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Orwellian Tech Support
alteran writes "Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center. Makes working for Initech seem good. Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
"We don't support that"
We're not here to help fix your computer. We just want to get you off the phone. A tech-support slave tells his hellish tale.
Editor's note: All names have been changed.
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By Kyle Killen
Feb. 23, 2004 | Class officially started three hours ago, but our instructor has not yet arrived. This is not uncommon. By now many of my classmates have begun to bring cards, magazines and DVDs to pass the time. "The Matrix" is playing on someone's laptop and has attracted a small crowd in the back of the room. The fact that we're being paid largely to sit around and entertain ourselves has been the source of lots of jokes and smiles, but in the back of our minds we can't help but be concerned.
Several people confess that they've never done more with a computer than check their e-mail. Others admit they haven't even gotten that far. An impromptu contest develops to see exactly who knows the least. There are lots of contenders. I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Ken is standing in the aisle, tethered to his cube by the spiraled umbilical of his headset, holding an unlit cigarette, and yelling. Ken is always yelling, and that's why we love him. Lots of us jot down Ken's more memorable tirades and compare notes on our breaks. Now, standing near my cube, screaming in the urgent and gravelly tones of a mid-40s chain smoker trapped in a non-smoking building, Ken tells a customer, "Quit whining and go get a damn screwdriver. I don't have time for this bullshit."
None of us is sure how he gets away with it, especially considering that Ken saves his real anger for dealing with management. His conversations with the higher-ups all end with Ken screaming, "This is bullshit! Total bullshit!" and hanging up.
We all understand why Ken is angry. We've been tech-support representatives for six weeks and already a third of our training class has left. A new crop of techs hit the floor last week, and two of them are already gone. It might be tempting to believe that the customers are driving the techs away, that they just can't take the stress of dealing with endless complaints and callers driven to near madness by interminable holds. But the callers just want answers. Ken, and those of us who are left, are angry because for the most part we don't have them.
When we pick up the phone we're lying. We don't really work for the company we say we work for. Because of the expense of housing and running a technical support operation, many computer manufacturers choose to outsource the work. We work for one such outsourcer, though you'd never know it just to talk to us. To the customer on the other end of the line the distinction, while important, is invisible.
Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. In short, your phone is always watching you.
Twelve minutes can sometimes be difficult even if you know what you're doing. It is impossible if you don't have a clue. The stress of always being on the clock without really knowing how to do your job has already claimed a third of my classmates, and from the looks of the bulging vei
What are the odds of that? I bet you can find the same for almost any position, big or small.
I didn't see any forced ad viewing?
Maybe that has something to do with me using a well configured Firefox...
One thing I've noticed recently is whenever I get connected to a foriegn-accented call center, all they can do is read the manual to me. If I actually have a broken part, they have to send me back to the USA to speak to someone authorized to get the part, usually by requiring me to call another number altogether.
I guess we shouldn't be too scared of tech support being sent offshore... those aren't the knowlegable people anyway, so they're not exactly taking our job.
I worked for a while for Stream International in Oregon, and I know people that worked for them in Dallas.
And yeah, it was a grab-train-dump situation for the first week, and then you got tossed out on the floor.
I got let go, and no one ever told me why. But the training and experience I got there - supporting Netscape 1.2 and 2.0 - was invaluable in getting my foot in the door at other places. It was a hell of a meatgrinder for me, but I lived...
Brazil has decided you're cute.
"Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center."
Things go on inside tech-support centers?!? I thought they just put everyone on hold!
tim
Makes working for Initech seem good.
:P
"PC Load letter? What the fuck does THAT mean?!"
Oh and don't forget the cover sheet for those TPS Reports
Join the TWIT army now!
It's all true. I used to work for a certain government contracted tech support call center in Lawrence KS. Some of the people there couldn't operate a calculator, let alone a computer. Oddly enough, that's how HR liked it. If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage. As apposed to the guy who thinks he knows what he is doing, and magically get's IE uninstalled on a win98 machine and all hell breaks loose (had to see it to believe it).
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
I originally worked for mindspring, they found that they got a better class of techs, who responded well on the phone when given a decent work environment; cut forward to 2 years later after the merger with earthlink. The new motto was low call times, let them call back. Costs rose, the work environment stunk, and most of the support personnel developed attitudes, not to mention that management developed a sweep everything under the rug attitude. Unfortunately call center phone support is getting to the point of burger flipping and telemarketing. A lot of friends complain that they know more about the product then the support personnel they are calling (some are semi-computer literate artists)
I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.
Dell's support line was like this when I called them last summer... Hopefully now that Dell is moving call centers back home again, better service is just around the corner.
When I ordered DSL, it had to be MSN. It never worked. But even as the Tech Support guys (in India) could not find the problem in their database (and therefor could not solve the issue, I just bailed on DSL for cable), they where polite and actually spent lots (LOTS) of time with me. Now the Comcast guys, they suck, tried to stick me with a "premium" install service charge even though all they did was drop off a box and a disc (my wife, the barracuda took care of them).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I've never had any of these supposed problems when calling any computer manufacturer's tech support lines. Is it how I somehow command the attention of the phone monkeys on the other end? Do they somehow become knowledgable or magically able to forward me to tier 2 if it says "Ayanami" on the caller ID?
I highly suspect this is a bogus/fluff article: you know, an amaglamation of a bunch of interviews and war stories about the worst call center conditions imaginable.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Orwellian? In what way?
I'd have said Kafka-esque, perhaps.
These sigs are more interesting tha
I worked doing tech support at an ISP some years ago. Once I gained more knowledge I moved on to bigger and better things. It cannot be easy to hold on to talented tech support persons for the relatively low pay they receive vs the stress of dealing with irate customers and the pressure of keeping call times down. Most probably move on like I did.
some are all about speed, some are about quality.
Why is this news?
Yeah, mod it flamebait, but you thought the same thing.
Some companies give bad tech support. News at 11.
Sent from your iPad.
I'm sorry, our support contract doesn't cover attacks by the high-tech machine. Have you tried rebooting ? Have you re-installed Windows with the CDROM that came with the computer ?
The last three words does suffice pretty well.
"Bullshit. Total bullshit."
And we wonder why computer illiterate people always come to directly to the geek in their life for help whenever something goes wrong.
No seriously, I haven't. I've had people who were obviously reading off a flow chart of possible solutions, but never been palmed off with bad information.
Ok, so maybe it's be cause I'm technically competent so I don't phone up with the usual cup-holder problems, I only phone up when I know something's broken, and I can usually get fasttracked to a higher level of tech support by telling them I know what I'm talking about. Dell were incredibly good about this and even flagged it as a note on my record.
On a sidenote: Format and reinstall is the biggest cop-out ever. Guy that do this are the biggest muppets I know in tech support - McDonalds staff usually have a better handle on what they're dealing with...
And your justification for gross violation of copyright laws is what exactly? Salon.com is a paid-subscription site with limited public access. Its content is NOT under a Creative Commons or GPL license. You have no right to copy an article in bulk from Salon to another site.
sPh
For the time being, I'm the guy doing the monitoring. Recorded calls, live calls, I shudder to think how many I've listened to in the past months. And we do indeed listen to them (whilst existing in that impossible state of forced-web-browsing-boredom) with at least one ear. Occasionally I get callers fired, largely for fun, but sometimes because they're rubbish. Of course, this is telemarketing, not tech support, and the government (UK) have reasonably strict laws on what will and won't hack it. Same third-party, outsourced set up. Perhaps some sort of regulatory/accountability / government-in-your-backyard intervention is required?
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
Who in their right mind would call someone on the phone in an attempt to get the computer working??
Try to tell someone how to tie their shoelaces over the phone. It will never work!
"We don't support that", they say, and why the hell do people pay for such a "support"?
Internet Help Desk skit (it's in quicktime)
It's mildly amusing, but there is grains of truth in the humor...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
If you're a big fan of "root causes", well, the root cause of crappy tech support is the business model. The people who work there get paid per hour, but the actual company, or in this case "branch-of-other-company-via-internal-billing" gets paid per call that comes into the building. Therefore somebody who is needs three or four calls to fix a problem, rather than just one, is three or four more times as profitable to the company as one who calls once.
In this environment, the ideal setup is about 95% braindead scriptreaders who can cheaply solve the great majority of problems given a flowchart and three or four tries and a tiny handful of people who handle the real problems from the persistent clients. But if you're actually good, and you want to keep your job, you have to play by Management's playbook.
There's an optimal point somewhere where the cheapness of tech-support expenses is balanced against the cost of losing clients, and I promise you, some very smart people have worked out those numbers.
Seriously, that's why consumer net access is so cheap, in both senses of the word, these days.
Mike Hoye
Nobody. Capitalism has failed.
Now, we could go back to market economy, but do you think it will ever happen?
Allow cookies from cache.ultramercial.com
/Creatives. Your not missing out on ads people - your missing out on creativity. This site bugs me, I thought cool the finally have text ads - but they turned out to be GIF's!
Adblock cache.ultramercial.com/*
Adblock salon.com/Creatives/*
That flags the cookie you've seen the ad, and next time you get a nice clean page that says click here to continue.
Also on Salon, the ads are pathed to
I thought it was fairly well known that call centers are all a numbers game. Management wants minimum call duration and maximum calls per employee; they're not really interested in solved problems.
The more calls you can handle, the fewer people you need (and all the associated overhead costs) and the more profit you make. It's really that simple.
Employees who actually take the time to help people get bad numbers and ultimately get canned, even if they're good at helping people. The successful employees figure out how to crank through their calls ASAP, as well as how to game the system so that they can sneak idle time without appearing to ignore calls in queue.
It's essentially the rules associated with factory work applied to answering the phone.
"The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists."
Actually, larger firms can get a deal with Dell where an in-house tech can order parts under warranty on a website. I would go nuts if my company didn't have that option.
-Jeff
Why is this even a story? This is nothing new, first level tech support has ALWAYS been like this. When I was fresh outta school in the early 90's and worked tech support this was the status quo, and low and behold it still is the status quo 15 years later.
I beg to differ, pal.
Go watch your DVD again.
Chris
A friend of mine who works for tech support summarized it very nicely. According to him 'Working in tech support is like living an unreality that when a client opens up an issue with the support, they imagine that a group of people in a room is working devotedly to their specific problem. And I live this for every single client'.
Free XBox, PS2
and quit about 1 week in.
They didnt want me to go since i was the highest seller. They actualy begged me to stay.
I could not stand calling up people and asking if they wanted life insurance on their sears card... i it so many freeking widows/widowers made me mad that they had such an old crappy setup.
A psychopath can't tell the difference between right and wrong. A sociopath knows the difference - he just doesn't care.
Just don't forget the cover sheet on your TPS report.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
If this anecdotal tale is actually true, and the whole idea is to make the call length as short as possible, and their are no reprocussions to providing bad support - why not just hang up on the caller after one second? Why even bother talking to the user at all? Sounds like someone just wants us to view a 5 second ad, because the article is "worth it".
There are burn out and high turn over rates at tech support centers. Recieving those calls all day is draining (I did it). The average time someone does tech support is like 9 months. That is no a whole lot of experience. So, those on the other end usually don't have a lot of experience doing tech support.
Evolution or ID?
Dude, I want seven monitors.
Create an account with false info, or Googlize your link to get in. It's really not a big deal.
This reminds me of my days as a TSR for a major printing company. I worked for a total of 4 months, and went three of them without any training, except for the obligitory phone training. People there were and still are scared to go to bathroom because the phone will record how many minutes they're away. Some TSR's get breaks by just answering and "accidentally" hitting the hang up button, convieniently located just next to the pick up one.
Others just told customers the printer was defective and needed to be replaced and sent them a new one. (Now you know why it's so easy to get that printer replaced!)
And for the printers that really needed to be replaced, that really had major defects, it was a big no-no to even mention that this might be a common problems.
You see, tech support is all about image. The company doesn't want to give good tech support. It just wants the customers to not think badly about it.
P.S.: To be fair, the TS was nowhere near as bad as described in the article, but I was only in the (comparitively) highly-trained laser printer dept. The ink-jets were shipped out to India a LONG time ago.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
I worked my way up a call center for an ERP software manufacturer into consulting. Many of my peers did the same thing. We came out of those experiences with great expertise. We ended up knowing more about the software than the developers and more about the hardware than the vendors. That's why we now are all making a comfortable living outside of support.
I came up through an original support staff of under 6 all the way through a 100+ org with sophisticated call tracking and metrics and high levels of customer satisfaction. Our customers were deploying and implementing production manufacturing systems. They simply could not get up and running without our support. And they were paying 5-figures + just for support, so there was a real incentive and resource base to make quality support happen. Despite that there were times when our customers got less than the best level of support. I'd hate to think what support is like in low margin, high volume businesses.
For the technically adept, support becomes a physiological challenge. Customers yell and curse at you. Jobs are on the line. Halted production runs can stop an entire shop floor. Big money is on the line. Even when you know what you are doing, it's hard not to take this personally. It is no longer a technical challenge, but a psychological one. Those that can't cope with this reality burn out, those that can become rich as consultants.
Even in the best of support orgs, with all the financial resources, support is still the bottom of the totem poll in most companies. Too little respect is afforded the support staff by other departments (but those few in the know, actually find the broad knowledge from the support group). Support is seen as a beginning, not an endgame for their most talented people. The writing is on the wall once you start to become an internal consultant to the sales and development departments. You will be leaving support and taking your knowledge and mentoring skills to greener pastures.
In my experience, for complicated software I've found that a support group can utilize as many resources as the sales or development group. How many companies do you know that put as much resources into support as into the other groups? In support, like everything else, you get what you pay for. Even when a company realizes the value of support, the best people eventually go elsewhere. Until these issues get resolved, support will remain in its generally shabby shape.
This is really screwed up. Since when does abusing your customers become good practice?
Perhaps I am nieve or just old fashioned but whatever happened to CUSTOMER SATISFACTION. Support like this is an abuse of customers, how much are customers willing to take before they simply go elsewhere?
If I receive bad support from a company when I need it - I will remember that incident when it comes time to make my next purchase. If I receive good support, then I am not only going to likely be a repeat buyer, but I am also likely to recommend that company's product to others.
A gambler. (One who "punts" money on the horses.) A customer of goods or services. These days the term is applied so broadly it can refer to any member of the great British public: anyone who is in the market for goods, services or help. "It's what the punters want," is an excuse for pandering to the lowest common denomenator.
Watch out for yer cornhole, bud.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Back when Microsoft Office was pretty new, Bill Gates was touring the facility and in one of the call centers, he discovered a couch in the center of the room. When he asked about the couch, he was told that it was the Mail-Merge couch; because when anyone needed help with Mail-Merge, they would be on the phone for a long time.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
The high turnover rate of employment is cause of concern for me. However, it won't end until people realize that the job is horrible and shouldn't go after it because of the money. $8/hr to flip burgers at McDonalds or $9/hr to get screamed at, both by management and the caller, and have to worry how to get "customers" off the phone as quickly as possible, I'd take burger-flippin' any day. I may come home smelling like french fries, but a quick shower will fix that and that extra dollar just isn't worth it to me.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I've been having some outstanding support from HP lately. I just bought a laptop from them last month, and had a number of questions for them regarding upgrades and repartitioning my hard drive to dual boot linux and windows. I'm very impressed and glad that I went with HP.
- Their technicians have responded within 24 hours (usually within 2 hours) to all my emails.
- They provided useful information without a load of sales pitch and other BS (minimal indemnification and warnings where prudent and necessary)
- The replies were in good English using complete sentences and proper technical document style and language.
- They told me up front they don't support linux (reasonable because there's so many distros and different ways to configure linux; I'd have expected REAL linux support if they were selling/endorsing a particular distro, of course), yet their techs went ahead and gave assistance with setting up the partitions for dual-booting anyway! (I wasn't just wiping the drive, but needed to re-size the partition so I could avoid having to reinstall, configure, and tweak all the WinXP stuff, and they were very helpful and responsive to my requests for information.)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
alteran is obviously the owner of the advertisement! It's a consipracy!
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
...I called their tech support last week and ended up with a guy in Panama whose English was fine. He had me run some hard drive diagnostics and figured out that it had some errors, so he had a new one shipped to me and I got it two days later.
The whole call only took about 5 minutes, and now my laptop is happy again. Good times.
The Army reading list
Not by a long way are all of the tech support call centres this bad. I have a buddy who works in one, and I myself once undertook the training to work for the same one. Which one? Not telling, sorry... suffice it to say that they're pretty big. It only took them a week or so to decide that we were not compatible. My fault. I have a smart mouth when it comes to tech issues, y' know?
Anyway, they weren't all hardcore geeks, but they were all computer literate, the guys in my induction group. The instructor was a distinctly non-techie type of chap, but they called in the real techies for some sessions. The suit was only to educate us in the fine art of customer service, and company policy. Don't judge all call centres by this article, please. T
Sign the FSF's Anti-DMCA petit
Tech support is horrible because the customers are letting it get horrible.
Complain. Often, constantly, daily. Write letters, not email, call every day.
Tie up their support phone lines to the point where nothing gets done. Tie up their sales lines as well.
Demand to speak to the president of the company.
File complaints with every consumer group you can find.
Write to magazines, tell them how horrible the support is, tell them you hate the products.
If the company has 12,000 unresolved complaints filed with the BBB in a 2 month period, what do you think will happen to their customer service?
More important to them, what do you think will happen to their stock price?
Back in '92 I called MS tech support with a windows com port problem. The guy I got actually knew what he was talking about, diagnosed it in under 2 minutes. I still remember how he would say "hmmm.... baddah baddah baddah...." while he was typing on his keyboard. Anyway, he even called me back on the east coast and read me a "debug" script to nail down the "floating com port" problem.
What I wouldn't give for those days....
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
Obviously only Indians will be left to buy anything.
I've worked for this, and honestly this isn't even close to the experience I had. Of course there is a few bad eggs who were punters (no givers, since we only did DSL support), and even a few people who would just randomly drop calls. But I (and almost all of my coworkers) worked to get the customer's problem fixed.
How to Speak Leet
If you haven't seen it already, go to the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie web site and watch their "Welcome to the Internet Help Desk" video.
Everytime I think I need to invest in anger management, someone shows me I'm not that bad. Thanks for the laugh "fuckwit"! Great stuff.
... since that's what the company I used to work for Tech Support had us doing (thankfully, my current employers are a world away from that). Before any return could be authorised, you had to advise the end user to reimage, or there was no return. If you hadn't done this - and the users couldn't lie since the reimage gave out a number we could check on - no return. But here's where it got really sneaky. Not only did people who didn't buy an extended warrantee for their home PC have to spend 50p - 1.00 a minute on the phone, but they also got no reimage disc. So to get their PCs returned, they needed to reimage, but couldn't reimage without a disc. I doubt this was legal, but we ended up advising users that they had to buy an extended warrantee to get a reimage disc. Or pay 50 pounds for a reimage disc! For a disc which cost maybe 50p tops to make. There are so many tips and tricks the article only skims the surface. Rings a lot of bells for me though.
