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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"
Amazing how long they took to figure it out...
What? I'm sorry, what's your customer ID again?
No, I'm sorry, I do not find your Cisco Router support anywhere on our systems. Have a good evening! <click>.
I'll show you tech support that sucks... jerks!
---
Companies spend millions on advertising, but pay minimum wage to those who will be the first point of contact with the customer. Ain't economics great?
But that report says it is getting worse every day.
This does not surprise me at all..
I have heard more clients talk of choosing a product based entirely on the service offered.
look at the Rackspace "insane support" model, they are doing well because of that.
anime+manga together at last.. in real time.
Several have delayed their products in order to produce a higher quality game.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
And how is this a suprise? Based on my many many calls to ATT broadband, Microsoft, etc I know many tech support reps a) have their head up their ass or b) the company itself has it's head up it ass. Also I used to work for MSN tech support and I think often times it's a combination of both. Lack of care for the customer and a lax hiring process that entails you can talk and will show upto work get you the job.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
it's news because a major consumer agency has taken the time to quantify how bad it is, something corporate execs can look at.
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
So let me get this straight, crappy software is sold by company A, users get screwed, and tech support ends up getting the blame??
maybe I should read the article, are they talking about a certian multinational company owned by a zillionare that tries to monopolize everything?
Linux: Helping nerds look smarter since the late 90s.
If you're searching for a company that does customer support RIGHT, look into National Instruments. They realize that encouraging customer success is paramount to a successful business.
...have been there and done that. Most people hired on helpdesks are hastily trained and then given a headset to help the incoming calls. Most times they have a dedicated pc with extensive database of cause/effect/solutions to work the customer through, but its not always that way. Ive worked in, and with a lot of helpdesks in the past 10 years and some are good and some are not so good...another problem is the good people dont stay with the helpdesk for more than a few years max. They move onto manager positions, supervisory non-helpdesk-call positions and are backfilled with new people. Having patience and common sense goes a long way since most people calling are not in a good mood since their Dell Pc is not booting up, they cant get a scsi cdrom to work or they cannot figure out why they cant remote dial in somewhere. Long hours, average pay, high stress - even in this market, its not that appealing. Ive dealt with some very good tech support people and some less than desireable helpdesk people, so its hit or miss in most cases.
Funny; I never had a problem with tech support, even though I'm calling various companies at least once per week. My secret - I'm friendly and humble. People on the other side of the line are just that, people. They appreciate if you don't yell at them, but joke with them instead. They are also not the brightest employees of the said company. They follow a certain routine, and don't appreciate if you try to interrupt them. So what, if I know how to change my network settings? It's much easier to follow their advice step by step ("Click on start." "Okay, now click on Settings.") than to interrupt them and tell them that you are already ten steps ahead. It yields real results. Back in the days when UUNet was still independent, I managed to keep a tech support person on-line from 4PM to 2AM, making her miss her wedding aniversary, just because I was friendly all the time (naturally, she wasn't one of the minimum-wage workers, but a tech support manager). Just yesterday, I spent 15 minutes on the phone with MCI, only to get a follow-up call ten minutes later. A coworker who tends to yell at them has never gotten a follow-up call. Same with Bloomberg tech support, Dell, HP, Earthlink and Verizon, all of whom I called in the past month.
tech support will always be a source of disappointment for anyone who seeks it
it's psychology, not technology
if you are dweeb, like me and most of us here, you pretty much figure it out on your own, and don't even go to tech support, unless you are in some fortune 500 company that mandates it's usage for ridiculous policy reasons and doesn't let you tinker, which is what is in line with most of our instincts to figure out problems with software
for the technically uninclined, you go to tech support expecting them to answer question like "what is the purpose of my life?"
