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Tech Support - To Phone or Not To Phone?
flyingember asks: "With years of experience with tech support I have yet to come to a conclusion as to which form of support to use. Phone, or not phone. For some companies their online chat is great, I used it often with HP since you were much more likely to get through fast during a peak time of the day and the support was high quality. I recently used Philip's online chat to ask about a product feature (or lack of) and they demanded a name, zip and phone number, then claimed the product wasn't supported through chat and that I had to call when I refused to give this. I've had mixed luck with phone support. From half-hour hold times and little knowledge with some companies to well-staffed techs such as with installing a DSL account or getting the Internet on my phone. I have used email chat with some companies, and it does the job as well as email does allowing lots of detail but has lag sometimes. Which do you think is better, support over the phone or support another way?"
Lesson I recently learned from Dell... their e-mail tech support is a lot less hassle than the phone version. Both are still mostly based overseas, judging from the names on the e-mails, but the techs that handle the e-mail support seem to be a bit more knowledgeable than their phone counterparts. Of course, for all I know, it's the same people.
Anecdotal evidence, sure, but it's worked on personal and work laptops about 8-9 times in the past month or two so far... Use the PremierSupport website, click the link on the left navbar called "Request Support," explain in normal terms what the problem is and the standard procedure you used to diagnose it, and you'll get a response back, generally within a couple hours, saying which parts will be replaced and to expect a technician to call you about the best time to come and fix it. As long as you use the usual magic words: "problem follows part", you escape 99% of the useless scripted "reboot and call us back" diagnosis.
One time when I said "Battery will not hold a charge" in somewhat vague terms, it wasn't a part replacement right away but they e-mailed back with a full and nicely detailed procedure of things to check, some of which I hadn't thought of.
Of course, most of this probably wouldn't work for the usual clueless user, but for us geeks here who know what we're doing, it'll save a lot of time.
[Yes, I am aware Premier Support is for the business/edu/govt customers, but they replaced most of the internals and the screen hinges on my personal Inspiron 4100 without a problem. Last time I checked, it didn't check any personal info when you registered.]