Okay, first of all it IS "Initech" with an "I".
Here is an auction for the Bill Lumberg coffee mug!, just in case you would want one on your desk...
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Vidi Vici Veni!
I worked tech support for a summer. The most frustrating part was having people saying, "Come on, Bob, you're a professional, you should know these things" when in fact 1) I'm getting paid $7 an hour and 2) the question he's asking is totally out of our "scope".
Not to mention, our retention rate was much worse than for the class in the article. 12 of us started training, 6 made it out (after 3 weeks), and when I left after 10 weeks there was no one else in my group left.
.. which isn't as important as the first, or when I wasn't working in my now non-crappy job, is 'it's a training issue'. Quite useful.
Thanks so much for the repost. Salon is crap for making anyone jump through flaming hoops of crap to get to their advertisement-supported content. While nothing is worth that crap, this article was well worth the few moments you may spend in purgatory for violating crappy intellectual property laws.
Soon, manglement decided that since they couldn't get the onhand inventory to match, they would give several of us cordless phones and have us field the 'pricing and availability' calls to the store. This was running around the store and checking to see if the product was actually there, and actually 9.95 - on top of trying to help people who had decided to physically come to the store and perhaps buy something.
The best part was when you were telling someone about an expensive piece of hardware and some call comes in (we weren't allowed to ignore calls) for the price of a printer cable, or if we have the '20 CDs for 20 bucks' deal in.
I had one guy go off and scream at me, to which I responded, "Please go back there and talk to Rick. He's the boss. I am doing the job(S) he gave me. Tell him he's a fucking moron." He responded, "YOU'RE THE FUCKING MORON" and stormed out.
I tried to tell the boss what bad service this was causing, and he said, "You need to try harder." Grrr.
About three weeks later, the phones disappeared, and I was back to software. And hardware!
At this time, I didn't own a computer of any sort, as they were unattainable on my hourly rate. And here I am trying to sell them. Ugh. I gave up my fakery and lies. I became a 'troublemaker'. If I didn't know if software did a certain something, I would crack the box and read the manual (this was discouraged) even if it was for my own education. If someone wanted a telphone, fax machine, or sound card, I told them that the 'extended warranty' was a ripoff.
I became well versed in the Mac line we carried, and sold a lot of them because I liked them, and they were easy for the customer to demo themselves.
People seemed to like my honesty. And I learned more about selling, and sold more than lots of smarmy 'say-anythings' there, because I only sold the stuff I knew, and liked. Of course, I quit not long after for other reasons. After that, I was well on my way to knowing my stuff, and built my first computer out of Salvation Army parts.
Oh, lots of retail stories came out of that evil place...
From the IT dept of a very large phone manufacturer to an even larger outsourcing company, I can reveal that my job is now no longer to fix problems and design solutions to help my colleagues, it is instead, to make money at the expense of my former colleagues.
Unlike the article, we do currently actually fix the problems, but guess what. Now 60% of fixes have to be within 24 hours, so what do you do with troublesome customers? Ticket goes on "waiting for customer" immediately, call them back at lunchtime, three calls and it gets closed. The metrics look good.
That Apache upgrade? Not part of baseline break/fix. Now costs you money and 3 days of my time (how much per hour?) as we update the OS, apache rev, modules. Oh, it broke your application? But you approved the change managment and we don't support homegrown applications.
Grid computing. Yum. $100/month/machine for supporting workstations becomes $1,000/month/machine as the desktops are migrated to *clustered* servers in the machine room. And you thought it was such a good idea before the outsourcing, at least they aren't on your budget, I wonder is it corporate who're taking the financial hit as the numbers of supported servers rockets?
Out of hours support? I'm off at 5 mate. Hourly rates double in the evening and double again at the weekend. And they start in 3 digits. What? You want a production system upgraded at the weekend? Oh you need a DBA and Financials administrator as well? And that 100Gb restore which is taking 10 hours? You get billed for every second which is out of baseline hours.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
There is a comedy routine put out by a fellow named "Wes" from the group "Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie" (No I am NOT kiding, that IS their name!) called "Internet Help Desk". FUNNY! and it says about the same thing this article does. Several sites for it are out there so I won't post a single one to get slash dotted. You can Google for it. If you have difficulties with that, Please call the Help Desk.
- Minutus cantorum, minutus balorum, minutus carborata descendum pantorum.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
The worst part of this whole setup is the poor, clueless end-user, who actually thinks tech support knows what they're doing.
I work in the repair department at a large electronics store. One of my duties (other than actually repairing or upgrading computers) is "inspecting" equipment such as wireless routers to make sure that we aren't getting scammed. It burns me up when someone brings in their 3rd unit in as many days, saying, "wow, what's wrong with you guys? I've been on the phone with D-Link all day, and this is the third bad unit I've gotten". I just want to yell out, "no sir, you've been on the phone with an outsourced guy in Manilla who may or may not have ever even seen a picture of your product, and he says it's faulty because his only concern is getting you off the phone in less than fifteen minutes."
I had a young woman come in the other day with some random Gateway desktop that looked like a CRT iMac knock-off (an all-in-one design where the mainboard and drives were installed in a section below the monitor). She plunks it down on my desk, and says, "The guy at Gateway's tech support says it needs a new video card." I took one look at this obviously completely integrated computer, and said (without thinking), "Are you sure he said that?" "Of course he said that," I thought immediately afterward, "he's tech support. He has no idea what that product even looks like. He doesn't know that the video is integrated." Just for grins I opened it up, on the off chance that there was some ghetto six-inch VGA cable that ran to an actual card. Interestingly, there actually was, but it ran from a proprietary pinout that allowed video to flow up to the monitor to a DB-15 connection on the motherboard, and power to flow down from the single AC jack that was located in the monitor . I showed the connection to the woman, then showed her a couple of video cards, and explained why they were wrong and what she could do (basically nothing, as she was outside of warranty). The funny part about the whole thing was that it looked like it was actually the CRT that was damaged, as it was exhibiting that "missing one part of the color spectrum" bit that is more often than not a CRT defect.
It's a shame, but I don't know of any consumer computer manufacturer that has what I would call "good" tech support anymore, with the exception of Apple (and then you only get 90 days unless you spring for Applecare).
There is not popup ad if you have subscribed to Salon, which really does not cost the world. I am in Germany and I figured that subscribing to Salon would be my little contribution to keep the critical media in the US alive. And they need critical media more than ever over there.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
If we farm all of our jobs out to India, who will be left to buy anything?
Indians, of course.
Globalization will balance everything out in the long run, but the first few hundred years are going to piss a lot of people off.
The USA is increasingly catering to companies and those that own them, at the expense of the individual. Taken to an extreme perspective, the USA might be seen as a land of corporations surrounded by a sea of poverty, an extreme polarization of wealth.
Fortunately there are a few things that can't really be moved overseas (today, at least). Things like person-to-person service, sales, government, construction. Well, and lawyers. And crime. As other jobs dry up and move to less wealthy nations, these industries will probably boom. But in the end salaries will balance out just about everywhere. The only way you might outperform local salary averages is if your position requires physical proximity, and many don't, nowadays.
What can you do? Buy some stock.
The one I worked for was a bit different. Small Internet Providers throughout the country contracted us to handle their technical support for them. Since many of these were "mom and pop" operations with just a few hundred customers in one city, they relied heavily on maintaining that local image. As a result, we were NEVER, EVER allowed to give any indication that we were not located in the area the person was calling from. I remember talking to customers of a Florida ISP about how nice the weather is, when in fact I'm sitting in Toledo, Ohio (hint to the company's identity?) in a snowstorm. If we were asked for our location, we had to respond that we were not permitted to give out details on our location due to security concerns. I had to give that line a few times a day.
We also had to be crafty. Although some "premium" customers had dedicated phone numbers so that we could find out which ISP they were calling for, many of the individual ISP's calls were routed to a common toll free number, so we'd have no idea as to which of the hundreds of ISP's we do support for the caller is from. We answer the call generically ("Tech Support, how may I assist you?") and usually asked for the customer's e-mail address for an indication of which ISP they were with. The domain name would give away the ISP. Unfortunately, people often did not give the domain name, or had offsite e-mail accounts. Since we couldn't give away that we were not with "their ISP", I couldn't flat out ask. I'd have to narrow it down by area code, and then search between ISP's in that area to find out who they were with -- often taking 10-15 minutes.
I remember one time management signed a deal and gave the call center side a chance to prepare. It was a HUGE customer - larger than all of our other ISP's combined. One night, on my shift, they simply forwarded the tech support number over to us. We went from an average 3 minute call queue time to well over an hour. We did not have the staff to handle the calls, and had no information at all about the specifics of the ISP -- dialup numbers, e-mail servers, etc. It was days before we even had the correct info to give customers. In the meantime, we just had to go with it.
And finally, we had no training program at all, so the company tried to hire people from an outsourcer in the area who had already been through their hideous training program. We paid a dollar an hour more, so it was usually pretty easy to do. Unfortunately, we supported dialup customers, and the company we stole people from supported cable modems, so new hirees usually knew nothing of dialup.
I lasted about six months there surprisingly. When I started it was a small operation with only a dozen or so techs. By the time I left, they had on average 30-40 people per shift. We grew so fast that they had to temporarily build a room in the warehouse and put up folding tables to make room for the new call center people. I'm sure they are much bigger by now, but probably still working out of the warehouse.
"The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant."
I've got news for all of you. It's not just overseas tech support who are "not knowledgeable" and rely strictly on pre-written steps and scripts to resolve problems. It's just about every tech support of a large company I've dealt with, in Canada and the US.
My ISP "Sympatico" has this problem. My dealings with McAfee tech support results in the same thing. No matter what you tell them, they step you through the same ridiculous "newbie" steps regardless of what you tell them you've done or discovered already. In fact, McAfee described to me 5 or 6 steps to take which basically could have been summarized as "completely uninstall the software and then re-install it"--Somethign I had already done and told them so!
Obviously, they're using the wrong metric.
Support is being paid for by manufacturers as a necessary cost of doing business so that customer satisfaction remains high enough to:
- prevent them from being sued
- get repeat business from satisfied customers
So they have to balance costs with customer satisfaction.
Rather than allowing their support contractors to use strict call times as measurement, they should be doing follow-up customer satisfaction surveying in some percentage (1%?) of the cases, and weighting that more heavily than call time.
In fact, quite a bit of this follow-up surveying is done, but apparently not by whomever this author was working for (unless he was distorting the facts to make a punchier article, heavens forbid).
If this is in fact going on, it's clear that the fault is with the managers who are using the wrong metric to determine success. This is easily changed.
Called IBM Rational tech support 'cause the site didn't explain how to upgrade from older Purify to latest Purify. Get shunted to India. "Open a browser and go to h t t p colon slash slash..."
I was punted (RTFA) to the same freakin' website I came from...what a joke. Eventually I found a more specific number, mostly by randomly jabbing at my phone with a dialing wand while in phone menu hell.
I have a "Ken" at my current support job. Sometimes I overhear the conversations and I laugh to the point of tears and suffocation. He has what I call "Tech Support Tourettes" and uses the mute button on his headset to great effect.
Whenever I start to get frustrated with calls, I simply take a five second break and listen in on "Ken". He is the office stress reliever and we have a pool going around on when he is going to kick the bucket. I think that is the only reason the company keeps him, as mental health for the rest of us.
My most memorable incident recalls a customer who had the unfortunate luck of calling in to "Ken" to complain and make legal threats. Sharp as ever, "Ken" transferred him to our "Legal Department" (we don't have one that I know of) at extension 600. Funny thing is, our extensions only go to the mid 500's, so no one was going to answer the call and the guy would wait on hold potentially forever.
Did I mention he deals exclusively with Macs? I can't imagine what would happen if moved to PC support. Probably could replace his chair with a coffin.
For some companies that service niche markets like ours does this is not the case. We have less than 10 full time tech support people but the average experience they have working for this company is likely 5-6 years. The difference is that customers pay (a lot actually) for the support but are happy to pay it. Also the tech support people here are actually paid reasonable salaries. While this model works for niche markets I don't think it would work for larger markets like say Dell laptop support, expect to continue getting crappy support there.
*no text*
Where'd you copy that from?
Here?
How do the American consumers gain? What prices have went down because of outsourcing to India/China? What is now cheaper?
"punt", from American football, "to give up on a failed offensive drive and kick the ball to the other team"
Why do they have a picture of some bloke phoning a sex line next to the article.
Karen is part of a growing group called givers.
When looked at in a tech support experience sort of way, the whole Goatse Giver / Receiver model seems apt, as a long drawn out episode with tech support will often lead to one feeling like the receiver.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
Makes working for Initech seem good. "Well, I'm
going to have to... disagree with you there".
By the way - have you done those TPS reports yet?
Isn't this interesting, I created one of the first predictive dialers in the industry and created call and data transfer for MCI in the 80's.. I wonder what horrible things the software I create today will be used for?
Don't Try to Outweird me, I get stranger things than you with my breakfast cereal every morning
I always hear it from people that tech support doesn't help at all. Then why do you buy from those companies and not from some local shop were you get support in person? Cause dell offers phone tech support. ARGH.
Personally I rarely use tech support in fact the only calls in a years time were to my isp to get a new password. Simple stuff and still it took a good ten minutes.
Outsourced tech support is known to be crap. They get paid per call not by satisfied customer. Anyone with a single braincell can then figure out what kinda personal they want. It is also easy to figure out the kinda callers they desire. Idiots that can be made to call time and time again but for short calls.
Until people start voting with their dollars and take their business elsewhere companies like dell will see nothing wrong and keep outsourcing their tech support with the same pay per call contracts.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Before you go nuts on the Indian "support" centers, remember that they're just doing what they're paid to do. Your US based Head Office is demanding exactly what they are giving. They will have had "negative feedback" about accents and off-shore outsourcing, so HQ has probably told them to be appear more localized (read pretend to be American).
I hate dealing with them as well*, however SlashGeeks are not the typical end user. Most people will have even less knowledge than these guys, and *need* to go through each step. Having said that, the entrapment bullshit you speak of is pretty shitty.
*I purposely mess up the scripts, when dealing with telecoms, pizza shops, tech lines, etc. I'm a person and so are they - fuck the corporate mindlessness.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
just to give my fellow slashdotters an idea of what working for this company is like:
they employ over 5,000 of the worst possbile computer illiterates I've ever seen. most have never even seen the inside of a computer. they specificly say during interview "We do not prefer experience or certifications. we will give any one with computer knowledge a job but prefer that *we* train you"
they pay $11/hr WHILE logged into the phone, minimum wage when not logged in (which btw will be most of the time).
security is soo tight there all employees are run through a metal detector coming AND going from the complex (would say building but there are 6 of them). I asked once why they did this they responded "to protect the employees from the employees" referring to a couple times people started shooting guns in the call center.
This company is evil incarnate. the place is a total sweat shop. 3-400,000 sq ft per building of cubicles. it's soo disorienting navigating the cubicle farm you have to go by the signs posted.
Oh and everything the article said about the place is true. yes they are one of the largest support providers, they do compaq, HP and IBM, plus bellsouth/comcast, directv, and a bunch of others. All they care about is getting you off the phone in 12 minutes (thats what the dead giveaway was, totall company policy, if you spend 15 minutes you have 3 supervisors breathing down your neck). they will even go so far as you find a reason to manually disconnect @ 13 minutes telling you to call back again.
ATTN Florida Slashdotters: Can someone back me up on this place, I know someone else has to have worked there. I can't possibly describe how bad this place really is since I only worked there 4 days, but man it did ring some bells.
Oh btw, here's the whois info:
Registrant:
TAG (TAG6-DOM)
7562 Southgate Blvd
NORTH LAUDERDALE, FL 33068
US
Domain Name: TAG2.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Nunez, Juan (JN8854) jnunez@TAG2.COM
TAG
7562 SOUTHGATE BLVD
N LAUDERDALE, FL 33068-1362
US
(954) 724-6745 fax: (954) 726-0015
Record expires on 08-May-2008.
Record created on 07-May-1996.
Database last updated on 23-Feb-2004 12:07:40 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
CMTU.MT.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 12.127.16.69
CBRU.BR.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 199.191.128.105
Why does this article remind me of the BOFH?
___ This sig is in boldface to emphasize its importance!
There's a related story here:
The Hell That Is Tech Support
This only confirms what many of us have long suspected. Companies promise tech support but, these days, simply don't deliver.
Any idea what to DO about it?
How do I "vote with my dollars" when everyone is doing the same thing?
The worst part is, I'm convinced that computer hardware and software has become less usable, and that this is part of the reason. In the old days, the need to deliver tech support provided some market discipline. If the stuff didn't work, support costs went up. But now, companies are essentially not paying for the real cost of proper tech support... and have lost the disincentive that used to inhibit the release of badly-designed products.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Is it just me, or should articles like this include an anger rating system from 0 (happy child running through the meadow) to 10 (about to go ripshit in the streets of boston after someone totalled your car during rush hour traffic, preventing you from going back to your unloving wife and kids). Seriously though, after reading this article, I felt like the only just thing to do in this world would be to take down these operations, SWAT style.
:)
A rating would help prevent readers like myself from getting this huge adrenaline rush right before going back to the lab and running experiments requiring patience, not the ability to throw large blunt objects at retarded management.
grumble grumble... i feel better now
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
-- To Err is human, to Ignignokt divine.
To me, whenever I hear stories like this, the first thing I think is: "if this sucks so much, how can I compete?"
If something sucks in the world, it's pretty likely that there's a way to start a company and compete with them, and win. (I won't accept bad tech support as a universal constant, like death and taxes)
I'm sure there are a few of you out there who are unemployed, (or looking for a better job) entrepreneurial, and smart, who could come up with a way to make money in this market where the competition is obviously not satisfying the demand. What kind of company would you create to compete with these terrible out-sourced call-centers? Let me hear your ideas!
Are there any websites where people can compare notes about lousy tech support?
If only it were always this easy. :) I work the worst form of tech support possible: one where you interact personally with the users.
... but I digress.
...
We have Student ITS at our school, where we have to fix every little thing wrong with every crappy computer any student on campus sees fit to drop off. If I never see another stick of EDO RAM it'll be too soon
As disgusted as I am dealing with users, I'm more disgusted with this company and their "Mantra." I actually like to fix people's problems, and while formatting a computer can be so much fun, and relieve a lot of stress, dealing with the fallout wouldn't be worth "tricking" a user into it to get something done faster. Besides, I'm the one who has to sit through re-installing XP
Xbox reviews.. We think they're funny.