i'm not joking
the psychology of someone who buys technology that is beyond their understanding, and then expects some poor guy on the other end of a phone conversation to download technological insight into their cranium via a 15 minute phone call is what we are talking about
you can't meet those expectations
and thus, tech support will always be a source of disappointment, since it is the source of solace for people who don't understand that if you want answers to technical questions, you need to seek them out yourself, in order to develop your own technological proficiency
unfortunately true for the technophobes
the problem is psychology, not technology, and the problem will always exist as long as there are people who wade into the deep end of the pool not knowing how to swim and expecting to be taught how to swim in the short amout of time before they drown, rather than learn how to swim first, and to have enough technological common sense to recognize the deep end of the pool and that they are in over their head in the first place
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Pay reasonable prices and try to buy only things that are made in the USA. Remember that you're going to get what you pay for.
So does that include these guys?
Because companies either hire people who don't know what they're doing for peanuts or techies who do know what they're doing who hate their job and are again paid peanuts. On the customer end, the customer often doesn't know how to ask good questions even when the tech support guy knows how to listen to good questions. I once had a tech support guy for compuserve in '95 or '96 who didn't know what a directory was. He only knew them as "folders".
s20451: I'm having trouble getting my ATI card to work under Linux. Can anyone help?
See, thats part of your problem right there.
- ATI card: which one?
- Linux: any particular distro?
- Trouble: Is the card out of its cardboard box yet?
You do have a point but even the most helpful 'guru' gets sick and tired of "its broken, please fix" pleas!
There's no support, but there is "Send Feedback" and "Report Bugs" in the application menus from Apple's apps, and Apple pays attention to the feedback.
I don't want to defend this practice - I really don't - but we have to accept that companies are out to make money. And if people (on average) aren't willing to pay more to get better customer service, it won't exist. People say they want better service, but typically their wallets vote otherwise. And I readily admit I fall into this category, although that's only because I have learned to have absolutely no expectation of service at all.
But bottom line, it's exactly like you said: Ain't economics great?. Sucks that such an approach works, but it does. Also blame the idiots that provide free help/tech support on company support forums. You're just enabling them, people.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
Welcome to the real world. Hate to break it to you, but this is how software is made. Many companies can't afford to test software for lengthy periods of time, and customers expect the product to be ready immediately, so of course they are going to get buggy software. If you are not paying extra for tech support, don't expect it to be good. Want good support? Pay large amounts of money for it.
This is the way things are. Don't like it? Just try to find another source that does a better job. You probably won't.
Its the old saying:
1) Low-cost
2) Quality
3) Fast
Pick 2.
#!/
Yes, But the OSS comunity is both willing to participate in FREE testing, and intelligent enough to know that OSS is a process, not a product.
Commercial Software users are mostly sheep being lead to the slaughter.
Or did you really think that WindowsME was the greatest thing for your personal productivity?
Hellohowyoudoing. Burrito will take 2 minutes in the microwave. TWO MINUTES! CANNOT YOU UNDERSTAND TWO MINUTES? TWO FUCKING MINUTES! SorryhowcanIhelpyoutoday.
This comment was randomly generated by a school of piranhas chewing on the PCB of a Microsoft Natural Keyboard.
I've never tried IRC, never had to. Google has found a solution to *EVERY* computer-related problem I have ever had, it's much faster than dealing with any kind of professional tech support, and it's free.
Who checks for that mapping? Someone in marketing, of course....
I always thought marketing's job was to find arguments for you to BUY a product.
This has the interesting corollaries as follows:
1) if it makes you think "I don't need this product" marketing can either remove it, or not do its job properly
2) if you buy a product but never use it, marketing did a splendid job
3) caveat emptor is a nice concept, to be applied whenever marketing is involved...
4) marketing claims things will operate as advertised, but it's usually engineering's job to see that it does, hence marketing can make a lot of impossible predictions in a lot of cases
5) a lot of these "impendence mismatches" between marketing and engineering have a lot to do with language... a good marketer for an engineering firm speaks both marketing and engineering jargons.
