Slashdot Mirror
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"
From the article: Am I going to use this software as it's been marketed?
Not as it was designed, mind you, but as it was marketed. We all know that in the "21st Century" (TM) marketing is reality.
And tech support is always marketed as a smiling blond woman with the headset on saying, "How can I help you today?"
I get a warm numb feeling just thinking about it. Problem? I don't have a problem...
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
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.
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
"I'm unaware of any company that would shortchange the customer in their speed to get the software to market," said Jonathan Thompson, vice president of the Washington-based trade group, which has more than 650 members.
That's great. I'd put Mr. Thompson right up there with the Iraqi Information Minister, and his "deathless quotes":
"There are no American infidels in Baghdad. Never!"
"God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of Iraqis."
"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Oh, um... scratch that last one, ok?
And he gets better and better!
Thompson said customers need to have realistic expectations. He urged buyers to ask themselves two questions before plunking down cash for software: "What is it that I want this software to do?" and "Am I going to use this software as it's been marketed?"
Well, if I were to use Microsoft software "as it's been marketed", I'd expect to be using it to magically draw pretty pictures around my everyday activities, transforming a burned-out building shell into a stage with a spotlight.
"Make sure that your expectations are appropriate to what a product is marketing," he said.
What the hell does that mean? Intel marketed its product -- a chunk of finely-etched silicon in a plastic box -- with a bunch of blue guys. What expectations are appropriate in that case?
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
Another consideration is that many bad experiences are had by people who constantly cheap-out on their purchases. You don't walk into a McDonalds and bitch about the paper napkins. Similarly, I don't doubt that if you're buying low end 'home' devices that they sell at the discount store that you're going to run into a few problems -- but the solution is simple: don't buy that $30 CD burner that was made in a straw hut. There used to be a time you could buy a television set that lasted 8-10 years, for example, but the lifespan of the equipment has been cut beyond the pricing.
If you aren't constantly bargain-hunting but instead reading reviews online and buying things at the logical price point you might discover that the companies can not only afford to give you reasonable tech support but that you will also have less need of it. Additionally, buying the cheapest stuff you can find almost certainly promotes outsourcing and the hemmoraging of manufacturing jobs from our country, which hurts all of us in the end.
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.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I've been using commercial software for many years, like most other people, and I've rarely had to call anyone to do anything. Granted I'm more technical than the average user, but then that would be an argument for making software easier to use, not one against its existence. Now, there are companies out there that put out positively shitty software without hardly any testing, and that becomes plain the moment you open it up. The birthday card printers and the no-name PIMs and so on. Software from companies like Microsoft always has bugs, but these are rarely showstoppers and are normally fixed in service packs or whatnot. There's another issue - did the user check to see if there was a fix before he/she called? Microsoft (and most other big software companies) spend billions of dollars on testing. This article makes it sound like nothing is tested and software is simply unusable by the time it gets to the consumer. I don't think that's even remotely the case.
And going back to why this was posted... how is free software any better? There is, by definition, no support. There's a formal testing protocol (alphas and betas) as well as thousands of unpaid testers. It's often released too early to "get it out there". The stuff is often buggy (oh, look! The KDE segfault dialog again!), but it's also patched regularly. The big-name stuff is about as rock-solid as most big-name commercial software. Both have their unique problems and strengths.
I'm sure this will turn into the usual "hahah, m$ sux" fest, but I just don't see how all these "facts" make free/open source more attractive - at least to the consumer.
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".
You pay someone minimal salary or a bit above to answer mails and phone about some products...
For the sake of an example let's take someone in computer science or electronics...If you want that supportperson to have education in any of those fields so that he understands what is really going on in the system and not troubleshoot with a simple "issue-solution" sheet, such a person will be demotivated really fast unless he doesn't have minimal objectives with his career.
The problem is usually those people are really incompetent if they end up in jobs like this especially if their education could get them 2x the salary or more. They either have to be really lazy or bad at their work (or the employment market to be really in a bad shape).
So what does that give, if the person isn't good enough to work in his field on practical projects, he won't be any better in troubleshooting it, minus some exeptions. If they would want to hire competent people they would have to raise the salary grid a bit, and even give extras because, lets face it, if you're told you'll be answering tech support issues for the next 5 years of your life, most people will be depressed.
The solution?
Well look at National Instruments for example, they have one of the Best support site on the planet, you search, you find. You call, you get the information. I am not a big user of their products (labview) but I was *really* impressed with this. So the solution is a mix of putting issues in a database and have experience stored somewhere so that someone else can use it (a bit like the trouble-solution sheet but more dynamic and with good search filtering) and as for non-computer approach, well, either make a better product, or for ***'s sake, pay the price to get decent people in. Having 3 monkeys to not answer questions properly and having the people re-phoning 30 minutes later, or having 1 good professionnal person that will be doing his job correctly and effectively will not only benefit in customer satisfaction, it will require less infrastructure and while it's going to cost a bit more, if you stop being a lame manager and use some common sence, the benifits (even financial) will be higher than the costs of keeping a crappy system.
Look at how many companies are starting to outsource their support center... this might work for some buisnesses like ISPs.... but for others it just shows that their system has failed and grew out of proportion... how many times people you know that used tech support had to phone back again because the problem wasn't resolved properly? This shouldn't happen for most of those calls right? well, there's your answer... putting more underpaid monkey won't solve the problem, it'll just cost more.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
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
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."
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.
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