You can tell when they're reading off the script. The worst is whn they've been beaten down so throughly (i.e. "well trained") that they are completely unable to depart from the script. Of course that's viewing the situation charitably - the alternative is that they were that way to start with.
I refer to these people as "MeatBots".
New MeatBot TM ! It's a robot - made of meat!
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
Up until about 5 years ago, I was a punter like that outlined in the story. It was highly encouraged.
The Metrics in use favored talk time, quality, then solve rate. Solving the problem was never the preferred resolution.
I spent 30 minutes on the phone with a highly foreign support rep who pronounced Ohio like 'Oreo'. My satisfaction with the entire call (not necessarily just the rep) was quite low. I will never buy another product from this company unless under some duress.
What I wonder is why technical support is such an administrative afterthough for a product. Good support seems paramount in ensuring a repeat customer. I've heard several customer services paradigms, as well as actual statistics, supporting the case that it's easier and less expensive to keep existing customers than to advertise and attract new ones.
Yes, I realize outsourcing is cheaper. Yes, I realize it's even cheaper to those to whom English is often a second language. However, I'd like to talk to some sort of peer while I'm on the phone, as I'd feel more comfortable with the support experience.
Since this is a hardware part that I will probably replace within 3 years for the better/faster/same priced combo, I am confident that purchase won't be made from the same company.
-m.
Karma Whore. Mod down.
No, the answer is not to patronize those with Crappy service. But from the looks of it, service doesn't really matter much to most people here. People don't want to pay for good service, so they get cheap service and complain that it is CRAPPY.
Price, Quality and Service. You can have only two of the three.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Morality of reposting from Salon aside, my brain read the whole article in Ed Norton's "Fight Club" Narrator voice - you know, the "He was wearing his cornflower blue tie" one.
Try it. It's spookily apt.
|>
Here be Dragons
The LCD was harder as I had to convince the staff that they had said any pixel problems was enough to get it changed and any pixel problem includes an always on red sub pixel. But got it changed.
Yet almost all people I meet say that they prefer to buy name brands because of the warranty and phone support. Both are crap but it probably gives them a nice fuzzy feeling.
I buy from shops and although I have needed it so far for computers it is far easier to demand to see the manager in person then it is over a phone line.
So I got exactly one question for you. Was this the last time you bought from this company or did you vote with your dollars and say "Yes sir thank you sir can you waste my time again SIR!"
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
WRONG Since people keep buying from companies with lousy support these companies have no incentive to improve tech support. The problem isn't the techs the problem is the customers who keep accepting this crap.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This story is absolutely true. I'm sure this will come as a shock to those who have dealt with Qwest, but I feel I must share my story...
<rant>
We recently dropped our long distance carrier from our phone line. The phone line is a shared ADSL line. The change goes through, and my DSL disappears. WTF?
I call my ISP, and they talk to my DSL provider (which is not Qwest). They determine within minutes that the circuit is open at Qwest's end, and that I need to call Qwest and get them to fix it.
Sighing heavily, I wait 45 minutes on hold to talk to Qwest DSL tech support. I describe my problem, and they ask if I have done anything to the line recently. Decent question to ask, so I tell them about dropping our LD carrier. He puts me on hold, then conferences me in with a DSL salesman. A DSL salesman! "We don't do have anything to do with someone else's DSL!" the salesman tells me. "You'll have to talk to your ISP again." They transfer me to repair, and repair says there is nothing wrong with my line. My phone line that is. "That's not the problem!" I say. "Well, it's not our problem."
So I call my ISP back, and they say the problem is still at Qwest's end. They can't provide DSL service over an open circuit. I still need to get Qwest on the phone. They tell me to have Qwest conference me in with them. Trying to be patient, I call Qwest again...
After another 45 minutes on hold, I get someone who is even more clueless than the previous person. I tell him my problem, and he wants to look me up in their DSL database. "But I am not a Qwest DSL customer!" I tell him. He looks me up anyway. "I can't find you in the database," he says. Really. I just told you that. Heasks what operating system I'm using. WTF? I ask him to conference in my ISP so that they can describe what's going on. Frequent repetitions of this request are met with a huge amount of resistance. "I can talk to someone here about your problem," he says. "Fine," I say, talk to someone else and put me on hold again.
"We don't support other provider's DSL," he returns with after 5 minutes on hold. "That's not the problem!" I plea. "It's not our problem," he says, and transfers me to repair, who claims they don't have anything to do with DSL. Angry, I hang up, and call my ISP back. "Help me please!"
A few days go by. My ISP and DSL provider escalate this help call within their own systems and get a Qwest person with a clue on the case. Within a few hours, they determine that Qwest miswired my line after we dropped our LD carrier. WTF? Within a few minutes of determining this, my DSL service is back on.
"It's not our problem." No one at Qwest even made the slightest effort to try to delve deeper into my problem, they just wanted to get me off the phone as quickly as possible. Today's tech support is getting more and more useless. If you don't have an inside person in the system, you don't stand a chance of getting your problem fixed these days.
</rant>
"What luck for the rulers that men do not think." Adolf Hitler
The problem is that good tech support costs money, and when they see your shiny new product that costs 10-20% more on the shelf next to the one with tech support that sucks, the customer isn't thinking he'll need tech support, much less about the relative merits of yours versus theirs.
Many moons ago, I had a laptop with a failed floppy drive. I tried calling the tech support center, explained that I had failed hardware, and it was still under warranty. The person there said she would transfer me to the right department, would I please hold. Pretty soon I was disconnected.
Tried it again. Same result.
So the 3rd time, I said "I have some failed hardware, I need an estimate how much it would be to fix it."
This time I got through to a technician, and when he asked me what the problem was, I explained, and then mentioned as an aside, "Oh, and it's still under warranty!"
Maybe they were just having problems with their phone system... makes you wonder.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Like so many of you out in the world of IS/IT, I too started in the 2nd layer of hell, Technical Support.
The problem, in my experience, and highlighted in this article, is the corporate love of outsourcing. Using my own experience as example, I started some years ago working for a particular linux based company doing tech support. At the time I started, the in-house support people handled phone support for corporate customers, and web-based support for non-corporate customers (i.e. those who didnt pay for a specific contract). The phone support was handled by an outsource "Partner" who had call centers on both coasts.
When I first started, the level of customer satisfaction for support was abyssmal. Being the "in house experts" we were drafted to monitor calls and offer critique to the outsource company. In the end, nothing we could do worked, and their treatment of our customers was so bad, we finally dropped them like a bad habit, and brought all support in-house.
Now, flash forward a year later, and the dirty word is mentioned again. So, in a nutshell, after the team I was on turned support completely around, from a low 30% satisfaction rate to nearly 95%, they turn around and ship our jobs off to another oursource company in a different country, and we were mostly out of jobs.
And same thing happened. Customer satisfaction fell through the floor.
So, the moral of this story is: outsourcing something that is customer facing like Support is a Bad Thing[tm]. Like the article stated, oursource techs dont really care one way or another (or those that do care are quickly replaced with ones who dont) and the company is just out for low call times and high volume. Techs who are actually employed by the company they represent are much better workers, and provide much better support to customers. Why? because for the most part, outsource techs are just hired guns who could care less about the company whose calls they are taking, while in-house techs have a certain pride in their work, knowing that when they look good, the company looks good, stays in business, gives chance for promotion, etc etc...
And again, thats just from my personal experience on both sides of the fence.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Yes, but you have to pay for it and do all the work.
Let's recap this little transaction for our readers:
[1] Dell reduces costs by getting rid of first-tier support or moving it overseas
[2] Dell charges you or your company a fee to enroll in this program
[3] You do all the technical support (testing, troubleshooting, etc.) thus saving Dell on per-call communication costs
[4] Dell pockets the savings from #1, #2, and #3
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
-Alex
What does the fact that they are Indian have to do with whether or not they read from a script? The Salon article demonstrates pretty well that the US has plenty of underinformed support drones that will do whatever they are instructed to do for money.
I worked in Apple Tech Support in Austin ten years ago, and with the exception of "evil Charles," I think I knew 90's versions of everybody mentioned in the article. They didn't press us as much to get off the phone quickly in those days, but other than that, it doesn't look like things have changed much...
How do I know it was a hardware failure? Because the picture was screwed before it even booted the OS. Nevertheless, I checked teh BIOS - then checked for windows drivers, etc. Found no Problems!
Called Dell as this was a new computer less than 4 months old. And has been sitting in the same location the entire time. After 1 hour on the phone with tech support (mind you I explained all that I had done right away), with them having me jump through all sorts of hoops, they finally told me to send it in - NO SH!T . Why the hell should I be checking windows anyway, when the monitor is screwed b4 it ever SEES windows. What A Waste.
Now for AT&T Broadband
Ping on Unreal Tournament kept creeping to well over 10,000 ms (LOL), anyway I can monitor my network stats in UT and see that I had over 50% packet loss.
Verified this by running a traceroute to random servers and web addresses.
Always got ping timeouts for one particular router on AT&T's network.
Called customer support, we all know what happens next (clear your cache? do you have enough ram? Have you updated windows? Power cycle the modem) In the Entire time I have been on the net, none of these have EVER been the problem.
To make a long story short (because this is pissing me off just to write about it), THREE months later after at least six phone calls and over three hours on the phone, 3 tech visits to my home - leaning cables, measuring signal strength, etc. the problem was finally fixed.
What was the problem you ask? THEY HAD A PROBLEM WITH ONE OF THEIR ROUTERS and this was only fixed because I had a super nice Technician visit my house, give me his PERSONAL CELL number and promise to keep on them.
WELL DUH! I told them that 3 months earlier, geez I'm no genius, can they even have enough sense to check on something someone tells them - especially when they appear to have some computer knowledge (mind you I talked to Tier 2 support several times as well)
I should've known that they were clueless when I asked how to view my MAC address in windows 2000. I just upgraded from 98, and didn't know much. I asked the Tech about it they said winipcfg, I said that that didn't work under 2000 (of course its ipconfig). Anyway, the Tech said he would ask his supervisor - who got on the phone and said that I didn't need it anyway. Mind you at this time AT&T broadband restricted access to cable modems by MAC addresses. I explained that I needed it for a new NIC (computer) that I had purchased, he further claimed I didn't need the MAC address, since I had allready been using the service. I told him I had a new computer (with a different NIC of Course)
anyway, to make a long story short, I pulled a NIC out of my previous computer, accessed the internet and found my answer. Was up and running on the new NIC in under 5 minutes. Time on the phone with tech support 1 hour. NOT having to go through this sh1t ever again PRICELESS
I work for a web hosting company, www.liquidweb.com, and we actually provide GOOD support.
When you call us you're talking to a bunch of Linux geeks that actually know what we're doing. Whether it's upgrading your server's kernel or fixing Apache issues, we do it all.
If you ever have a problem with their desktop shipping software (that nobody on earth has any useful doc for) their first suggestion is ALWAYS to reinstall... Even if you've already done that, even if you know you accepted the defaults they specified...
Their next step is ALWAYS to send you another CD-ROM of the software, even if you have two copies of the same version and neither gets you anywhere. This is their "get off the phone" move, because they don't offer a download or FTP site... Instead, you must ALWAYS have it shipped to you, even if it is going to cost your business a large amount of money.
Actual Quote from Manager: "Sir, we can't afford the bandwidth to allow people to download a 650 mb CD-ROM from our web-site! We'd go broke!"
Me: "I zipped the entire contents of the CD into a 12 mb file..."
Manager: "The size is irrlevant, I simply cannot offer you any further support until you install from the new CD-ROM we're sending you."
This might be my favorite Slashdot story every... There've been tech support hell-tales before, but this is an intellgent dissection of the problem. A dreadfully wondeful story.
Who did what now?
...reading that makes me feel proud that I'm actually able to answer peoples tech problems, regardless of how long it takes. must be something to do with working for a small company and not some massive beast. I get many people who will call, after weeks of problems and when asked why this is the first contact, they mostly say they did not want to bother us! umm, dude, we'd be out of a job if you did not call? I think they are also suprised when they get hold of a human being and not some automated system. Then they actually speak to a true tech who knows the product and not some PFY sitting in front of a database of common problems, Yeah, there are times when I "do a Ken" but it can't be that bad, would not be hear 10 years on if it was!
I manage a small callcenter (5 people) who take calls for support on products we sell. This is a little different because we aren't the manufacturer, or an outsourced arm of the manufacturer. We are the endpoint of the distribution channel.
Our goals are reduced visits by field engineers who typically bill $$$$ to be onsite to solve what is frequently a simple problem. Our calls aren't timed, and we do pretty much whatever it takes to solve the problem. Today, we talked a customer thru configuring Zone Alarm correctly so they can use our product. Sure it took over half an hour, most of our calls do. But the important point is that the customer was happy when we were done.
I have been here 4 years now, and don't have the absolute gut level hatred of my job that I hear from many support people. I am posting this because I want you to know that not all support centers are awful dens of customer dissatisfaction. Some of us do actually do our jobs.
Globalization will balance everything out in the long run, but the first few hundred years are going to piss a lot of people off.
I have to disagree. Its balancing out jobs, but that balance is not being passed on. Cars are built in Mexico, but they are not costing any less, in fact their price is still going up.
Our annual telephony costs are over 7 digits per year, easy... and getting any form of tech support, despite being a rather large account, is damned near impossible. The reason?
Everyone wanted 10 cents per minute. Then 9. Then 8. Then 5. Then 4. If a telco doesn't offer it, everybody dumps them.
Think they can offer any support at those rates? They can't - anyone with any experience costs too much, and is retired out. We get left with "script kiddie" tech supports, who don't understand what an T3 is, let alone know what the loss of one means. At this point, our tech support for AT&T now consists of a call to our sales rep, followed by a call to a VP - and let them deal with it, because it's the best they can do.
So, don't bitch - we're all getting *exactly* what we asked for.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
I'm reading some of the responses to this article, and one thing that stands out is the large number of people who cry out "It isn't real! It isn't true!"
I'm curious - from what well of wisdom does your disbelief spring?
I've worked for Wal-Mart, a tech-support firm, and for my state government. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the sort of business practices described in this article are not relegated simply to tech support; they permeate corporate culture. They are very, very real.
Considering the almost universally crappy service at McDonald's, transfer/machine hell on automated "help" lines, incomprehensible and unethical billing practices by phone companies, undisguised hostility and ingnorance in goverment offices, chronic understaffing and undertraining in department stores, spam, and a host of other noxious and common business practices . . . well, i'm just tempted to ask you, "What the hell kind of bubble have you been living in?"
Good service in any business arena is the exception and not the rule. If this is not the case where you live, please send me an application to your gated community. I want to move there as soon as possible.
** Chigusaaa!!! You're the coolest girl in the WORLD!!! **
I can't wait for more tech support to be farmed out to teams who actually help, as opposed to those who say they do, but are watching their call log.
A company I wont mention has made a system that can read what you say in several languages then present to the tech support person what is basically compared to a ranked google search with percentages of revelance attached to each subject. The tech support person is supposed to read the highest ranked one verbatim to the customer. Of course "We dont support that" probably comes 50 times more than a real answer.
This is the reason I dont buy my computers I build them.. I teach those around me who I build computers for the basics of adding and removing stuff if needed and how usb and the connector color coding works. They're largely on their own past that but I do encourage them to grab a few dummies books if it's too hard.
Sadly my mother is too damn lazy to even read one she just calls me. Maybe I should say "I dont support that"
hmmmm
I had problem with my office jet some months ago. The printer gave an error saying that the cardridge was not inserted correctly. So I bought a new cardridge, but the same error occured. I was really pissed, because the OfficeJet had just received a fax but could not print it, so I even could not switch it off without losing the fax. When I called HP tech support, they not only solved my problem within minutes (wash the cardridge with water and soap and insert it again), but a few days later I found a new cardridge in my mail. Oh, and I had a professional tech support from HP that helped me setting up an Itanium machine. That support was superb.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
A paid subscription site, eh? Information should always be free, especially if it's useful. In this instance I question the usefulness of this article because it doesn't offer a better solution. I'm glad I didn't pay for this article. I looked at some of the other Salon articles that were recommended at the end, and they were so rife with over-descriptive, drippy purple prose that it made my teeth hurt. This is really bad writing by people who think that they're really good writers. Bad writing affects me physically; I will never return to salon.com and I'm sure it's no skin off their nose. But back to the topic... honestly, isn't it obvious that "free" phone support is useless? This is nothing new; it's been this way since the dawn of tech support. Even some of the paid support is useless unless you're on a premium support contract with someone big like IBM, Sun, or HP. In those instances you end up with skilled technicans who know what they're doing and in appropriate circumstances have access to service manuals and other important tools that you can't get to otherwise. For home users, nothing beats community support. All of us here should know that already, and we should be passing this knowledge (along with links to good forums and lists) to those who don't know. -Jem
I'd rather hired a skilled pot smoking tech than a clean one with no tech skills...
Pot smoking tech: "Whoa dude, that computer problem is totally bogusss!"
No skill clean tech: "What's a computer?"
Another thing that really hit home with me was the second tier support positions. These people are supposed to be knowledgeable beyond that of the average tier 1 techie... but they are not.
I hate inexperienced techs... I hate damn script readers... but companies love them because polite people who can read a script are cheaper by a large margin than actually tech-enabled geeks.
In regards to the dell comments... I have usually been able to bear with the accent problems and that, that is until my last dealings with them. I had a workstation with something wrong with the video card. The machine had hung, the user reset the tower and after that there was lines all over the screen during post and when hitting F8 to select safe mode (the only way windows would start) the text would all be wrong... like the wrong letters here and there. Since this was happening BEFORE windows loaded it was IMPOSSIBLE that this had ANYTHING to do with video drivers. Try explaining THAT to a script reading idiot across a language barrier!! Two calls and two hours later I finally got them to get me a new damn video card.
www.madeofwinandawesome.com
A sensasional artical than it is factual. Now I don't doubt that many of the issues raised in call centers ring true, been there done that, there are a few things that I personally have seen that need to be taken into consideration.
First of all, it's average call time. While most of my experiance has to do with ISP support there are still a lot of parallels. Say you get a 30 min call, then a 5 min call, then a 10 min call. Right there your at 15 mins ACT. Not great but if your trying to actually solve problems rather than "punt" or "give" the call away it's a respectable ACT to have. Now how do you know that 15 mins is a respectable call time if it's 3 mins over your 12 min limit? Next point...
Any good call center has peer review and then the big client review. (I don't touch on client review here but suffice to say there are often frantic scrambles down to the "floor" from the boardroom to tell tech X that he better do a good job on this call, time be dammed!) Peer review is typically a weekly thing that every manager has to submit to their "Account Manger" every week. Plug into the call queue and listen though a call. Not the most fun but it really does need to be done to ensure that people have a clue what they are talking about. (This is assuming you as the manager actually have a clue, but I digress.) Many times this job is left to the managers lackys, sometimes called "Team Leads", but the important thing is that it gets done by someone who has a good understanding of what to listen for in a call. You then can use this data with the statistics on call times and such to get a real picture of how a tech is dealing with calls. Only looking at the #'s leads to...
