just want it to work.
3) Saavy people, who know what is going on and can describe the problem completely.
I think groups 1 and 3 are the ones that get the most out of tech support, because the problem is usually obvious for the former and easily diagnosable for the latter. The middle group often end up in over-their-heads with non-trivial problems, and that's when tech support tanks.
In January, I had my longest and most successful tech support call. I was setting up an HP wireless print server (and let me tell you, those things are a BITCH). Long story short, the manual omitted one important detail - changes to the server settings DO NOT take effect until after you power the unit down and repower it. After calmly explaining the problem to the HP handler and trying a few things, (and after he talked to someone else there), he came back with the answer to my problem. So I would just like to say - what you get out of tech support is proportional to the amount of effort you put in.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
I have been helping people in many channels for years and in the vast majority of them if you talk like that you are kicked and banned. I have helped people on #debian-kde, #zope, #python and others. That may be an interesting stereotype behavior but in most places it is not tolerated at all. I mostly am on irc.freenode.net
Computer modeling for biotech drug manufacturing is HARD!
...
b oards/g en/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=025104
Allow me to introduce you to EA Games. I'm sure you are familiar with the Sims, but let me tell you about this great RTS game: C&C Generals.
Generals was rushed to market in one year, despite using a entirely new engine. The result? Well, it was released in February, and just 2 weeks ago a patch was released that finally made the game work through firewalls. Congratulations. Unfortunately, the have redefined "direct connect" to mean "lan play" so there is no way to "direct connect" over the internet. Meanwhile, every game ends in a disconnect as disconnecting prevents the loser from getting a loss on his record, there are 115+ pending bugs found by users, a map hack has been around for weeks and EA has never even mentioned doing anything about it, and in fact EA has abandoned their own forums and plans to delete all the posts shortly. Oh, and many of the features promissed do net exist, the ladder pack still does not exist (there is no ladder right now and multiple people can use the same username) and many people who preordered to get a special CD not only did not get the CD but got the game later than people like me who bought the game in a store, for less money, with the special CD (which turned out to be their website on a disc).
In other news, an xpac for Generals will be out in a few weeks.
115 bugs:
http://messagebrd.westwood.ea.com/cgi-bin/
OK having used them but not needing support that often here are the highlights:
Dedicated team this means you get one of a handfull of people every time you call about your server AKA they do it right and assign admins and support staff to machines 1-500 another group to 501-1000 so they dont have to know about everyhting.
There teams are from multiple fields so there is the usual tech drones that get the info and do anything that has been stripted this is probably most of what they deal with if they are like the hosting companies I know well. But there is also the dedicated networking and OS guys in the mix so there is never the well networking is working on that we will get back to you there is somebody you can talk to directly.
They agressivly script things if there is a security update out they will volenteer to install it for you via a script pretty much unless you did any customization they will do the work for you for free. This isn't garenteed but it's automated so it happens.
On the flip side get 2 day past due and they will shut down the server there accounting is realy good about making sure they get paid. They will get things back ASAP as well and give you plenty of notification via email but if you ever lived in a large corp its those runs down to accounting to make that bill get on top of the processing pile.
No sir I dont like it.
Hmmm, sometimes the "reboot your computer" thing is a to start folks off at a similar starting point. A baseline for reference.
I was recently on tech support for my DSL, the tech said the usual reboot/etc... I told him I did. I then asked him to ping my ip and see what happened, nothing. Then try a trace route, to which he found a router or something between here and there not responding. All said and done a couple minutes on the phone. So, not all tech support is crappy. *chuckle* The guy even mentioned that he knew a friend that used linux. It made me smile anyways.
Another tech support I had the other day was my phone somehow was using pulse instead of tone dialing. Well, without any obvious marks on the phone for switching back and the manual with the phone saying there was a switch where there was most definitely not a switch, I decided to call the tech support for the phone. Sure enough, they looked up the model and found that I just had to do some strange ritual of pressing buttons and it switched back to tone. Again, tech support wasn't the usual useless.
I think quite often the problem with tech support tends to be the poeple who call. When you know what you are asking, things go better. When you don't know what you really want as the outcome, it is quite often blind leading the blind.
Norris/Palin 2012
Fact: We deserve leaders who can kick your ass and field dress your carcass.
"shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market"
:). OS X is a serious consideration now too. Funny, but the *thought* of a Windows server turns my stomach. I've got too many geek friends that are damn fine admins -- and see the crap they go through.
:). Whatever. Personally, I have not.
:)
... [didn't know how to finish it? "hole" or "in the face"?]
I thought Microsoft's motto was more like "GET THE SOFTWARE TO MARKET FAST!" written like it was done by programmers on speed. Sshh, they're not _supposed_ to know that Office has a 80% markup [suckers] and forget shortchanging them. We take bills. BIG BILLS. Many of them. Overcharge all you can, while you can [suckers].
I mean, don't get me wrong. Heck, I first rolled out WFW 3.11 [happily mind you] @ the office and was rather finally forced to the 98se migration (it was either that or NT -- 98 had more apps). Windows 2000 "Professional" was some relief, but surely not much and not worth the cost/hassle/time to do so.
