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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.
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.
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.
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