6) consumer associations in my area(Quebec) have a job to check that claims are backed by fact, but they are woefully understaffed. By understaffed I mean they do NOT screen ALL of the advertising, but wait for a complaint. Of course, that may just mean we can't afford to right-staff that office.
Sure, there's forums and there's newsgroups, and of course there's mailing lists...but none of them *have* to help you resolve your problem.
The fact that, in practice, such tenuous support turns out to look pretty darn in good in comparison with the existing commercial software support ought to give commercial providers some pause.
Either improve your support, or make it easier for the open forums to provide even better support for your product.
Reward your internal experts for trolling the usenet groups, for offering advice, making FAQs, fixing bugs, writing documentation, tutorials, quick start guides, searchable answers on web databases, etc.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Nothing is more annoying than the asshat who calls and thinks he/she knows everything.
I disagree -- I find few things more annoying that some asshat tech support droid who discounts my knowledge of my equipment and their inane 1st level scripts. I've been on their end, I know how call centers work. I also know that if you go through everything they're going to tell you to do before you even call it gets you to a higher level as L1 isn't given much leeway to get the problem corrected. 9 times out of ten they're going to transfer to L2 or put you in for a call back.
I never said I knew everything, just that I know the routine that Time Warner has L1 go over. Mostly, this involves rebooting thier cable router. Since I know this is what they're going to suggest, I do it before I ever pick up the phone.
Fortunately, I've had little need to call them (other than to tell them they have an outage and ask how long its going to be before its fixed).
Cruising the internet on my TI-99/4A @ a whopping 300 baud!
The customers can hardly be regarded as "an army of unpaid testers." I have called technical support for a variety of different companies wishing to report a bug in their product. Do you really think the flunkies answering the phone know or care? Their purpose, obviously, is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible while still keeping you "satisfied." I've talked to a supervisor's supervisor's supervisor, and all he would tell me is "our product has been fully tested...", blah, blah, blah. I guess I am an unpaid tester. But no one gives a shit what I have to say or what bugs I've found.
The very first line of the article: "Of the estimated 8 million computer users who seek technical support from software manufacturers every year, about a third never get the help they need, according to a survey in the latest issue of Consumer Reports magazine." Well, the question is, what kind of help do they think they *need* anyway? Do they "need" the Dell support guy making $7/hour to explain to them, in detail, how to make a Powerpoint presentation and use and MP3 of "Wind Beneath My Wings" as the soundtrack? Or do they "need" their local ISP's tech support to troubleshoot their broken printer, because they can't print a web page? You see, there is bad tech support, no doubt. But the real problem is that the VAST majority of users don't know what their problem is. They call the wrong people, ask the wrong questions, and flat-out lie.
Copyright violation: Caused by nearly everyone, one industry sector hurt.
Software bugs: Caused by one industry sector, nearly everyone hurt.
Yes, as opposed to other (non-commercially produced I guess) software where the support is non-existent
Yet another pile of crap about there being no support for free software. Why did this drivel get modded up to 5?
There are plenty of small companies which sell support services for free software. Moreover, they're motivated to do a good job because their livelihood depends on it - they don't have monopoly rents coming in. Moreover, you have a choice - there is competition in this marketplace.
>>At least with commercial software you can get your money back.
Which retailer actually gives you money back or even accept an exchange on any software that has been opened.
Almost none.
Tech support for most software is awful, at least people in forums/email for lots of open/free software understand the product if not the authors themselves. With coprorations you get hourly wage employees that don't "want" to help you.
I don't call for support on easy problems. If I am up against something so gruesome that it requires a call to tech support, it will not be answered by Level I techs. I generally need to talk to the programmers who actually developed the software, the engineers who actually designed the hardware, or at the very least someone in a third or fourth level of escalation position.
What drives me nuts is calling support and being FORCED through the F-ing script before they'll escalate.