The drive to get as many calls as humanly possable, problem solving be dammed. And yeah, it's there and will be until the clients (The people who outsource their support needs.) realize that paying by call instead of "resolutions" is a truely asinine way of doing things. However, since many companys have yet to realize this you will have call centers gouging at the trough of calls/money. So often what is done by clever managers is to strike a balance of techs who do both, those "turn and burn" calls and those who actually try to fix problems. It is far from a perfect solution as those who don't fix anything tend to leave the customers in a very upset state for those that do actually try and fix things, or even worse the punters manage to make the problem worse before ending the call. But it's a way to actually keep the gravy train running while still being able to keep most of the angry customers from writing scathing letters to the powers that might actually cancel your contract.
I could go on but I think everyone should get the idea by now. Hopefully one of these days the people who outsource their support will get a clue and use that magic word resolution rather than trying to just look at #'s but for right now it's at best a frog in the blender mix of both kinda deal.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
It was on Comedy Central the other day, hell it's always on.. I remember noticing, watching the "Jump to Conclusions" scene that the company was spelled "Inotech" on his ID badge..
It could have very well been an in-joke, that the company name is spelled different in different scenes.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I support about 500 boxes: a lot to some, few to others, it's all relative. Most of them are Dells. Tech support from Dell varies from excellent to non-existant; it just depends. I've had support orders submitted that never ever got a reply (for a dead system) even though I have the email confirmations to prove they were submitted (That's happened with orders as well.) On the other hand, I've had a new power supply on my desk within a day. I have a test bench and I usually know precisely what is wrong before I contact them, but many times I have to fight them: a blown hard drive and I have to go thru all these diags.
Given all these issues we've grown to simply not expect any competent tech support. PCs are a commodity item. We buy them dozens at a time. If one breaks, it's far easier to replace it and use the broken one for parts. I don't care if it is under warranty. It is FASTER and LESS EXPENSIVE to just replace it.
Yes, that has implications for the land fill. I appreciate that issue. But when MTBF menas sometime TODAY, I simply cannot afford to believe tech support even exists.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I used to work there. it is the worst of all employers. the article is dead on and I'm also convinced that they're talking abot TAG. I worked there myself for three months. It is the shittiest company in the world.
If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage.
I actually read the article and found it positively HORRIFYING. Since I am around sysadmins all the time, I forget what it's like to be some gullible consumer running Windows XP Home Edition.
How about some Hippocratic Oath action here? You know, "First, do no harm." The Formatters who fail to fully disclose that consumers are going to lose their family's digital photo albums, video clips of newborns, and contact information for friends and family worldwide are lacking in redeeming human value. If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
Call ME gullible, but given our reasonably wide-open markets for building, selling, and supporting PC's, I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers. What's worse is that these practices end up staining all of us in Information Technology as uncaring a-holes. In the future, those PC customers will move on to technologies that they can handle on their own. Hell, they might just buy Apples or some extremely dumbed-down desktop Linux. Just try explaining where "Desktop" is located in Windows Explorer to the average consumer if you think Windows is "simple and intuitive". And the Desktop is the first thing seen after logon!
In principio erat Verbum.
People complain about tech support, but aren't willing to pay for it.
The company I work for has excellent, and I mean excellent, tech support.
But it thousands of dollars per year.
How good tech support do you expect, when you buy a $399 computer or a $29 software package.
This is interesting, as this is the opposite of Apple's tech support. My girl friend had a problem with bad memory in her new eMac, causing the screen to "snap", or flicker. Replacing the RAM did the trick.
However, she was very happy with the technical support people who she said were very helpful, and rather smart. She's very much into computers, and so knows bad tech support when she hears it (she introduced me to Linux, for example), and was very much pleased with Apple's tech support.
She tells me she almost enjoyed the fact that she got to call tech support, made her feel so much better about getting a Mac.
Jason Lotito
Really? How?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
You ripped me off. Word for word.
5 59 755
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=87052&cid=7
Plagarist. I don't mind being copied, translated and quoted, but you passed this off as your own, and that's plagarism. Have you ripped off anything else I've written?
Compaqsucks.com : Compaqs Really Suck!
Here is a example posting of the tech support hell from a Compaq tech support tech.
Tech from Site 38
I'm a Compaq technician; not really I work for Sykes Corp., which contracts to Compaq. Most customers don't understand why they get the support they get. Most techs want to help out but the restrictions that Compaq imposes stops us from helping.
One restriction that Compaq imposes is a time limit. You may call and ask if we have a time limit and we'll answer "no, we don't have a time limit", as we are required to say. When I first started out, we had twelve to fifteen minutes to solve your problem, which can be done if it's a simple question. (I.e. how much RAM can I put in the machine) Then about four months later the time length moved again to ten through twelve minutes to solve and if you had to rebooted the system three times then your times up. Well, guess what... the time limits have moved again. Currently the limit is from six to ten minutes to solve your problem. Currently the only way to get complex machine corrected is to QR the machine whether it needs it or not. Wait... Hold on a bit... I know what you're going to say and I AGREE WITH YOU. A lot of problems can be fixed without doing the QR..... Here's the catch 22 for us the techs.... If we don't get you off the phone in the current time limit when we will be written up or later fired if it keeps happening (PERIOD). For an incentive, we the techs get paid more money if we get you off the phones faster. Yes this is the first time that I've gone to work for a company to deceive people about Compaq's problems.
Another restriction that Compaq imposes takes place in giving support to the customer. According to Compaq, we are under no condition to tell people about the major problems with different systems. If you read the tech's (from site 58) information when you could see what I'm talking about. Also if you get a computer that will not work and it's out of the box or about every component has been replaced, we can not tell you to take it back even if we thinks it's a Lemon. If we tell you the customer to take it back to the store and Compaq is monitoring the call they will call Sykes and tell Sykes to remove that tech from their employment. So what do you think Sykes will do... fire an honest tech or jeopardize losing the contract? So what do we have to say is that we (Compaq) will get the computer fixed. Now for the fun part is that out of box monitor or printer not working we can replace it...But what we can't tell you is that it will be replaced with a refurbished component...Yes someone old rebuild piece of equipment in exchange for your new monitor or printer. I have finally got it all figured out. We are not here for customer support but for customer management... Do you remember during the Gulf war when all the American people in Iraq were forced to stay at military site so that we wouldn't bomb those sites? Well Compaq must have thought it was a great idea because they're using the same tactics. And we the techs are there to protect from any customer from getting to them but instead of oil or weapons we're protecting Compaq's money. We the tech are the human wall set up by Compaq.
Not only do we have to deal with Compaq but we have to deal with Sykes too. Some of the internal operations disable us from help you. After our initial training, we start receiving less and less training. All of the software that comes with the computer old and new, we have had no training unless we have the program a home or check it out after hours. Many techs have requested formal training on a program that people uses a lot but all requests for trainin
He'll interrupt with, "Tell them we can't support the system unless it's in its original condition."
Compaq.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Before I buy something either expensive and/or potentially problematic (video capture hardware used to be a very good example), I check out the web site of the company in question. The main thing I look for is the support pages. I'm looking for a public forum. 1. It gives me a hint at potential problems I might face if I buy this product. 2. Any problems I (might) come across often already have a solution that someone else figured out. If that solution is to return the product and buy similar product X, I know where to move on. If the solution is a configuration tweak or a driver download, then I might just brave it anyway. Call center? What's that?
At the end of the call, it clicks you over to a phone bank at the contracting company (Dell or whatever). "On a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being abysmal and 5 being great, please rate your experience with this call." Beep! "Thank you. Your rating has been recorded." Along with the time of the call, and the call center employee number. The computer at the phone bank records the time of the call and the rating, and using some formula specified in the contract, the amount paid to the contractor is calculated.
Toon toon! Black and white army!
errr I mean Stream. Well on second thought maybe I don't. Gives me the screaming mimi's just thinking about it.
Water Technologies from GE
Helping conserve one of our most precious natural resources.
See what's possibleThere. Was that so painful? If you're going to plagerize the article, you might as well plagerize the ad too!
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
Now for AT&T Broadband
One of the main reasons I've stayed with Speakeasy is that they have excellent support and uptime. Course it costs a lot more -- $80 for 4 dedicated IPs over a covad line versus the $20-30 for cable or Qwest's DSL.
I think the difference is that they can let the morons (not saying that you are) go to the cable and Qwest DSL and they can handle the more professional user. Thus they can dedicate resources to solving real problems versus answering calls about how to close the cup holder.
Plus the whole idea of broadband internet access where one person could screw up your neighborhood's connection is a little frightening.
About accents... it occurs to me that some people probably respond poorly to indian accents on the tech-support line for one or more of these three reasons:
1)They are racist.
2)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think that an outsourced employee is less able than a non-outsourced one.
3)They hear a non-american answer the phone and think of the negative economic connotations associated with outsourcing.
Any way you lose, except on payday.
It reminds me of the culture at a HelpDesk I worked at. Many people who called up were rude, and although some were just naturally jerks, more than a few seemed to think that all helpdesk people are Bastard Operator-types who have bloated egos and no social skills or desire to help anyone.
I have no point. Not even on top of my head.
As companies functioning on small margins seem unwilling to pay for competent tech support, the trick seems to be convincing customers to do it on their own. The best plan I can see is for several dozen of us to band together, become a Dell/HP/etc. certified shop so we can dispense parts and take calls at an hourly (quarter-hourly?) rate. If we charge about $60/hr, the people with simple questions only get stuck for $15, while those requiring the time pay more.
The small matter of getting consumers to pay for independent support or buy support contracts, on the other hand... I got nothin.
Grüß Gott aus Bayern!
well, I don't know if the info here relates to home user support or corporate support but... I've been working with Compaq hardware for over 10 years (in the corporate workplace) I would rank Compaq as among the top 3 companies for support. I call an 800 number and usually get a warm body with actual in depth knowledge of the hardware i am calling about. I've always been impressed with them. HP on the hand, totally blows. again, in talking about corp. support, not end user.
I believe your shorts are too tight.
Like, how? I was expecting this to be about spyware. This isn't Orwellian; it's just sad.
I disliked that job. I didn't hate it, like the Two Guys stint I wrote about last month, but it was not a great experience.
The management was bumbling and just on the edge of mean - always sitting on us to get times down. But, it was Back In The Day, so I had GREAT stock options, so I put up with it for THREE YEARS.
The worst part were the customers, for me. Some were nice, and I liked them, but some were complete IDIOTS.
Here's a few conversations I remember:
Me: So, you're getting a what error?
Caller: Ah got me a tap negative ONE error, and then nuthin happens.
Me: Type one? Sounds like it's a problem with your extensions - some kind of conflict.
Caller: Oh? Wull, lemme check that out raaaht now...
(The sound of the reciever clattering on the table and footsteps across a wooden floor. The sound of furniture moving. The sound of more furniture moving. Fottsteps coming back tothe phone)
Caller: Why it CAIN'T be an extensheeyuns problem.
Me: Really? How do you figure?
Caller: Wull, ever-thang's plugged in JES' FINE!!!
Another fine user of our product:
Caller: Hi! My name's JIM! Who're YOU? ... how does it not work?
Me: Ralph. How can I help you Jim?
Caller: Well, my (program) won't fucking WORK! (puffs from a cigarette)
Me: Bummer. You're using it for what purpose there Jim?
Caller: I'm the webmaster of the Bluebird Trailer Court. I'm tryin to set up a way that we call all get onto the web and order supplies for our, ummm, homes without any kind of time wastin' - so like if someone runs out of Propane, they just get on the web and bingo: everything is done all automatic like.
Me: That's a pretty sophisticated job, Jim.
Caller: DAMN FUCKIN STRAIGHT! AND YOUR GODDAMN SOFTWARE AIN'T FUCKIN' WORKIN! (swills something from a bottle, and smokes some more.)
Me: I understand Jim, and I'm here to help you. Where you located? What's your serial number? (We do the business part of the call) Wow. Texas? You must be hot there this time of year.
Jim: It ain't the heat, it's the damn humidity (slap of skin. Truck roars by... I'm getting the impression he's sitting there crushing mosquitoes, drinking whiskey -his speech is beginning to slur as he gets louder and louder; in his underwear - because it's an oven where he is, and lives in the trailer next to the Highway - judging by all the traffic noise. A vision of HELL - a trailer park in southern Texas...)
and DAMN it's humid here today!
Me: Bummer Jim. so, let's see
Jim: It doesn't do what I want it to.
Me: Are you in front of it now?
Jim: YEP! AND IT'S DOING IT AGAIN!!!!
Me: What? I thought it didn't work...
Jim: It works - IT JUST DON'T WORK RIGHT! DAMMIT! (swills more booze smokes more cigarette...)
Me: OK OK - quit the app and do EXACTLY as I tell you...
Of course, he didn't and all he did was get completely shitfaced drunk and go through a pack of Merits. Eventually he started hitting his computer. At that point, I couldn't stop stifling my laughter, and put him on hold. I conference called him in with another tech, because Jim was a LOSER beyond loser. We were both hitting the mute button because we were laughing hysterically at this nincompoop. It devolved to something like this:
Jim: SEE? THERE!!! IT DID IT AGAIN! I'm tellin ya this fucking thing is CURSED!!!!
Me: I'm sorry Jim, I didn't see anything - we're on the telephone. Tell me what you saw.
Jim: OH RIGHT! uuuuh Well, IT' DIDN'T WORK AGAIN! DAMMIT! And (hits computer) this damned Compaq is a piece of CRAP. I friggin HATE this thing.
Me: I'm not sure it's the computer, and while I know you're using a very old PC, we do make the same software for Macintosh, if you do cross over to Mac. So either way, you can use this program and not lose your work.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
I don't find that surprising at all. People want things to be easy, and what's easier than having someone smart do it for you?
What surprises me is that we still have not formed a geeky union for the purpose of denying the PHBs and cheerleaders our *ahem* services until we get the *ahem* services that we desire.
1) Manufacture, Sell, And Service Mainframes At Nice Fat Profit
2) Invent Killer Micros
3) Watch Killer Micros Cluster Up And Kill Other Mainframe Manufacturers
4) Watch Killer Micros Get Dirt Cheap And Kill Killer Micro Manufacturers
5) Manufacture, Sell, And Service Mainframes^W Consolidated Enterprise Servers At Nice Fat Profit
Editor's note: All names have been changed.
Later in the article:
Loni is a great guy.
Loni?
Who makes up these names? Couldn't they at least come up with a gender-matching name? Did Salon outsource the picking of names to some country where it's unclear that "Loni" is a girl's name?
And actually, our hardware support is all Dell certified, and we have a parts for most recent GX models in stock. But we've got almost 10,000 systems, and a lot of smaller companies don't have this luxury. I can see a torrent of companies with even a couple of hundred machines leaving if they had to deal with this all the time.
While some of us demand the whole home run for our services, others will settle for a damn smile and five minutes of female company.
Assholes, aren't they?
is that you??
If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
You obviously have never called tech support. I refuse, to this day, to call Windows tech support lines for anything. That's because, in the early days of Windows (3.1 to win95) every damned problem came down to re-installing Windows. I hear it's better now but I'm not gonna try it.
Say what you will, I think this entire idiotic non-support tech support model, along with its casual contempt for the customer and the customer's data, was pioneered by Microsoft.
I call tech support and was greeted by the following message: "Thank you for your call, you will be charged 60 cents a minutes for your call". Including the 20 minutes I spent holding before I hung up fuming.
I guess that's the worse way to make money I've ever seen, but my parents were all surprised to hear about 800 free numbers in the US. Hell of a business plan: make a crappy product and charge customers for holding.
I wrote them by email and 45 days later got an very generic answer in the form: "Make sure your modem is plugged in properly". What a joke. Stay away from free.fr at all cost.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
If there was a standard board and configuration for laptops that I could build myself, then I'd have a new laptop. Until then I'll get by without one. Is there one? Haven't checked recently. That would be cool.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
...would call them meatbags :)
I did that _on purpose_ and it took me awhile. Let me shake this idiot's hand!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
AT & T Universal Card: Companies are not only using Indians to do jobs that were done by Americans. Companies are using Indians to further abuse their customers. I talked with one Indian woman at AT & T Universal Credit Card customer support who told me that she had no way to contact anyone but her Indian manager, and that the Indian manager had no way to contact anyone at AT & T. So, there is no way to resolve any legitimate problem. The logic seems to be, "Why should we hire Americans to abuse our customers? We should get Indians to do all the ugly jobs."
ECS (Elitegroup) Motherboards: One of the answers is to call the technical support for a product before you ever buy the product. I wish I had done that before buying and testing 8 L7VTA V1 motherboards from ECS. I found that the ECS technical support line is a recording that says something like, "All of our customer support personnel are busy helping other customers. Please call back at a later time." There is no opportunity to leave a message. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: 510-226-7333 option 4 for technical support. Only one of the 8 motherboards works as advertised, and ECS will do nothing about it; they don't answer email either.
Support Ed Foster: Maybe the only person who is doing anything about this is Ed Foster. Here are the companies in the GripeLog Hall of Shame: 1: Dell, 2: Microsoft 3: VeriSign 4: Intuit 5: Symantec 6: Network Associates 7: HP 8: Cisco.
I've personally been abused by Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, and Intuit. I have no desire to repeat that ugly experience. So, I try to stay away from anything they do. In my experience, they are not companies that sell computer software and hardware, and are sometimes abusive. They are abuse companies that also sell software and hardware. The world of computing would have been a far better place if Bill Gates had had a caring childhood. The world of computing would be a far worse place if we didn't have good leaders like Linus Torvalds.
1. As stated, corporate customers DON'T WANT first tier support. They employee people who are more knowledgeable than first tier support.
2. The fee comes out of the IT department's training budget because Dell requires "training" before permitting you to order your own parts.
3. You troubleshoot PC problems as a matter of course; often they're fixable. Even hardware problems can be fixed by using spare parts lying around.
4. Dell passes the savings on to their customers. It's called "competition" and whoever submits the lowest bids to the big companies gets the contract.
------------
If I ever want to feel like I've been cheated, I look at my company's financials and then look at my paycheck.
salon's silly daypass system has *never* worked for me. typically i get through all the ads, whatever they are, only to be punted right back to their frontpage again and asked if i'd like to view an ad for the free daypass. i'd do that gladly if i actually got to READ THE ARTICLE afterwards, but since i don't - i'm overjoyed that there are slashdot AC's willing to break their stupid copy prot^H^H^H^H^Hright.
But in the end salaries will balance out just about everywhere.
Wow, I doubt that. First off, there are billions of people earning a lot less than the compartively low paid knowledge workers in countries like India. Some are qualified to take fight for those offshored jobs, others will be - maybe in a year, maybe in 10 years, but they'll be there to compete.
