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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?"
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.
That was for "Internet in a Box," you punk kids. Back when we had to piece together our uuencoded porn bits by HAND before we could decode them! BY HAND!!!
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.
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.]
Which do you think is better, support over the phone or support another way?
Another way: Google.
Seriously, since Google, I haven't needed to call tech support numbers. Whatever problem I'm having generally falls into one of two categories: other people have had that problem, solved it and posted the solution to the web somewhere, or no one has ever had that problem, and in that case tech support is useless.
The only value of tech support is to the product vendor, who can then advertise that they have tech support.
Hell, I look things up on Google before I crack the manual. Google is faster, I can narrow down the search to exactly what I'm looking for, and I often come across a cool and informative website on the topic at hand.
Plus, using Google requires that you think about how to describe the problem, which can often solve it before you even need to follow a link. Tech support is kind of like "natural language" programming nonsense. Programming isn't hard because the language is hard, programming is hard because you have to specify your desires precisely. You do that without realizing it as you refine your search; the search process is educational.
Five percent of one year's DoD budget puts us on Mars.
I research every tiny freaking little thing before I buy it. This nit-picking includes cat5 cables and different types of USB cables, and especially includes software. The result? I haven't had to contact customer support for a computer part/peripheral in five or six years.
This probably doesn't help if you're in IT for a huge company where you're pretty much given the hardware and said, "Here, make this work," but it's better than nothing. For what it's worth, if I do have any problems with features, incompatibilities or whatever, I find that the most valuable place to look is in the company's user support forums. There might be a ton of people saying that this particular laptop has dead pixels, or that a certain function in a piece of software doesn't work with a certain sound card, etc. etc. Real people with real problems is better than tech support any day. YMMV.
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
-- Open Source: It's mad, but you don't have to work here to help.