A prime example: we recently had a T1 outage. I call support. They want me to reboot the router. I tell the person to STFU and escalate me to someone who knows WTF they're talking about because the CARD IN THE SMARTJACK IS DEAD. I can reboot the router until Microsoft GPLs Windows and the circuit will not come back...yet they insist on leading me through the script.
I hung up and called my sales rep. Nine times out of ten, that gets me the support I need.
The point is that companies should be spending more time on testing and less on pushing out poorly tested releases every quarter.
This is called a short-sighted strategy designed to create temporary stock price raises. It works until enough users get pissed off and never want to buy from that company again.
1) Before coming to work, make the idiotic assumption that only highly experienced power users will need help
2) Make fun of the people who call with your coworkers - after all, it isn't that YOUR COMPANIES PRODUCT sucks... it must be that the people calling for help are stupid
3) Laugh as you get the pink slip and someone in India takes your job
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Upgrades make money.
As a commercial software developer why would you ever produce a piece of software that is perfect? Once eveyone who wants a copy is happy with the copy they have then you're out of business. Just make the damn thing good enough. Then people will use it and then buy the bug fix upgrades once they've had enough of the bugs. While you're at it put in some extra features with the upgrade but make sure the new stuff has bugs too.
You'll be in business forever.
That implies that problems found by the customers and complained about to product support personnel will be reported to some programming team that will fix them. That seems to rarely be the case. I know of many organizations that have near zero communication between product support and development and many more that even disband the development team when a version of software is complete and come up with another team if and when they decide to do another version.
From a business perspective, especially in the case of small companies set up as a front to milk a single product (there are many examples of this), if people are buying your product and complaining about it, in many cases, you've already won. They bought the product. As long as you sell enough copies to recoup the development costs and your Indian product support service doesn't cost more than what you're pulling in, you're going to walk with a profit that you can use to build the next company. Some companies don't even seem to have to go that far. There are companies that seem to go on forever selling crap that makes Microsoft look mil spec for $10 a copy to uninformed consumers.
So, what incentive does a company have to make software better? If they spend more time and money on it while some crap house builds market share and name recognition, they will lose the marketing game and their investment shirts.
Hell yeah! That's why I buy only American. Because everyone knows that:
* At Ford, "Quality is Job One!", while those cheezy Nissans, Toyotas, and Hondas are always in the shop
* The Linux kernel, started by an effite European, is vastly inferior to the quality server OSes cranked out by innovative Microsoft
* There are no more American TV manufacturers any more, because although they were of tremendously high quality, they were done in by the shoddy workmanship and underhanded tricks of foreign manufacturers.
Protectionism serves nobody. It pampers weak companies, maintains artificially high prices, and keeps less-developed nations from gaining economic self-sufficiency. Protectionism is not patriotic. It's just a fearful reaction to economic change.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
The reason why crudy commercial software is so offensive is that it is always repersented as a finished product. OSS users (especially beta and version 1.0 users) know that they are helping the project by finding bugs and providing support to the authors. I think that the OSS developer community is just more honest than the commercial software community (or at least its management).
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
One of the problems is that with open source, the user is usually motivated to solve the problem or has someone around who is motivated. Most consumer product complaints basically involve people who want to scream at you until you "fix it."
I think part of the problem is that there aren't well-known and trusted "computer mechanics."
This is partially caused by the "my son the computer whiz" syndrome, where people know some kid that seems to be good at computers, and they get him to fix their computer. Sometimes (often, in fact), the kid can fix the problem, and that's great. But it means that people are loathe to go or flat out don't know where to go to get their problem fixed.
I think open source can help with a lot of this, as it's possible for a small shop to be able to fix just about any problem that comes up with a computer that uses OS software. Not likely, but possible. But they in turn are likely to know whom to call to get the problem fixed. Or maybe this is just because most OS problems stem from misconfiguration and other simple things because the level of skill required to do basic administration on a *nix is much higher.
