Slashdot Mirror
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?"
On which one you can get access to the shortest amount of time. If you don't have net access or can't get to a place with it, you won't be able to get much useful help from a chat room. If you CAN get online and get help in a chat room, that would seem to be an easier and faster than meddling around waiting for phone support.
Support over chat works better as someone can deal with multiple "calls" at once. Let's face it.. if you are waiting on the phone for someone to reboot, your productivity is zero. It also makes it easier to copy and paste error messages (if you're not using an OS or software which prevents copying and pasting error messages.
The downside is, it can take longer to get to the bottom of a problem. If you have someone who knows what they are talking about then you will be able to sort it out quicker over the phone. Of course, when you have to pass things like URLs or file paths, it is easier to send them over on chat.
In my job, I use both, as they both have advantages... but I would give up the phone before I would give up chat.
(and personally, I find crap english easier to deal with on chat than on the phone)
None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
By the way, after several other phone calls for other issues that ended with supervisors actually swearing at me or hanging up on me, I decided Gateway as a company really sucks and it must be their company culture that drives everyone to be so generally bitter and evil. I had much better experiences with Dell.
What would be really cool is if there was a good way of profiling users to see their technical competancy. Perhaps by a few simple questions or commands like "Okay pull up a command prompt", or "what Bios version do you have?", stuff like that. The times I've had to contact support I already know the problem, have tried the typical solutions (ie dropping it in another box, trying newer drivers, etc...) and just need a new unit. Not to jump through the typical hoops "yes it's plugged in". Of course the problem with this is the semi-knowlegable people that *think* they've tried everything but are really overlooking something simple.
So I dunno, any ideas on how to do said profiling? The only thing I've really noticed from the tech support I've done is that the semi-knowlegable people are typically assholes on the phone, whereas everyone else is generally calm.
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.
Exactly. It depends.
There is, however, a hint of a better question in flyingember's post when he talks about how he's got good response out of HP's online chat. What I'd like to hear from slashdotters is what type of response you get from specific companies in different mediums.
e.g. when you contact eBay through their webforms/email, they first respond with a form letter that doesn't answer your question and then you reply explaining why it doesn't answer your question and then on the second (or third) response, you get the answer to your question. When you use their chat service, you get good answers quickly, but the people manning the chat service are outsourcers and can only provide information on how to use eBay in general -- they can't answer specific questions about your account or anything that's gone wrong, etc.
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With the few tech support disasters I've had to deal with, by phone usually has worked best -- but there are tricks to getting it to work, like making sure you take notes of who you talk to so you can reach them again. With some companies there's a decided change in quality of tech support depending on the time of day. (Strangely enough for me, it worked out that calling from 2am-4am has netted the best tech support.)
I strong concur with the recommendation to Google first. I've also found that email tech support pretty much sucks -- I've had an email request to download updated firmware for a 3Com wireless router that's on week 3 of waiting for approval at the moment, and all too many similar experiences.
Like it or not, self-help (google, mailing lists) is pretty much the way to go these days.