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"

Comments

Re:Based on my own experiences

[garcia]

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.

Re:and.. not only..

[joeldg]

http://www.rackspace.com/aboutus/awards/cve.php?CM P=BAC-9P115W302611

actually .. fanatical support.. (insane/fanatical.. same diff)..

But.. the point being, these guys seem to have done it right..

Re:and.. not only..

[silas_moeckel]

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.

What marketing is and isn't

[metamatic]

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?"