Anyways, back to your subject: I find the most important thing with tech support is a well-organized and accessible database of past problems and solutions. Many companies are flat-out embarassed to admit they have problems with their software, and thus will not make their bug database available. Perhaps there's a legal liability issue here that I'm not aware of, but I'd hate to think such could be truly fixed by lying to people.
Having your bug database (even if it's just the closed bugs) available makes it far easier for a semi-experienced person to fix issues as they come up. If you have a good taxonomical system in place as well, then it becomes of use to even more people.
Another aspect is the software writing itself. I'm working on a mid-sized project right now, and most of my work is going towards: prevent the problem, and produce logging and error reports that are sufficient to narrow down not just this problem, but related problems in the future.
One of the funny aspects of this is in user interface. Often times a user says "this didn't do what I expected it to do," or the even more classic "I don't know if it worked or not, and I can't really tell if anything's wrong." The latter is a sure sign of a poor interface. The former is a sign of poor documentation.
And that's another thing: most people don't read documentation because it isn't written properly. There are basically two types of documentation: tutorial and reference. I've seen some good tutoreferences, but they are few and far between (and not usually as good as the two in pair).
The best man pages I have seen have a tutorial (sometimes as simple as examples) in one section, and a reference in another section.
I have noticed that if you have a very good tutorial, a very good reference, an accessible bug database, and a good troubleshooter, you do get the "I didn't read the documentation, but that won't keep me from shouting" problems every once in a while, but most of those people, once the very good resources are shown to them, become different people entirely.
Though this may only be true for a major tool. Minor stuff may always get the shouting[1].
[1] - In this case, you need to remember that you are writing a minor tool. If what it does is simple, keep it simple. If what it does is complex, make sure people understand it's complex. Good examples: (if you understand regexps) grep is simple, cat is simple. find is complex (for a simple tool).
What drives me nuts is calling support and being FORCED through the F-ing script before they'll escalate.
I know you hate this. Everyone hates this. I certainly hate it. I hate having to walk someone through it.
Unfortunately, we in the tech support biz don't have the clear, definitive, undeniable proof that you, you in particular, yes YOU, are not a dumbshit who happens to have picked up the vocabulary from somewhere. It's dumb for a tech to assume you diagnosed and applied the fixes correctly UP UNTIL NOW.
I teach a workshop on using our email client at work. One of the things I show is how to turn on the automatic spellchecker. One day, someone in class piped up complaining that she was a touch-typist for 30 years, could type a jillion words a minute, and hated the spellchecker popping up and telling her no errors were found. Fine, I said, turn the option off and be happy. She did, and we went on.
A few days later, she sent me an email thanking me for something and managed to mis-spell her OWN LAST NAME. Just a typo? Sure. Happens to everyone once in a while? You bet. Still looked like a stupid asshole? Absolutely.
That's not a tech support issue, but I hope it gets the flavor across -- sometimes even when you're sure you're doing it right, you still do the dumb thing anyway.
Most times it's best to start from square one when fixing a problem.
So, we're all supposed to accept whatever glorious wonders open source delivers and never complain? Nice approach: open source as a playground for developers, but, sorry, no room for users.
No one says you can't sell open source software. I'd be happy to pay if it would give users more control of the product and eliminate the hypocritical notion that open source is the wave of the future, but only open source developers have a right to comment on it.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
customers are used as an army of unpaid testers.
Now, this is completely wrong. Customers pay through their noses for the privilege of becoming testers!
Why is this unfortunately? Do you want engineers who don't know neither who his customers are, nor how customers use the product, to define what features go into the design?
Well, at least marketing know the customer, designed feature XYZ for the customer, and are in better position to do this.
"The programmer wants the construction process to be smooth and easy. The user wants the interaction with the program to be smooth and easy. These two objectives almost never result in the same program."
- Alan Cooper. The Inmates are running the Asylum
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
He's not using beta releases of the software either, he's using final releases. Final releases aren't pushed out with tons of bugs like in commerical software. I've known OSS projects to run for years before finally releasing 1.0