Plus, it's not like these jobs that go offshore go directly to someone at a lower rate. They go to a company that fills those positions. And I guarantee you they keep as much as they can.
So what does this really mean? It means people who want jobs being shipped out of the US will work for much less than it looks like they are now.
The only way you might outperform local salary averages is if your position requires physical proximity, and many don't, nowadays.
What can you do? Buy some stock.
Good advice. Buy stock and if you want real job security, do something that would be really difficult to send overseas.
Based on the last line of the story, I had to wonder if the whole thing was made up!
But, I recall one of my best friends being trained to handle support at [name withheld, but a hugemongous PC company in Texas] in the early-mid 90s. If the user had an actual problem, as opposed to simply not being able to figure out an app, the first two things my friend was taught to try were:
1) reboot the computer
2) if that doesn't fix it, reinstall Windows.
And he wasn't kidding me - that was how he approached his home system, afterwards, as well.
He didn't stay in support very long, either.
So, I guess I'm not American, huh? I must have misunderstood the relationship between the geography I learned in school and what's on my birth certificate.
>>$8/hr to flip burgers at McDonalds
When the f*k did Mcdonalds raise their pay to $8/hr??
>>$9/hr to get screamed at
Wow, $9 per hour? my first tech support job only paid 8. And I didn't even quit when I discovered that my temp agency was internally listing my pay as $10 (as in, I was supposed to get $10/hr instead of $8) because I didn't think p'o.ing my first serious employer was good strategy.
>>I'd take burger-flippin' any day. I may come home smelling like french fries, but a quick shower will fix that and that extra dollar just isn't worth it to me.
You and I must be very different people. I feel exactly the opposite, I'd rather deal with frustrated people than be dirty, smelly, spattered with hot oil, and go home with legs aching from standing all day. After Mcdonalds one needs a shower. After tech support, usually all I need is beer or comedy or excersize.
because otherwise the endpoint of that 1-800 number would have been a smoking crater. I'd be a shame if I accidentally killed you; you seem nice enough.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
While MS may have pioneered this approach in the tech field, most companies should not be in a position to emulate this callous disregard. After all, MS has long enjoyed monopoly power but hardly anyone can talk of most (any?) PC makers having monopoly power. It seems like such lousy service is not something these PC makers should be able to get away with providing. On the other hand, MS can barely warm over Windows 95 again, throw in a few features, recommend business buyers NOT purchase the product, and foist it on consumers as "Windows Millenium Edition" (not to be confused with the millenium edition of Windows NT known as Windows 2000). Now THAT's monopoly power.
BTW, Neal Stephenson hit this nail on the head in his essay "In the Beginning was the command line" seen here. In the essay, he predicted a future MS operating system would consist of logging on and just seeing one button to click. Voila, I give you "Luna" in XP (years later).
In principio erat Verbum.
I'm a tech support survivor of nearly two years. I finally got out of that rat race and went back to school, and I have never looked back.
Coming out of it, I really think you need to blame the business model. I worked on several different contracts, and the one thing that struck me in common was that businesses all saw support as an afterthought. Something they have to provide, but rather wouldn't. One major OEM I worked for had as a mandatory part of our call script that we would direct people to online self help at the end of our call. Clearly they were trying to push people to less expensive support alternatives.
It's funny, because I worked for one of the "better" outsourcers (Sykes Enterprises). We were actually given fairly decent hands on training and had management that, while still definitely management, at least cared enough to put a human face to things, and to explain -why- we had to do things the way we did. And they were jerks on AHT (Average Handle Time) as long as you actually got issues resolved and kept the ACW (time between calls filling out notes) down. And for this, my company had difficulty holding onto contracts because we would be outbid by lower cost competitors promising higher callflow per buck. Businesses clearly cared a lot more for lowest price than highest quality. And even with a relatively decent employer, the job was still extremely high pressure.
I was fortunate because I came in already knowing a lot, but you can't possibly know enough in this industry. You have no idea just how -obscure- computer trouble can be until you've worked the phones, and this is exponentionally compounded by trying to piece together what's going on from customers who don't know the vocabularly of computerspeek, let alone how to construct sentances with it - all they know is it's broken, and they need it fixed yesterday so they can finish their master's thesis. It's a bit like trying to perform brain surgery blindfolded while wearing oven mits, except even then you can actually touch what you're working on.
As computers and electronics get more complicated -and- cheaper this is only going to get worse. Tech support -is- an expenditure - there is no direct profit involved to the manufacturers and service providers - only indirect benefits of customer retention/loyalty. We're already seeing this to a certain extent, and I forsee it becoming more prevalent - two tier support. You can get free support with underpayed, undertrained phone jockeys who may or may not fix the issue reading from their scripts, or you can call a fee based line, pay $2.00 a minute and get someone who actually knows what they're talking about. I think the days of high quality free support are numbered if they haven't passed already.
Like I said, I left, and I'm never looking back.
I got hired, put off my show up date a couple of times, and finally had to not take the job due to a scheduling thing. Did you ever know that Black chick named Mika? She's was a hotty, nice ass on the girl. I wouldn't have minded jumping on that Asian chick, Shannon, as well. She had that Valley Girl stuck-upness to her, but I bet she could fuck like a beast.
I worked briefly in a call center several years back. I got called into the manager's office because my average call time was too long. I pointed out that my average for successfully closed calls was higher than anyone else there, and that my average call times were only slightly higher than average for the call center.
His response was basically, "Yes, that's very nice and all, but you need to lower your average call time." The next day I was getting really frustrated about my call times and just said to myself "Fuck it, this job sucks." So I sat there for a couple minutes just hitting the hang-up button every time a call was routed to me until the queue was empty.
A week later I was called back into the manager's office. I thought to myself, "OK, this is it. Today I get fired." Instead I was congratulated on my much improved call times, given a cheesey award and told that I was being put in line for a minor promotion.
I quit and found another job a couple weeks later.
Amazing, isn't it? Yep, the point of moving jobs to other countries is to pass the savings along to investors, not consumers. Eventually they'll equalize the wages in 1st and 3rd world countries. So instead of you earning $40000 per year and Jose earning $400 per year, in the future you both get $4000 per year. The remaining $32400 goes to dividends and executive bonuses. Enjoy!
Reading this story reminds me why I build my own computers. I order all the components online. Typically the parts comes with a 1 or 3 yr manufacturer's warranty. And as long as you order from a reputable business with a reputation for good support, such as NewEgg, you're set.
Other advantages of this approach:
(1) You can save a fair amount of money.
True, you can get a celeron-based machine for $300 from WalMart, but who knows what corners they're cutting? A lot of the quality of a computer is based on motherboard, type of memory, HDD speed, and other factors that are deemphasized by sellers who focus on CPU speed and HDD size.
(2) You can better customize your components to match your needs: gaming, digital video, entertainment center, whatever. You end up with a higher quality computer for less money.
(3) You don't have to deal with any tech support malarchy.
(4) When (not if) your computer breaks, you get to trouble shoot the problem yourself. In the process, you gain a betterunderstanding of your computer. It can be a great learning process. And, the problem-solving aspect can be fun.
(5) You don't have to replace an entire computer to upgrade it. Adding a new video card or more memory might be all you need. My computer is continually evolving.
The big problem is that, as far as I know, this approach is not feasible for laptops, only desktops. If you need a laptop, you might have to end up dealing with big sellers and their tech support.
looks like a cheap attempt at free advertising. you could have gotten your point across without mentioning your company's name & URL
I tried to get to the article. The "ad" certainly played fine, but the article appears to be slashdotted.
What's worse? This at the bottom of the error message:
North American Help Desk (800) 943-8397
European Help Desk +32 2 529-1230
I'm afraid this might let me experience the article first hand....
In fact, with very limited exceptions such as Slashdot, I will not even go through a registration process. I have emailed the NYT to tell them that I did not find their content compelling enough to convince me to register to view it. (They were justifiably unimpressed, and offered to sell me a paper subscription. ;-)
I do read all kinds of sites with banner ads. Who knows, maybe someday one will look so interesting that I will click it!
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I used to install phone systems for a German company and there was built in software that recorded all sorts of statistics. However the average answer time of the switchboard operator wasn't recorded. I found out later the reason was because of the strong unions in Germany there is a law preventing this type of information being recorded.
Even if your call centre cares enough to do something about you repeatedly hanging up - I never found out if my next to last job did - there are sometimes tricks. The call centre job I was in had a phone system so crappy that just hitting a certain button combination (I can't remember which) would crash the phone, disconnecting the call without anyone being any wiser. Nice.
Quick response:
Dell should provide this service free of charge, and shouldn't require "training" costs for anyone involved if they're not going to bother paying for staff on their own end.
Dell does not generally pass savings on to customers. If anything, Dell's prices have remained as high as any other name-brand vendor, even in quantity. They are the largest PC vendor in the world, have the most efficient supply chain and should automatically be able to provide lower costs, service issues aside.
If you really want to feel cheated, think about how your employer is kicking back money to Dell (or whomever, for services that Dell should be paying for) and how that comes out of your paycheck.
Globalization will balance everything out in the long run, but the first few hundred years are going to piss a lot of people off.
If globalization took a few hundred years, it wouldn't annoy anyone. It is changes that happen quickly enough that you don't have time to adjust to them that are causing people heartburn.
In the end, it all boils down to what economists call comparative advantage. The explanation is pretty simple. If there are two countries, A and B. A makes a widget for $10 and a doohickey for $10. B can make a widget for $12 and a doohickey for $15. Country B will make widgets and country A will make doohickeys because B is more efficient at making widgets.
Now, as for globalization, you have to take everything that gets produced. Sadly for those people looking for someone to give them a job, labor is not what we do efficiently in the US. That's partly the result of our relative wealth and partly because of shortsighted laws that make hiring someone in this country more expensive than it has to be. We can provide capital to the process. If you don't have capital, well, you are going to have to find something else to produce. Specialized expertise can be a money-maker, but you have to know something and you have to be able to sell it.
There are an awful lot of people around who aren't prepared to sell their skills. Yes, I'm a software engineer. Yes, a couple of years ago, I was downsized at the same time that my company was hiring in India, China and several other places with cheap labor. Yes, I've had to look for work then. Yes, I've had to look since. I haven't taken a pay cut yet for two reasons. First, I wasn't overpriced during the telecom/dotCom bubble. Second, I'm pretty good at selling my skills. It isn't solely about what tech skills you have. Its about showing an employer that you know how to make money or save money using them. If I can save you a million dollars a year for the next five years doing something that you're going to need to pay me and two other guys $200K for over the next 6 months, that'll get me into your office. If I can present a business case you can believe, that'll get me a job.
Although i hate bad tech support as much as the next guy, i thought the article was over-the-top. it sounds like tech-support stereotyping. the author has been permitted to omit identifying information. I wonder if salon really did due diligence on this piece.
The writer says he works for one of the top three computer manufacturers. Presumably he's talking about PCs. Who would that be? Dell, HP, IBM?
I've dealt with Dell. Sorry, they are simply not nearly that bad. I'd say the same for HP, although they are less competent than Dell. I've dealt with IBM on the server side. They are far better than the writer describes. Some posters seem to think he is talking about Indian tech support. The writer never said that, and all the names are English/American. I have generally found Indian tech support to be really bad, but they haven't been able to authorize replacement parts. That has always been done by usa-based Level 2 support. At the writer's company, they regularly authorize replacements (see "givers" in the article).
An interesting article, I conclude, but not to be taken literally. It is an encapsulation of all that is wrong with tech support. But not a fair representation of Dell, HP, or IBM support. BTW, the Salon website is really dragging today. I've been getting timeouts. The Slashdot Effect strikes again!
Colour blindness?
Corporate support vs. user support is a whole different ball game. Corpies usually have several things going for them:
It's an IT tech calling, not joe user.
When they call, they have their corp support contract info in front of them.
They didn't do something stupid to the machine, like, say, jam a pen in the power supply fan to get it to stop buzzing.
This makes it real easy to go "oh, ok, it broke, you need an RMA, did you do anything like drop it kick it spill water on it etc" they say "nope, just died", you go, ok rma. Thanks!
That's corp support, in a nutshell. Every once in a while you get a big issue, but it usually affects a lot more people than just one, so you fix 50 computers at once, not just joe user's screwed up mouse port.
Of course, they have. Because we are afraid to back up our words with any claims of fact. The story reads like a piece of satire -- pointed, bitter, and funny. But its claim to be factual is greatly blunted, by reluctance to name the contracting company and the PC manufacturer involved.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
I worked with tech support for a while between high school and the university, and I'll say it's the worst thing I've ever done. I worked at a steel factory for a while and that was much better.
First of all, a lot of the people I worked with had really no experience of fixing computer problems, and the management were even worse. All they looked at was the number of logs you had written and how much pause time you had in the phone system.
Regarding the work itself it was rather ok as long as you helped people with their technical problems, although about 50% of the calls were from angry customers yelling about that their computer has been in service for 2 days longer than it should be, or that the same error still was there after a repair etc... And taking those calls when you had no chance at all to really do anything about the problem was the worst thing of it all. Beeing polite to people who yell at you and call you names, telling them that you will hurry up the process as much as you can when you know you won't do anything about it anyway, because you can't.
I wouldn't recommend my worst enemy to work with tech support.
Their 1-day-pass subscription server has been shut down to prevent the Slashdot crowd from getting 1-day passes. It's not Slashdotted, it's refusing connections - shut down.
Way to Salon-whore, guys.
(site ./ed)
I did phones, for a large software maker's new and legacy operating system. You might be familiar with them..This was back in the heady days of 1995 (get it 95?) I had 8 weeks of traiing on the products, 6 hours on phones, two hours off. Took between 15 and 30 calls per day. I can say that the experience was good. The management was very keen to keep the culture fun and customer statisfaction high.
The people who worked at Softmart Inc. formerly SPC Software's technical support call center, (Office Writer) Softmart purchased SPC's call center to provide helpdesk support for software customers. It soon became one of the leading outsourced partners for technical support.
For a brief time between 1993 and 1997 this organization and it's managers created one of the best call centers in the world and it was a fine organization to work for. We had loads of fun, learned a lot in my two years there I had over 8 weeks of 40 hour per week training.
We had mentors, knowlege exchanges, games, contests, KB's, smorgasboards, happyhours at nearby Babes...mmmm nachos and beer...full bennies and plenty of challenge and rubber band and nerf gun fights. And we helped a lot of people. I owe a lot to the experience I gained there. It was one of the funnest jobs I had.
When a company is run well by smart motivated people good things can happen. Unfortunately the division was sold by the folks back east and as usual the new owners turned the call center into a death march.
Typical.
Actually for computers you get 1 year and then get applecare. It's well worth it though. Applecare doesn't screw around with you and they speak proper English.
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I realize that many people have bad experiences with Indian and Pakistani tech support, but I just want to note that I had difficulties setting up a Netgear wireless base station/router to play well with a Linux firewall/router running NAT. Now clearly this is not a standard setup for home users and was in fact clearly noted as unsupported, however, I called to resolve 2 separate issues with (clearly) Indian tech support. Both times the person I spoke with was extremely knowledgeable and went out of their way to get me running. I haven't run into many American support staff who could help me with any technical questions, especially with non officially supported set ups.
/. for godsakes...
Not trying to flame, just to put a little balance into the picture. "Americanized" foreign call centers seem disingenuous to me, however, if outsourcing SOME support results in skilled support staff being affordable, I'm OK with that. It just seems that the dialogue about outsourcing needs to be balanced with by recognizing where it can be a good thing rather than automatically cry that the sky is falling.
I know, I know, why be reasonable when we can freak out and spread lots of FUD. I am on
'the Internet is right.'
Doubtful. You do realize that people have been making this shortsighted, Luddite argument for hundreds of years? Ever since the original Luddites broke mechanical looms when they feared that those looms would take their jobs?
Well, they were part right, as are you: those looms DID take their jobs. However, they got BETTER jobs that were then available because less of the country's labor was busy making things that could be done by machine. And if they were too dense to get the better jobs, their kids certainly did.
The point is this: offshoring jobs, or replacing humans with machines, is a natural part of the labor cycle. At some point, many jobs become commodity, either because they are unnecessary, become too easy, or because too many people can do them. As the world economy changes, certain jobs go from being expert work to non-expert work, ultimately to machine work. You don't complain because a compiler stole the job of an assembly coder, do you?
Note that the US has maintained its status as an economic powerhouse over the last 60+ years by constantly evolving its labor market. People argued your same argument 40 years ago that manufacturing jobs shouldn't have been mechanized or offshored. They were, and no permanant unemployment resulted. But what if we hadn't offshored those industries? America would be nothing, economically, today.
Bottom line, you can't fight economic trends. You can postpone them and make things worse through an isolationist economy, but you can't change them.
The American economy may be expanding, but it's not expanding nearly as fast as India's or China's. The American economy is not creating jobs nearly as fast as it's loosing them.
As to the first part,it's guaranteed, because China and India are not developed economies. As such, pretty much every Asian economy (other than Japan) has grown faster than America in the last decade. As to the second part, care to substantiate? Outside of the recent recession, that's blatantly false, to which employment statistics will testify. Net American jobs have increased in the last 10 years.
manufacturing is all but gone from this country
Yes, just as it's gone from all of the first world, nearly. Manufacturing jobs don't pay much. Americans don't want them. Americans have better jobs.
and services are also leaving
And new ones are generated every day. So what?
From IT (programming jobs and tech support) to accounting no job is safe from an Indian worker earning a 10th of what his american counterpart makes.
Sure there is. Learn to do something that an uneducated Indian worker CAN'T DO! Look, with all the advantages we have from growing up in America, if there is nothing you can do better than someone from a third world country, you don't deserve a job.
There is only a need for so many doctor (even that they can do remotely these days) or burger flippers.
Really? How many people go to India for burgers or to see their doctor? Because if that's your argument, it's not about offshoring, because those jobs can't be offshored. That's about racism. You know what I call an Indian with US citizenship living in America? An American. And you should too.
This made the job just a teensy bit more difficult when a customer is demanding you stop sending them porn popups and you have no way to say it's not coming from us and we have nothing to do with it, because you're not allowed to say no. Instead you have to try and quickly come up with some hippie bullshit that's "phrased positively" like "These popups are used to generate advertising revenue and usually come from the website you're reading, or sometimes from software that has been installed on your computer. We only provide the internet connection so the popups come from other sources." Which always results in a customer going into a screaming rage about how they never had this with AOL and they never installed anything that does this etc.
Oh, the other fun one was that while trying to keep your call under 10 minutes, solving a problem or getting a customer to believe it's someone else's support they need to talk to ("But my computer is fine, it's the internet that's broken!") you have to document all your calls and everything you've done on them in a form which is saved so people can later look up what you did. Most techs heavily skimped on this to save time, which meant whoever had to reference their sheets later when the customer calls in for the 4th time that day screaming about slow downloads has no idea what the problem is or what the last tech tried to do to troubleshoot it.