Some equipment died and was mysteriously replaced with some Mac's. Productivity is amazing. I always bought custom built and fairly decent/mainstream hardware -- I've seen how long Dell's last and compared costs to performance, etc. My computers tend to _easily_ last 3-6 years. Sometimes 10 (!). Funny, but the cost of a Mac really is about the same for me (and sometimes CHEAPER)...
Of course the core office servers are Netware, BSD, and of course Linux (FU SCO
Funny, but I *STILL* remember having to pay the Microsoft tax years ago for Linux boxen that are, well, still running Linux. My only option to avoid it was to build my own PC's from the ground up for the company (?) There was a day I couldn't go through 99% of the mom & pop "Microsoft Certified" OEM's, HP, Gateway, who? They made it tough for me and my business.
Funny, but I don't feel that way with the Powerbooks, iMac's, PowerMacs, and my original & favorite test/learning box -- my now brother's Cube [yeah, the cabling on the bottom was a dumb ass idea, but it *works*]. Sure, Apple could screw me -- I realize some felt shortchanged by one of the $129 OS updates (there's ANOTHER one coming...
Nor do I feel shafted by Redhat. Autodesk is pushing it a bit though.
As for the bugs... rotflmao -- after administrating for all the various OS' -- well, Windows, by far, been the most problemactic of the group. Buy American like good 'ol Apple. Bill's got the pie
Consumer Reports: "duh"
I worked Road Runner tech support for two years. (cue the groans) Unless you got actually cursed out by a tech, chances are whatever they did, it was on orders. Our support boundaries were defined by what we COULD do, not what we couldn't. And we couldn't confirm an outage without it going through about three levels of high mucky-mucks, which could sometimes take more than an hour. So even if we, the techs, knew an entire city was out, we'd still be forced to drag you, the customer, through half an hour of fruitless troubleshooting. (and by forced, I do mean "or else we're risking termination") This was intentional, BTW. If the local engineers could fix the problem before RR officially announced there WAS a problem, no outage went on the record and their service performance looked better. So if a tech is being unreasonably beaurocratic or telling you he's not allowed to do something, he's almost certainly not making it up. Quit arguing with him, ask for his supervisor (POLITELY!), and hope you can complain your way up the chain of command.
Bush: He's Liberal in all the wrong ways.
I must say, I'm in tech support, at least a good percentage of my job, but it's more Service Provider support, as in an ISP. I can imagine this being terribly different than software tech support (see my other comment in this article), but I can imagine my job being much easier. My secret is to treat the customer very decently, as I would a friend or relative, and make them come around to helping you. The unspoken words "I'm not going to fix this, we are" go a long way. A litte encouragement, explaination and nudge in the right direction is usually all it takes. They're only people, after all.
On the other hand, there's some software I wouldn't want to support 100% all the time...
(leaving that part up to your imagination)
FLR
Yeah right. "Community support", that's where it's at. Have you been on any support channels?
:)
s20451: I'm having trouble getting my ATI card to work under Linux. Can anyone help?
HellDog69: LOLOL u noob RTFM
31337h4x0r: u r gay
I hate to tell you this, but all of IRC is like that. I'm pretty sure most IRC clients these days come with a "u r gay" button. It's right next to the "A/S/L" button.
Anyway, here's a suggestion for you: try a newsgroup. There are some grownups on the newsgroups, and most of the conversations use English and involve complete sentences. That's a big step up from IRC.
A lot of people confuse marketing and advertising. Speaking as someone who has worked in a marketing group...
Marketing is the science of analyzing the market and investigating customer needs and desires, in order to produce requirements that can drive product design. On the output side, marketing also take the product and devise a marketing strategy based on the same analysis.
Advertising is the art of persuading people to buy stuff by describing what it will do, how it looks, how it will make people relate to you, how you should perceive the company, and so on.
So marketing is finding out what people want, and trying to frame what you have on offer in terms of what you've found people want. Whereas advertising is the communications process of telling people about your stuff and trying to get them to buy it.
So the original article probably should have said "Am I going to use this software as it has been advertised?"
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Tech support sucks. You know why?
Most consumers aren't willing to pay for it.
It costly to the companies.
It doesn't sell.
If I started a company with great tech support I would never be able to compete(unless I found a niche market).
Yes, here is my $250 sound card no better than the other guys $75 sound card but it comes with great tech support. Just not worth to most people.
Now once you get into businesses and expensive hardware/software the support gets much better. You should also expect to at least $1000/year and usually much more than that.
A friend of mine had trouble when he first installed XP. He had that problem where the start menu took a lot longer to show than it should. He contacted MS support and they helped him get it to be better, but still not what it should have been. All this was done with no added cost after buying the OS at the MS store for real cheap.
On the other hand, I don't think much software these days is released without knowing that there will be issues. Back in the day you could have a couple machines and test out your software on them to find the problem spots. However, these days there are so many combinations of software that it would cost a fortune to do this.
I'd say open source projects tend to use the method of releasing and letting the users find the problems a lot more than commercial products. Probably because they don't have the resources to have a group of testers go through it for them.
-]Phreak Out[-