And yes, I did solve all the problems, even the lady who had a BIOS with bad power management that would cause her HP to shut down anytime the USB ports recieved too much traffic, like when using the USB port on the modem, who had already called HP 4 times recieved a replacement computer twice from best buy, etc. I called her back when I found out the problem by searching on my lunch break and had her reconnect on ethernet. Then I told her to call HP and tell them she wanted a BIOS update (I had her write it down) and here's the technical articles explaining what's going on and why it's their fault.
Yeah my times were crap, barely below the cutoff levels. But after 2 months I tried to stab myself so I'd have an excuse not to go into work, so I decided it was better to quit. Back to job searching again.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Yeah, you posted a link where it's spelled with an "O" in the user comments, and that person isn't even sure "...inotech, or something ending in 'tech'"
It's Initech. Sorry.
Chris
about indian call centers here? Isnt the article about american ones? or did I miss something?
Here's a nice image for you: http://www.aquanuke.com/item-3388284024.asp
Chris
OK, hopelessly naive question:
It seems that the root of the problem described in the article is that the contract with the company pays for calls completed, not problems solved. That company's customers are apparently enraged at their treatment. To the naive reader, it seems as though the contracting company could save money and improve customer relations at the same time by rewriting their phone-support contract to reward the call center based on actual problems solved.
All you guys from the real world, why doesn't this happen? Is it actually impossible to measure? Has anyone ever tried it?
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
Perhaps, but I'm going to go with the coffee mug, which is the same as the sign in front of the building.
Which is why I told you to watch your DVD again.
Chris
As a former tech support representative for a very large national phone company that does DSL I have to say it's basically all true.
Though my training was 2 weeks of genuine training. There were 4 trainers AFAIK, 3 of them were horrid, and the one I had actually new quite abit about why things actually failed and tried to make sure the class LEARNED something, I was happy about that. I ended up being the first person to ace the training test (?? that's just weird) and there was one person in my class who I counted as intelligent in addition to myself.
Once I got out on the floor taking calls, I realized that among the few hundred call takers and the supervisors who we were supposed to ask for help, there were 2 other people on the floor who i considered to have deeper knowledge than I, one was a tech agent, and another was a supervisor. It is a sad state of affairs when you have supervisors coming to you to ask for the answer to someone elses question.
The only redeeming part of that job was to hear the sigh of relief when your response to the fact that they're running linux or bsd was "oh, what kernel version?" instead of "is that windows or mac?"
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It seems that the real problem here is the all-important calls-handled number. This is the only statistic that the parent company (the unnamed one that contracted with the tech-support company) cares about.
Obviously, what's also important is how well real problems are solved. So, I would suggest the parent company occasionally have a shill call in with a bogus problem. The caller knows what the problem is, but goes through the motions to determine how well tech supports handles customers and how problems are solved. The results of a few tests like this would be more important than some bogus "Take 2 minutes to tell us how our customer service department did" survey.
Similar techniques should be used in airport security so the workers know that sometimes people will come through with a some item that should be flagged.
Good testing is hard but worthwhile.
I think there are a number of reasons for this. First of all, most people don't look at service when they buy, they just look at price. You can have the best support in the world, but if nobody buys your product because it costs more, the company dies.
Companies have also realized that some customers are way more profitable than others. That's why Dell gives consumer customers cheap outsourced Indian techs, and corporate Optiplex/Latitude customers US support. If Joe Smith decides not to buy his next $399 Dimension from you, big deal. If Fortune 500 company decides not to buy several million worth of servers from you, that's a problem.
Stores that sell extended warrenties also win when manufacturer warrenties suck. It seems worth an extra hundred or two hundred bucks to be able to walk into a store and walk out with a brand new PC instead of arguing with someone for 3 days so they can wait 2 weeks for them to send you out a part you have to replace yourself (which can be a big deal if you are an average user). These can be a big profit center for stores, so the stores kind of win when manufacturer support is suck.
I have blog like everyone else
You all should read The Electronic Sweatshop by Barbara Garson. Basically, in a company decisions are moved up the hierarchy so that people at low levels can be easily trained, paid less, and easily replaced. In that order. Ideally no training would be required, cutting the employee replacement cost even further. You see this obviously at McDonald's but less obviously in fields like social work, and more slowly in education.
The book itself is mostly conversations with people in jobs of this kind, or anecdotal records of those people. There's very little preaching by the author, if any.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/01 40121455/103-0830543-8955814?v=glance
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I used to have a job at an unnamed ISP with a reputation for good tech support which had merged with a second ISP who had a reputation for TERRIBLE support. Aside from some horror stories from my friends who used this second ISP, I have some personal experience--
Although I didn't work the phones personally, I did have the opportunity to spend a few hours riding tandam with random support people-- they'd plug an extra pair of headphones into their phones and you just sat and listened to the exchanges...
I could NOT believe how horrible these tech support people are. I actually listened to one of them lecture a customer about how having DSL was a "privilege" and they should feel lucky to even be considered for the service-- never mind the fact that this person had stayed home several days in a row and the installer never showed up. Fast calls they were willing to help, but anything that looked like it was going to take more than a couple minutes they blew off.
There was a giant LED "stock ticker" in the room that spewed out statistics.. I don't know exactly what they meant, but I got the impression it was the high-tech equivalent of the big fat dude pounding on the drums in those Trojan slave ships. You could hear the desperation and frustration in the caller's voices.. It was not a happy day for me.
It used to be http://www.deadtroll.com/index2.html?/video/hellde skcable.html~content ... this one was a re-enactment with him training a newbie on helpdesk. It was working on 2/10/2004 according to my history list.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
The company responsible for all those PCBs in the Hudson river......
Had the same type of Problem with Verizon when installing Frame Relay (remote office, no DSL no Cable available), they had to install new cabling, then said the new cabling was faulty, ad infinitum - took 3 months beyond the contract date to install (the contract install date was 3 months from the day we executed the signed documents)
AT&T Broadband was 3 years ago, I couldn't get DSL in the area so I HAD to go cable. Plus DSL has a higher latency and I love my games.
Comcast cable here has been rock solid, and even upped our downstream to 3mbps (I know that's due to the increased pressure from DSL prices), but it's fast as hell. Now maybe not many people in my neighborhood have Cable yet, but until they get it Imma enjoy my fat pipe. Haven't had to call customer support - so they may very well suck (Going on 1 year).
Actually I did call support, but that was because a gardening contractor had cut my cable.
no offense, but the site Compaqsucks.com is loaded with clubies and your general assortment of idiots that in all honesty, should not be allowed to own or operate a computer.
Some quotes from the guy I mentioed in the cubicle next to me:
"...are you fucking retarded?"
"I am sorry, I can't fix stupidity."
"Yeah, it's the email chip. Maybe someone at the factory replaced it with an idiot chip."
"Of course it works, it's a god damn Mac."
"You're annoying me, I am cancelling your warranty."
That's all that comes to mind right now.
I laughed. I cried.
And the really sad part is that I
found the whole thing believable.
Coporations today are so far
removed from reality, that they
actually consider keeping their
customers happy a burden, rather
than something they should do to
improve their business. It's a
real shame.
j
--------------
I kept getting a "connection refused"
error, when trying to watch the stupid
ad, so I couldn't read the article on
salon.com
I work with a guy whose answer to any problem he can't or doesn't want to solve is to tell the user to go to Windows Update and install all the updates and call back when they are done. I've heard him do this even on problems where an email has been sent out with the exact instructions on how to resolve an easily resolvable known issue. It's brilliant though, because it usually takes the user so long to do that chances are when they call back he's either gone or doesn't answer the phone and someone else has to deal with it. And who is going to argue that patching security flaws is a bad thing, even if it doesn't solve their problems.
I have blog like everyone else
I'm sure many here know what I'm talking about. Having done tech support for many years, I noticed that I started to develop a certain tone in my voice, a subtle condescending ring to statements when I would try to help a customer, for example, who claimed to have a problem, and noted there was an 'error message' but didn't think the actual error message was worth remembering. In these situations, it's SO hard to not just want to call the customer a complete idiot. Many help desk people have this recurring frustration which eventually leads to the classic "computer nerd arrogance". What can you do about it? I noticed that I started carrying this tone into other conversations and it was getting very annoying. Unfortunately, the condescending approach to dealing with many problem users ended up being very effective in making them aware that much of these problems could be solved themselves and that they weren't paying attention.
Eventually I got away from having to do so much tech support but to this day, I'm aware that my personality is affected by years of dealing with idiots who refused to even pay attention to the problem as it was clearly described to them.
If you're in this field, you need to be aware that this subtle personality mod can happen. It's driven home when you see skits like SNL's "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy."
Aside from the phone technical support, a lot of companies try to get you to use email support as an option. Does this actually work better than phone support? I would imagine it's just easier to delete emails and remove the problem of pesky customers than it is on the phone. Anyone have any thoughts on this?
"Shared pain is lessened; shared joy is increased. Thus we refute entropy" - Spider Robinson
Called Microsoft's pay-for-support service; $35 until the problem's fixed. Two and half hours later we figured out that Microsoft had changed the font metrics on Arial. Excel computes cell sizes based on Arial font metrics. When Arial changed, so did my print areas. The tech was obviously Indian, obviously smart and curious enough to spend the 2 hours it took to figure out what was going on. I didn't care about the $35 to find out in what mystical way Microsoft screwed up - I just wanted to know what had changed so I could undo it.
Contrast that to estamps.com. Free tech support and worth every penny. Software crashes my printer taking the postage with it and all the tech can say is "tough." They don't have much competition right now so they can get away with it but that will change.
"I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers."
Most computer users that I know think computer mayhem is just normal. Most folks just want it to work and don't want to put in any more effort than the minimum to continue on with life.
Taking it a little further, most folks just want things to work in general. The less hassle, the better, and companies know this. At the end of the day, people take the path of least resistance.
I generally think people are too used to being screwed over to hold the company accountable or they're just too apathetic. That's why these draconian contracts and bad service are the norm. Until people stop giving these companies their money, this is the problem we'll have.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
I got hired on doing tech support for (one of?) the largest software companies in the world. The only call center for this department of theirs is in Austin. If anyone knows who I'm talking about, say it, for I am fearful of their wrath. I'm not fond of getting LEGAL WARNINGS AT MY HOME ADDRESS FOR SOMETHING I DID ONLINE (HINT HINT).
The training was decent, when the instructor was able to speak over the people in the back of the class talking. Usually that was only when the people in the back of the class were sleeping. We were told to try and keep a 7-minute average call time, which was impossible because the databases to search for registered customers were slow as hell (especially since they ran off the software developed by the company we were supporting...HINT HINT). If a customer wasn't in the database, we had to add them, which was even slower. Then we had to search on the intranet's knowledge base (KB), which, by the way, was slow, until we found the problem. We were told specifically not to say anything that wasn't in the KB and that if we were smart, the only words coming out of our mouths would either be from a script from training or a script from the KB. This included denying knowledge of pending lawsuits against said company for fraud, much less denying knowledge of the Attorney General looking into unethical business practices, etc. Thankfully, I was fired on the third day because I opened up a DOS prompt to ping a user. Sure, I had to save a file called dos.bat onto the desktop that contained the line "cmd" in it to get to the prompt, but even so, I was never told that going to a DOS prompt was an offense punishable by termination.
I wasn't sad to go, though. So many calls were related to the previously mentioned class action suit against the company or the problem that inspired the lawsuit that I wanted to wash my hands each time I finished a call. The official policy was that if the user hadn't purchased an extended warranty (possibly needed 2-3 if they had purchased their product long enough in the past), then they would have to send in their product and pay a $100 repair fee because a faulty part in the product finally failed completely and, even though the company was aware that many products were shipped with said faulty products, they still charged the customers. They also did not recall the products or even acknowledge that there was any kind of specific problem. We were simply told to alert the user that they needed to send the machine in and our repair center would take care of the rest.
wait wait wait...
Now, you're happy because you talked to someone who told you to CLEAN THE DIRTY PRINT CARTRIGE?
my time is worth more than that, I would have cleaned it myself BEFORE calling tech support.
that's why tech support is so worthless -- it's designed to help people who can't wipe their own ass ^H^H^H print cartidge.
sign
What ad-viewing?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
That's what I did. Salon is totally worth the $30 or whatever it was I paid. In fact, it's the only online content I've ever voluntarily paid for.
Up till last November, I worked for an outsource company. The problem with these companies is that their not motivated to fix people, just make money off the call volume. They want their techs to rush and get the customer off as much as possible. They also will hire as few people as they can get away with to do the job and cross-cue people between contracts without the clients knowing. On my last contract, it was more like working directly for the client rather than the outsource company because of how the client interfaced with the techs and that the outsource company expected it to turn into a bigger contract, which didn't happen. They ended up closing the call center where I worked because the parent company wanted to reduce the number of call centers in the US. Basically the parent company bought the outsource company to raid them of profits thru the economic downturn. I heard recently that they want to sell the company now. It's all about the money...
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
First of all, the wait times are typically 2-5 minutes. I wish I could turn off the background music so that I could just leave it on speakerphone until it gets transferred, but 2-5 minutes a couple times a year strikes me as okay.
Secondly, the TS specialists seem to know their stuff. They seem to have been well trained. I've been getting people in Austin... anyone know whether they are Apple empolyees or whether it is outsourced? I'd guess they are Apple employees, but I don't know for sure.
In any case, I called them twice recently. The first call was because the email application started croaking a lot (once or twice a day). The technical support specialist was very knowledgeable, spent quite a bit of time with me discussing what it might be, etc. He actually listened to my theory that it was related to the junk-mail rules engine, pointed out how I could reset the rules engine, and that in fact seemed to solve the problem. It's nice when tech support will actually listen to your theories :-)
The other call was because my laptop hard drive started making bad noises. I felt like they might have made me go through more steps than absolutely necessary (OS reinstall, disk-erase/OS reinstall) than absolutely necessary, but the trouble shooting they wanted me to do was not unreasonable. Also, they (after some persuading) were willing to send me a drive and let me replace it, rather than have to send them the laptop for a week (it's my everything-including-work computer, so it's tough to let it go for even a day, nevermind a week).
All in all, I've never felt like they wasted my time, the stuff they ask me to try makes sense, and ultimately I've had my problems solved with a reasonable minimum of fuss.
Applecare is not exactly cheap, but given that I tend to keep my Macs for 4-5 years, it's not an outrageous expense. I think other computer manufacturers could win some points with their customers by being more like Apple.
Man, I didn't believe you until I copy pasted the link and saw it for myself.
How pathetic.
I did 5 years of inhouse tech support and didn't see the level of abuse as detailed in the article but I have seen all these methods used at least once. I copied the article and saved it, please don't tell salon
A lot of people are mentioning the "numbers game."
..."
This may explain why when I call 411 on my cell phone, most of the time the reps hang up (redirect to the phone number) after I tell them "Yes, that's the one." As I'm opening my mouth to say "Can I have the exact address?", I hear the automatic "We are now placing a call to
The parent post said they don't ask you to work extra hours. Not at my old shop!
A company Sykes had a contract with paid for butts-in-seats, not calls taken so the rampant absenteeism was killing the eend of year totals for the account. Guess who had to do overtime to make it up?
A person who hasn't done this job before would say great, but that extra hour per day isn't worth it when you're almost homicidal at the end of the day on a normal schedule.
And yes, at one time I could recite the entire fdisk menu and the restore sequence from memory. Damn e-machiens.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
Orwellian is wrong. Kafkaesque is apt. But I'd suggest "Proustian" as a more relevant literary analogy.
Cites the OED:
"A. POWELL Infants of Spring viii. 123 A lack of interest for individuals in what might be called the Proustian sense was perhaps characteristic, too, of the whole of the Arts Society."
I can vouch for this - it's what we use. I can put down just about any ol crap on Dell's warranty parts form and the next day, out comes a tech with a part. Of course, this assumes that I've diagnosed it correctly. The only times I've ever had to tech support is when the tech didn't show or something like that.
Don't cry over spilt milk. It just makes it salty for the cat.
Remember that not everyone can use (or likes to use) GUI and that not everyone is on broadband.
We've all dealt with bad tech support. Many of us have had to _be_ tech support in a bad environment. It's not fun for us, it's not fun for the customer, and it's hard to keep good people in that kind of an environment.
Rather than just whine about it, get yourself into a position to do something about it. I like digging into interesting calls, so I got a reputation for being kind of a Sherlock Holmes kind of character - the cool, interesting calls got conferenced to me. After a while, the "cool interesting calls" kept having the same questions over and over and over.
I made a webpage with the most frequent problems our users had, and easy tests to check for them, with links of what to do to fix them. One test, for instance, uses Javascript to display the user's system time in a window on the webpage. This actually checks 3 things - are we a "trusted site", do they have javascript enabled, and is their clock accurate (check that year, guys) - any of which being wrong will prevent the user from using our financial data site.
Make it easy - "Can you see the big red star? How about the small blue star?" First is served unencrypted, second has 128-bit or better encryption on it. If they can see one but not the other, "click here". If you can't see either, "click over here", that sort of thing.
The number of BS calls I got from the first & second-level folks has dropped dramatically since I set this up - every once in a while I add another test (it's up to 7 or 8 now), and it's used a lot.
Give the poor bastards in the call center the tools to fix it well _and_ quickly, and even the most pointy-haired of bosses should recognize that that's a good thing. Push it with a call-time reduction slant if they're that sort of boss, or if they actually give a spit about customers, use the customer-sat side of the argument. Or, you can just keep complaining about it...
regular or supersize?
I guess that places like this would pay you to drop cow manure on customers' cars - it would after all be only slightly more destructive and slightly less helpful than their tech support. If there is money in the job, someone (whether in the US or elsewhere) will do these jobs and do them "well" (badly, but according to the company's desire). In some cases, after all, these are jobs of the "new economy" (the modern version of "getting a silk purse out of a sow's ear") and may be some of the few jobs available; in addition, they provide valuable training in the growing field of jobs (such as Enron accountant) where one can make lots of money while (or by) screwing your customers, investors, and/or employees. The incentives for people to take these jobs exist, so the fact that someone will do these jobs is unsurprising.
The more relevant question is "Why is doing a bad job at a task (and hurting your paid customers) profitable?"
You know, you can just subscribe to Salon, too. It's like $3 a month (cheaper than a paper magazine, and with about 10 times more content), and with that comes special access to PDA/cellphone-formatted content, and PDF downloads of all content, with no ads on any of it.
If you like Salon, just freakin' subscribe already.
What actually happens is alot of random guesses at what that point might be, and an evolutionary process whereby wrong guesses are punished by going out of business.
Also, getting people to call back multiple times to rack up the number of calls at the expense of actually solving problems is an inneficient use of resources. Sure it lets the call company quote a price per call that is cheaper than the inhouse price per call, but think of the wasted time. Obviously, tech support should be focused on the goal of solving problems rather than getting the customer off the phone.
If I were running a company and wanted to outsource tech support, I would require that each call get a ticket number, and that no ticket could be closed without the customer's permission. That way the call center would at least have an incentive to try to help the customer. However, measures would have to be taken to ensure that techs ( who would presumably be graded according to number of tickets closed ) didn't just punt anyone with a difficult problem. You might give the customer the opportunity to key in their ticket number when they call and also the opportunity to stay on hold for the same tech they talked to before, or just be assigned a random tech. Punting would still happen ( such as near the end of a shift, or in hopes that the customer would choose to get a random support tech, but this would help somewhat with punting.
Customers are probably the best ones to police the quality of tech support actually provided by a call center outsourcer. If they were asked to rate the quality of service after each call from 1 to 9 where 1 is awful and 9 is adequate then quality could be assured. The calling center could be paid according to the following formula: NominalPricePerCall * NumberOfCallsTaken * ( AVG( Customer rating ) - 5 ). This would give irate customers the power to punish effectively costing the support company money.
But this is not perfect either. The common case would be that the person is politely punted ( or tricked into beginning the formatting process ) and calls back having rated the first person highly only to find out from the random person they were assigned that they have deleted all their files. Now the customer rates the innocent tech who is stuck with the call badly out of anger rather than calling back and waiting on hold for an hour to put the blame on the person who deserves it. You could have the customer rate the resolution of a ticket rather than rate per call, but then you'd have punters benefiting from the problem solving skills of people who actually solve problems.
The best solution might be to force a ticket to be handled all the way to completion by one tech so that the rating system is fair, but then you will have customers on hold for long periods.
And of course all this costs money. If customers get fed up enough with bad tech support then they will buy from somewhere else.
That's not likely though, because as bad as computer software/hardware can be, if it works for 80% of the people who buy it without them ever calling tech support, then by being slightly cheaper, that company will most likely garner 80% of market share over a competitor with better ( more expensive ) tech support. The minimal level of support that most companies give is the level that will not cause them to raise prices perceptably for the customer. So basically customers are left complaining about worthless almost-free support.
Eat at Joe's.
When I have a problem I go to the company's website first, then do a google search. Most times the problem has shown up on some user forum (Macfixit comes to mind) and someone else has a solution. I don't bother with tech support. I have nothing but time wasting experiences from them. Usually their answers revolve around "turn the product off for ten seconds, then turn it back on again" bullshit. If a product is so far gone it's not working and it's out of warrant, I buy a replacement rathern than deal with incompetent tech support ... and the replacement comes from a different company. Just like everything else in life, companies don't stand behind their products when they go bad. They're handing more and more of the "service" to the consumer themselves.
Negative, I am a meat popsicle.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
You're looking at decades when I'm talking about centuries. One might even suggest that the rising prices in Mexico are an example of this "evening out" trend in action.
As it becomes cheaper to move things across borders (cars, knowledge), borders will cease to be an obstacle to trade (e.g. in cars and knowledge). This trend is only going to continue, it's not going to reverse. Take it to its logical conclusion and you find a world where all things that don't require proximity are fair game for those that aren't proximate.
The first page of posts are arguing about the meaning of "punter".
/. nerdies, get a life!
/., after all, I mean, c'mon, really, READ THE ARTICLE? BWAHAHAHAHAHA!)?
Christ,
Is it possible somebody might actually have something to relate about the ARTICLE (not that anybody actually read it of course, even though it was posted - this IS
Or the sorry state of tech support - in fact, customer support in general - in this country?
Or are we just jacking off?
I used to do support for a Bank of America in-house-developed cash management package for Fortune 1000 treasury managers. I actually tried to do my job. I once spent seven-and-a-half hours straight on the phone recovering a customer's data (they never backed up, natch) for a month when they lost it. Got a written letter of commendation from the customer.
So what happened? Due to idiocy on the part of the Bank's managers, the package was trashed, everybody was laid off, and I got fired for blowing up at my supervisor (no unemployment, thanks).
What does it all mean? (In the words of Mr. Miracle, "Don't mean sheeiiitttt!") It means corporate America could care less about its employees, its customers, or anything else except the individual manager's own income and authority.
Which is a direct result of human nature.
So I guess we just accept it. 'Cause it ain't gonna change. Ever.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I couldn't help feeling , when reading it, that there's a film script in there somewhere. All the different characters - the punters, the "santas" , charles, ken "total bullshit", the managers - were very memorable and very well described.
Any film script based on this wouldn't be anything like "Office Space". It would be much more relentless, much more castigating, and much more pressurized. Alienation , pressure, stress and moments of humour thrown in.
Think the adrenalin, energy, and mania of Boiler Room, meets the characters,humour and alienation of Office Space, in union with the sheer unadulterated white-collar anger of Falling Down.
Hey, it's better than selling pet food on the Internet.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
This is normal for Stream. I dealt with their people many times. Fortuantely I was on a reseller line and did not have to deal with tier one. Still, the scenario described in the article was quite accurate. What is worse, the Charlies of the world get recognition, while the REAL tech support people who take the TIME to fix the problem correctly the FIRST time, get punted.
Management, IF it can be called that, are really a bunch of useless individuals, by and large. To paraphrase someone like H.L. Mencken, "Those who Can..Do! Those who Cannot, Manage."
Just wait until you get Bubba Habib on the support line. He is a Charlie wannabe.
To ALL you PC and peripheral manufacturers. LISTEN UP. This bullshit mentality you have concerning Support teams HAS TO STOP. We, as consumers, WILL find out who's products work best, and purchase those products. You who make shitty products will fade away. You will sit and wonder what caused your unemployment, but it is really two things, shitty products and Shittier support. Fuck you very much.
That system is nuts.
To make an analogy, the way these help desks currently promote their operators is like some sort of military promotion based upon how many bulletes a soldier has fired. It simply does not make sense.
Why don't they add some sort of system where by the customer can rate the call? This could mean that unhelpful calls do not count towards your call statistics, and thus only useful people like Ken would get promotion.
Japan went from abject poverty at the end of WWII to being a level competitor to the USA by 1970. the Yen went to throw-way currency to on par with the dollar in the same period. When India and China throw way the last remnants of their socialist straight-jackets, they could reach world levels in less than a generation.
He forgot one important tech support type: the CMOS drainer.
'Hmmm, sir, it seems like the best solution is for you to drain your CMOS. Do that, and call back in 40 mins if it's still not working.'
I used to work at a telemarketing firm. Yes it meant that i hated myself, but college is expensive, but the money can be really really good if you make commission.
Our employment video showed a happy cheerful place where people were genuinely interested in a new credit card, or some entertainment club, or identity theft protection. Every person had their own cubical, with computer and phone, and the entire call center looked like some upscale human resources department.
My call center was dirty. Dirty isnt really a strong enough word to describe it, but lets just say that people got excited when they had the little moist towelettes to wipe down the keyboards, which had years of god only knows what encrusted on the keys. The fabric on the chairs were stained horribly, like someone's pet had gotten loose and had some fun.
You would go in around 9:00, put on the headset, and log into the computer, which were running Windows 98 with some specialized dialer software. A name would flash on screen. The instant that name popped up, the person had already said "Hello" at least once. Meaning, no time to attempt to figure out pronunciation... "Hello, Mr. Fhqwhgads please."
Assuming that you are close enough to the proper pronucniation that they dont slam the phone down in disgust, you must seek permission to continue. This is required by law. How is this circumvented? The magic word is "okay".
Never, ever, ever, ever ask a question without phrasing it so that the last word is "okay". That is one of the fundamentals. "I'm calling from *******, and i know you're probably busy, but i just want to take a quick moment of your time, okay?" If they dont say "no" or something similar immediatly following that, then you have legal permission to continue. You start your schpeil. The trick is to say it as quickly as possible, outline benefits, and explain to this person who is already way over their head in debt why they want a new credit card just because of the balance transfers. The script itself is like a choose your own adventure. For early interrupts, there are a series of retorts for you to choose from. You must respond to early interrupts. Once you have outlined benefits, you use a line similar to "i know this is a great deal that can really help you out, so after a quick confirmation and approval, we can have this card out to you in a few weeks, okay?" If they say they are not interested here, you must use no less than 2 second efforts, which outline other benefits that you didnt mention before. Long before you actually get to go through with the second efforts, the "customer" has already hung up, but this is of no concern to the managers, who walk around the room listing in on each "Tele-Service Representitive"'s calls.
The managers are the ones who can convince Neil Armstrong that he never walked on the moon. They speak fast, and they speak clear. Using a form of mind control that is perfected from years of being a telemarketer, when most people normally get 6 sales a day, these guys made 12. They throw around the word "okay" like nobody's business, because they know that the mind's first instinct when it hears "okay?" is to respond with "okay."
Being a telemarketer wasnt about finding people who actually need a service, and making it available to them. The right person for the deal is whoever you are talking to, and its your job to make them realize that.
It was a stressful job, and one that i hope ill never have to go back to again. Getting an ulcer by age 18 should say something about a job. Besides, being a male prostitute would be far less dirty. Maybe the moral of this story is that the concept of the telephone is out dated. I can type faster than i talk anyway...
Last year, I bought a 512MB CF Card on sale from Dell for about $80. They lost the order altogether-- no record in their system of my number. So I asked them to place the order again at the sale price, but they wouldn't without proof.
So I hung up and called back. Tried the business number. Bounced around between reps a little, and ended up with a "giver." Apparently unable to even check pricing information, the tech actually had *me* look up the price online. She then credited the difference in price to a *previous order* (so that she had a credit card number to hang it on) and told me to re-order the card from their website.
As is traditional for Dell, the card went back on sale a few days later. I ordered it, and ended up getting the card and making a $20 profit.
The reps are so confused and without information you can tell them nearly anything. They don't care, and just want you gone. It's amazing anyone is still even bothering to offer support-- utterly worthless. But at least you can get your revenge by getting some of your wasted time back in the form of money and free stuff.
this article is about a US call center, outsourced within the US. so shut your trap. thank you.
Reading that article makes me realize things aren't so bad in my corner of the tech support world. I manage a small support center for a software company. We aren't under contract but actually work directly for the company. We don't enforce any kind of time limit on calls. We encourage techs to try to keep call times down but don't penalize or reward based on call times. The emphasis in on actually trying to understand and resolve a customer's problem to the point that they do not have to call back. It seems to me the 10-minute limit, combined with outsourcing to companies who are paid per call, is the factor which skews the incentive system so badly as to create the opposite of good technical support. Our department does have its problems and limits (disrespected by other departments, no accountability from the developers means bugs never get fixed or even looked at, lack of resources means we cannot provide support for everything we want to, no time for training or very in-depth troubleshooting, etc.), but employee turnover is actually not bad (some people have been here over 5 years) and our customers often give us glowing praise and thanks. It seems that other companies have set the bar so low on tech support that people are very pleasantly stunned when they get a human being on the phone who effectively helps them solve a problem in just a few minutes.
First I'd like to say that I agree with everything you've said. But... I am compelled to play devil's advocate for a moment. If you have no concept of how a computer works, and how data is stored...perhaps that is not the medium on which you should be keeping your most treasured family memorabilia. Similarly, if you have no concept that running VHS cassettes throw a chipper/shredder makes it so the moving pictures of grandma are gone forever...home movies are not for you.
if you did mod someone down in this thread as soon as you posted here your mod points would have been rescinded. If you had read the moderation guidelines you'd know that.
As far as I can tell, the American consumer makes buying decisions on exactly two things
Yes, there are exceptions, but Service doesn't seem to ever enter the equation, with the occasional Nordstrom's being the exception to prove the rule.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Gosh...I hope you don't work in tech support.
I wish more new users knew to reject the formatter, but most don't and then they wonder where their e-mail is at. Responding that users should know better is almost as bad as the formatter telling them that reformatting will fix everything.
Gorkman
I'm not letting the formatter off the hook; I actually find that behavior to be abhorent. I'm simply stating that this is a consequence of putting complete faith in a technology you don't understand...
Right. Just like any GOOD programmer today, whose job is in danger of being outsourced, can learn SOME skill that hasn't been filled by millions of people from third world nations. It will always be that way, and it's why only the more underskilled have to worry about job loss on a protracted basis.
This isn't meant to be a personal attack, but could you please, in your wisdom, tell us what a guy is supposed to do when his whole industry moves to India or China?
And please don't just say retrain.
Hey, no offense taken, and I don't mean the following as an attack either, but...sorry, retrain or become better at what you (by which I mean a general audience 'you') actually do. And the whole industry isn't moving. Companies are hiring skilled college grads, and nearly every job I'm looking at requires programming experience. And they're not based in Bangalore, either. Much of the problem is that a lot of programmers here only know how to program, and more and more this level of programming is being outsourced.
I would say your problem is NOT Indians - it's skilled Americans in other fields who can program just as well. People similar to me who program better - I'm an adequate, not great, coder, but I will soon have a Ph.D. in chemistry. These days, programming is good for accenting a skill set, but isn't sufficient alone. In other words, the people in demand are scientists who program well, finance people who program well, etc. But it's not people who are expert at standard CS group theory algorithms and the like, because it's expected that a programmer can pick that up if they need it. My advice to people majoring in CS is this: double major in finance or a phyisical/life science. You will have to beat companies, American companies, away with a stick.
Oh yeah, did the 'retrain and get a better job' theory work for all those poor souls who lost their manufacturing jobs in the 70's 80's and 90's? Using this as an example, personally I'm afraid for my future.
I'm glad you bring that up. And are all those "poor souls" currently unemployed? No. They're not. Because they, for the most part, successfully retrained. And certainly our economy is better for it.
Also, don't be afraid for your future if you're competent. For what it's worth, the times during which a person would enter the work force and perform a single job for 40 years are long dead. Technical fields change so fast that, if you don't keep up, you're an irrelevant dinosaur. And I mean that inclusively - if *I* don't keep up with my field, I will likewise become a relic. That's the way it is these days, and that excitement and novelty is why we choose the fields we do, I expect.
Let's put it this way. Lots of people bitch and moan about outsourcing, but what's the alternative? Make sure that menial labor is done in the US? Make sure that we can't compete with other countries? I mean, when you put this in historical context, it's ridiculous. Labor markets evolve. We have to deal with it, or become unemployed. Hate to be harsh, but that's the way it is.
I haven't read all the responses on this thread, but I couldn't help but wonder - is anyone surprised that tech support jobs are moving to India? I've had my share of stints with customer support personnel who I wound up educating (and I felt like an idiot afterward) - up to the point that I just don't call customer support anymore. Unless it's a small company of course where I know who's doing tech support and I can drive down the street and kick his hiny if necessary ;-)
But all violent urges when dealing with tech support personnel aside - if that greedy attitude is the standard out here in the U.S. - then we shouldn't complain about those jobs wandering off to India. I'd rather have some guy with a 7/11 accent answer my call and try to help me out then to simply have my time blatantly wasted. That's the problem in this country, everyone is so busy finding ways to undercut the next guy and putting one's hand into someone else's pocket - it just goes down the line until the lowest bitter is someone is Mombay (formerly Bombay).
We all thought that pure greed and lack of integrity is commonly accepted now and that's just the law of the land. Well, guess what? There are repercussions to all actions (good or bad) and maybe you doing a crappy job today or some company just focusing on the bottom-line will cause a snowball effect in the long run. Can't find a job for over six months now? Maybe it's that type of mentality that caused the dotcom bubble to burst in the first place. And obviously, reading reports such as this, people have still not learned their lesson, and it's 'business as usual'. Corporate America is a piece of turde - I'd probably feel better working as a male actor in p0rn movies than to live through one day as depicted in this article.
i've also seen it used to mean give up.
round here, "punting" a class means you've given up all hope of passing. typically implying that one stops attending and doesn't bother with the final.
Now, in my experience, most of the time when you ask companies about an old and outdated product, they just say "sorry, not supported anymore". Doubly so if you didn't buy it from them, or got it used somehow. Especially if it is a rather niche market that didn't bear out (ie, enterprise-wide network diskless workstations from the late 90's). I expected just such a response from IBM - that, or they wouldn't tell me because I didn't have a service contract or something with them.
Imagine my surprise when a few days later I got an email stating where the software, and all of the documentation (PDF format) was located at - for two different service updates. The software consisted of a tar.gz file and an ISO of TurboLinux 7.0 (though supposedly the installer for the software will work for other distros of the period as well - but you still need the TL distro because it downloads some piece from it when installing). I have yet to try it out, but I am surprised I got a response at all!
Now I am praying I will get something close to that support when I receive a Virtuality HMD I got off of eBay (now, this is a loooongshot) - hopefully cyberminds.uk will help, plus I am hoping to get some support from polhemus on an old ISA tracking card and sensor that is coming with the HMD (I don't think I am getting the transmitter for the tracker - so I am hoping to dig one up some other way).
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Formatters are too lazy to actually work to get things done. Similarly, I would have read the rest of your comment, but...
"PC Load Letter? What the $@#% does that mean?!"
You know, this post brings back fond memories of my own days doing technical support for UPS. I was a punk 18 year old kid and no one knew the wiser.
In actuality UPS technical support is usually handled by the outsourcing company MicroAge (they do some AT&T too). There were three facilities at one point, and let me tell you something that we verified: Technical support from Santa Monica sucks. Hard. Bad. They are the worst. Neveda was second, and Arizona was best. Which went first? Arizona of course.
Well, signed an NDA, no names. I remember once getting a completely irate man in his 50's screaming at me and crying that he was sick of our BS and wanted a real person live on site in an hour.
I looked up his problem log. Sure enough, the techies in Cali *knew* what his problem was but didn't want to sacrifice call time. So instead of dialing in and just fixing it (a 10 minute process) they escalated it to onsite repair, which would be a 5 hour delay.
Meanwhile, this guy is shipping hundreds of parcels and is frozen solid. I look to see why onsite never showed: they rejected it (and they totally have this right) on grounds that one of the call centers could do it quicker.
So I explained to him what happened, and struck a deal with him. If he gave me 10 minutes I would fix it, if I went over, I'd have onsite out there even if I had to drive myself.
Took 15 minutes. He joked with me about it, asked for my manager, and I got a nice little "Customer Satisfaction Award."
Of all of my tech work experience though, MicroAge was the best - they focused on their call evaluation system instead of the calltime. We could flux between 20 minutes and 1 hour calls without any raised eyebrows. 3 hours and they just felt sorry for you. Of course, people under 20 who scored high on evaluations moved along much faster.
I liked the system.
-A Coward
Globalization is made possible by cheap energy, because labor costs are so much higher than the energy costs of shipping products around the globe (I'm talking about goods, not services here).
However, we are rapidly approaching global peak output in oil, as more and more countries go from oil exporters to oil importers, and everyone leans more and more on OPEC to produce the oil.
Oil production will peak very soon and then decline by 3% a year. This will cause a radical realignment of our economic systems, and local products will trump global products just due to the energy it takes for shipping.
Don't believe? Just enter in "peak oil" in google, there are dozens of websites devoted to this. Many of these websites contain articles written by retired oil scientists which warn of the peak in oil production by 2010, 2020 if we are really lucky.
Facts:
Fact: US oil discoveries peaked in 1930
Fact: US production peaking in 1970
Fact: World oil discoveries peaked in 1964
Fact: World oil production will peak (or has already peaked) any day now
Fact: We used to pump 50 barrels of oil for every 1 barrel of oil energy equivalent invested
Fact: We now pump 5 barrels of oil for every 1 barrel of oil energy equivalent invested
Fact: The last major oil field discovery was in the 1970s
Fact: Natural gas will also peak, but lag gasoline peak
Fact: There is no substitute for oil that either 1) won't take a long time to bring on line 2) won't pollute horribly
So, if suddenly sneakers made in China cost $300 because of the shipping costs, suddenly US made sneakers costing $100 look pretty good.
80% of the people who bother to read this post will say "This is total bullshit -- we will never run out of oil, there's plenty of it left" -- What are you basing your beliefs on? That it has always been there, so it will always be here? Oil companies paint a rosy picture otherwise their stocks will crash, the government does the same to prevent a panic, and the main media doesn't want to spread anything the suggests the coming doom of multinational corporations. How many McDonald's hamburgers will you be able to eat if they cost $50 a piece?
World oil reserves have been pegged at 2000 Gbarrels for many decades. Suddenly, recently, the USGS changed it to 3000 Gb. Was there some incredible new find? (We have pumped about 900 Gb since the beginning of time, we have about 1100 Gb left in the ground) No, the revised numbers reflect DEMAND in oil. In other words, the USGS changed the estimate of reserves so that they can continue to say "we have X years of oil left".
who dont know what vegitarian means. I hate to order in them taco bells driving south on I95 to florida. Does "fish" sound like a plant to you or do chicken/caviar/ribs ? You are a meatbot too pal.
Most people doing stupid things to the environment aren't selective - thus things dumped into one part may end up near me someday. More likely, of course, is that the people who felt free to dump their waste somewhere else will feel free to dump it near me.
The environment is like freedom - none of it is free if it is under attack anywhere, because if bad things (loss of freedom or environment) could happen somewhere, they can also happen where you are. If people have the power to do bad things elsewhere, there is the potential/likelihood that they will be able to use that power where you live.
I may be misinterpreting - the "developers want houses in the woods - environmentalists already have them" things has also been around awhile...
I know someone who used to work there, supporting a rather popular hardware product of theirs that people try to run free operating systems on. (I always thought it was rather foolish of them to include moving parts in this product.) A few months ago she got a job with the school district working with "special" students. I told her that she should be happy because she was now working with a higher class of customers.
I worked for a Sympatico outsourcer and while not as bad as this article, I saw very similar things. What drives people away is not the calls but the targets. Average call time must be as low as possible, you have to follow pre-written scripts even if you know it's not going to solve the problem, if you don't know it's better to tell them it's not supported than to call and wait on hold for the second tech support line.
"I just bought a laptop from them last month,"
Sucker.
HP Laptops were lame. Compaqs were worse. Ironically, now that they're combined, you get a product that is much worse than either combined.
These new laptops combine bulkiness and weight with an astouding lack of speed and poor battery life. I'll bet that you couldn't hit that particular combination purely by chance.
I guess that's called "Synergy".
"You will get put in the crank list of a lot of magazines"
Why will that be bad? Does it go on my "permanent record"?
The best market opportunity that exists right now is to create your own local shop which provides highly competent charge-by-the-hour technical support for other company's products and services.
People haul their PC's into your shop, or you send your knowledgeable support people out to people's homes. If you fix the problem, then you charge the customer based on time spent helping them. If you don't fix the problem, the customer pays nothing. Therefore you have built-in motivation right there to track both time-efficiency AND problem resolution, with problem resolution being of primary importance.
The face-to-face/hands-on/in-person aspect to this is very important, as the reality of technical support is that it's just not possible to do it over the phone and rely on uneducated customers to do the actual work. You have to get someone knowledgeable on the actual problem, dealing with it directly.
Moderator hint: a comment is neither "Flamebait" nor "Troll" if it is true.
"I always hear it from people that tech support doesn't help at all. Then why do you buy from those companies and not from some local shop were you get support in person? Cause dell offers phone tech support. ARGH."
My sister bought a dell. Wouldn't boot one night, so she was on the phone for a god-damned hour. They had her remove the fucking motherboard. This from a woman who could hurt herself with a phillip's head.
At the end of the call, they said she needed a new motherboard, she must have burned it out (???), and that it would be $350.
Wow.
She bought another computer and gave me the old one. What was clear was:
a) In putting it back together, my sister seemed to be less competent than the dell tech support.
b) more to the point, it was obvious in 10 seconds the hard drive had crashed. It wouldn't even come ready. This should have been obvious except the most clueless and tech support I guess.
c) I put in a cheapie HD I had (80G), and now I have a perfectly competent server in the basement.
So you can see I'm ambivalent about Dell tech support.
the ability for a company to move quickly and easily from one country to another takes away the only real powers workers have: Unions and the strike. Something everyone in the US seems to forget is people died for the 40 hour work week. In the past, when people tried to unionize and stike they were dealt with brutally. The violence against them generated sympathy and helped their cause. Now, the company just leaves. No violence, no messy protests, no flashy news stories. Just a dead town. That's why you're not hearing about any great labor movements in India even though they treat their workers like dirt.
Global capitalism screws everyone except the capitalists.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"Who needs support for long-distance phone service?"
People who pay 7 figures, ie call centers, large companies.
Please try to read before parading your ignorance.
If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
easier said than done. One day I was working as a sys-admin at a software company the next I was working at Stream. I survived for two years - the entire time I was looking for a new job. Finally a friend recomended me at another call center that pays more. If he hadn't I'd probably still be working there. Frankly I had no-where else to go. No savings, no place of my own etc.
I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers.
you would but you'd be wrong. Sure Dell, Gateway, HP might become disgusted with the performance of a certian call center, but they'll just move to another. Again - while I was at Stream we picked up more than one contract from Sykes, ACS and the like from more than one disgrunteled company.
Oddly enough the pattern is the same for each contract - spend the first year making the client happy - around then start imposing draconian rules. For example (and I'm not making this up) fixing complex problems in a certian very famous graphics program made by a company in san jose in 14 minutes with 15 seconds to wrap your notes. You start saying things like "you're windows is broken" and "there's really nothing we can do here".
Ever wonder why HP techs try to sell support solutions on every call? They will be fired if they don't. You lose most all your points on a call monitoring - you could be the most brilliant tech on earth and be fired for not trying to sell extended contracts.
Really though if it wasn't for stream I wouldn't have got the job I have now since they wanted call center support. I've got 10,000+ calls of that.
Spot on! This is exactly right. I was laid off in November of 2001 because of massive budget cutbacks. Who did they keep? The foreigners. All of us americans were laid off, while they (for the most part) stayed on. It is hard not to be angry at these people, even when I was friends with many of them, and knew it wasn't because of them.
Dell's support is not like this.
Dell uses quality metrics to measure support services - NOT just quantity. The bonus for every employee in the company (not just the support/call center people) is tied to these quality metrics.
I used to work at Gateway before thier stocks got flushed down the toilet. I worked at the call center in Rio Rancho, started there about a month after they opened (was part of the second class of techs to hit the floor) and watched our call center go through many stages. When I first started there, we were all about getting everyones problems fixed the first time every time. Call time was important but if you were solving problems, without messing around, then there wasn't any problems. THey were focused on quality not quantity. The year I started Gateway was named #1 by pc magazine for tech support. Everyone was proud and excited to be working for such a company. It was not uncommon to spend the entire day with one client to get certian problems fixed (was rare and only for strange and unique circumstances but it did happen).
Slowly and gradually, things started getting worse and worse. I was gradual enough that we didnt actually notice it at first... basically the frog in boiling water. They started getting tighter and tighter on calltimes, slowly lowering the maximum time. The reason we were given was that before we were running more like a help desk than a tech support call center. I personally didnt see much of a difference, both set up to help people with thier problems. We of course didnt support everything, no 3rd party hardware or software. But they slowly started limiting our scope of support.
Then Ted Waitt stepped down and Jeff Weitzen was named CEO. Talk about going to hell in a hand basket. I dont think it was personally Weitzen's fault, but I could be wrong. All of a sudden we werent a call center, we were a cost center, as we cost money to operate instead of generating revenue for the company. They set up pay support lines for the more obscure stuff and stuff we normally didnt handle. They gave everyone scripts to follow. A lot of us had been there 2-3 years at that point and knew these systems inside and out and could fix problems faster than tier flowsheets allowd us. However, if we didnt follow these guidelines we were punished. Written up, yelled at, etc. By this time I was working laptops, and we had a max call time of about 7 and a half minutes. I think standard desktop support was at about 12 or 13, cant quite remember. I was also working with home networking (anyone remember hpna cards?) so I had a little repreive.
They came up with the great idea of lets have tech support sell people stuff when they finish thier calls. I thought that was a totally bogus idea as before if they needed something like more memory or a bigger hard drive we would just transfer them over to the sales dept. for a quick and easy commisioned sale. Now they were expecting us to sell stuff to people that didnt need it. We didnt get commision, but we had numbers to hit. Now as most of you know, Tech support people dont always make good sales people. I was only able to sell extended warranties when the 1 year (used to be 3 year) warranties were over, and the occasional memory upgrade and hard drive, if it was justified that they really could use one. My manager would get on to me about more sales. I told him that I felt cheap and dirty making sales, as these people trusted us much more than sales, as sales people are there to make a sale and nothing more, but we were there to help them. He said, exactly. They are more open to sales from you because they arent expecting a sale from you. You should be pushing everything you can at them. Well of course that didnt go over very well with me, but at the same time they did a restructuring of the que's
With the que restructure, I now sat idle for hours at a time as I was one of about 12 people in all of gateway (at least in the US) that was still on the home networking que. (The rest were smart enough to get out... at about the time that Gateway outsourced thier IT department) So, I wouldnt take any other calls unless the other ques were hopelessly backed up, but that was rare as if you didnt have wicked fast calltimes you
Unfortunately, the ad in question (some flash monstrosity flogging GE's water purification tech. I guess they want us to forget they also make nuclear weapons? *shrug*) crashes my browser like a three ton male cow with BSE being dropped from the top of the empire state building onto a porcelain establishment. So i've watched their fucking advert twice, vainly hoping that I'd get to read the content. No such luck, and I even happen to be using a gui browser with flash. So thanks to the efforts of a fellow slasher/ette I can read the article.
Just think, if I was blind and using a braille device, that kind person's effort would be the only think letting me read the article. Forced delay ads authored in a proprietary plugin environment are almost criminally stupid given the recent legislation regarding web accessibility.
Oh, and feel sorry for commercial entities trying to make old-tech biz models survive in the digital realm? Hahahahahaha. Fuck them and their cretinous, heavy-handed attempts to make the web like teevee. The net was such a nice place until the suits showed up to whore it out.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
If the tech was lucky, he got a whole $13 of that $35.
I understand that other haven't worked tech support and that normal people have problems with computers. My point is this isn't new news, check google, people were saying tech support was crap just like this 10-15 years ago.
Another winner of a company, HQ in Southfield Michigan. 2nd level support? A bald middle aged cocksucker selling pot on the side, a bunch of affirmative action types that couldn't find their fucking asses with both hands and a fucking mirror, and a 'project manager' that was sucking the dope dealer's dick when she wasn't fucking shit up. Absolutely the worst place ever to work, but a godsend to the hundreds of otherwise unemployable convicts/criminals/cocksuckers/motherfuckers/cunts that they foisted upon their CORPORATE HELP DESK customers as 'trained computer professionals.'
Two apartments ago, my roomates and I wanted to get DSL. We called Verizon, give them our phone number, and the operator "hmms" for a while and then asks "Do you have fiber on the line?"
I had to resist the urge to go "HOW THE HECK SHOULD I KNOW, YOU'RE THE FREAKIN PHONE COMPANY?
Not to mention that to someone who doesn't know anything about networking, the word fiber makes one think of breakfast cereals that induce pooping.
I have blog like everyone else
I used to work for an undisclosed ISP in Australia. ..
Whilst working there, we got a new call/distribution/PABX system which used TAPI & run on NT, so we could watch the queues from software on our desktop.
It didn't take long to figure out that if you DoS attacked the NT box, the whole queueing system would go down! no more calls! it took them bout 4 months to fix it
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
The reason tech support is so bad is that a certain percentage of users will just give up and buy another computer. It works fine as long as all the vendors work the same
"I'm whoring for Promise Technology"
Well, I want you to repeat something:
"RAID 0 means I don't give a shit about my data"
repeat
"RAID 0 means I don't give a shit about my data"
Raid 0 is only useful in a 0+1 configuration. a 0 configuration says "Please destroy my data".
I worked for these guys in Vegas, on the Dell campaign. It was almost as if I'd written the article myself. Our call times were set at 17.5 minutes though. I don't think I ever hit that. I can remember one time, talking to some sexy sounding lady on the phone for 3 hours. I sat on the phone with her and chatted while her hard drive formatted. (this was back in the Win98 days when format/reinstall was more viable than in today's carefree world of system restore) The trick I learned for getting call times down was to hang up on the customer and call them back, since only incoming calls were part of the average.
I'd never do that job again. It was soul sucking. Money wasn't bad, $10 an hour, but it wasn't great. Benefits were decent. I got my wisdom teeth pulled. I even got my little "Dell Certified Technician" diploma.
The big thing with punting and giving, where I worked was that calls were monitored. My friend got fired for sending out a set of speakers without going through the whole set of TS webpages Dell had set up. We had an "ownership" policy. Once you get a call, you own it. If that means you have to call them back later, or tomorrow, or whatever, that was your job. Like I said, call-backs didn't hurt your time. The last thing was the rate of first-call resolution. It was said to be really bad if you had a customer call back within a day of you punting them. However, the whole tracking system for that broke, never to be fixed in my 6 months of working there. So, it was a vacant threat that some people (the ones with the low call times and big bonuses) took advantage of.
Having worked on the other side of the phone, and currently working as an onsite tech, I kind of know how to deal with the schmucks on the other end. I never say that I'm a tech or that I used to be one of them. I just wait for them to start trying to give me the run around, then I lay into them. So far, it's worked all but once, when a tech put me back into the tech support queue.
Often in Error, Never in Doubt.
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. It also has the second worst job market after San Jose, CA. Among Tulsa's 80 call center firms are DecisionOne, West, US Cellular, Cingular, Metris, Dollar, Thrifty, and Avis. They can be extremely unpleasant places to work. Most are outsourcers for other major companies, so it doesn't do the workers any good to unionize. The primary company would pull the contract. These jobs pay from $7 to $12/hour. Most are in the $8-9/hr range. Call center jobs have notoriously high turnovers. Employee careers are measured in weeks, possibly months. With the economy sucking so bad, they can be measured in years now.
Oklahoma is like a third world country. So big ass companies don't outsource your low paying shit jobs to India or China send them to Oklahoma. They have more high school edumacated people than West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missippi combined! And the cost of doing business is low.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The fundamental problem with tech support is that:
1. The people who call in, by and large, are not computer literate nor very good at troubleshooting. (Troubleshooting in this case being the ability to reduce the problem to "when I do X, Y happens") So they are frustrating to work with. Problems that, were you at their PC, would be solved in seconds take 12 minutes.
2. No one with any level of skill or communication ability wants to work on the phones, because users tend to not be computer literate nor good at troubleshooting.
3. Users with a level of technical ability and skill don't want to call in for support, because they know they'll hit a script reader who won't be able to solve their problem. So they check on the Internet or ask friends to solve their problems. So the only users who call are less experienced users, which brings us back to point 1.
How to break this cycle? I'm not sure. I will point out the computers seems to be a rare instance where an untrained person is expected to be able to perform sometimes complicated operations only by voice instruction. Would you call the manufacturer of your transmission for help "over the phone" in installing it in your car? Of course not - it's understood this is a complicated operation that needs to be performed by a professional in order for things to work correctly. At minimum someone who can actually touch and see the work that needs to be done.
I will also point out that the companies who have historically had good support (Cisco, among others) tend to have users that don't fall into category 1.
Ack!
If you're _calling_ a telemarketing line, I hope you do get fired.
... and then there were none
I expect it is a subjective topic, but by most usual metrics including the popular rankings, it's stunning. Of the top 50 in the world, I think 45+ are in the US - and the rest are in Britain. Note that 50 or so years ago, this was most certainly not true, as both England and Germany among others had great universities. That said, many Asian nations are on the way up (though I believe Japan is a bit stagnant), but watch out for India, China, and Korea.
But between America's commitment to funding research and the system by which technology is transferred between Universities and private sector, it's amazing.
Now as for more aesthetic considerations, that's a different story. But as support for the industrial and research sectors, the top American universities have no peers in the world. And I don't say that to boast, as I really don't care all that much.
I'm not *just* making this up (no, really!), I've read about significant concern in Europe regarding the deterioration of their University system, in part from underfunding.
Put another way, what the hell *else* is keeping America on top? I think we'll all agree it's not the intellect of the populace on average, and it sure as hell isn't the public school system (ie, high school), as that's a joke. I can't think of anything but America's funding of the sciences, primarily.
But I like your general optimism that about constant innovation. You've got the right attitude. Time will tell if it stays true.
Time will certainly be the determiner there - but unlike most Americans on here, I wouldn't be at all displeased to see other nations enter the first world, as I'm comfortable with my skills and abilities. The more, the merrier, as far as economies go.
Where you from originally, incidentally?
I suppose you pay for your movies and music too?
;)
... and then there were none
Ahhhh... the what fun it was doing.. DUM BAH DUM... XBOX SUPPORT!!!
I had the chance to work at one of the rare exceptions, I'm sure some had a bad experiences, it's inevitable but we were complemented by industry reviewers on more than one occasion for our support. We had a free 800 number and actually did a decent job of providing solutions. On top of that our department was reasonably fun. How many people can say that in cubicle land? Our secret? NO CALL TIME QOUTAS!! Sure we cared how many calls you took but in the end the big stat was available/unavailable time. Didn't matter if their was a slight pause in the call que giving you a break, didn't matter if it took 40 minutes to solve a problem, just don't spend 3hrs sitting in the can. But then our company was in the buisness of selling video cards and getting it to work so you wouldn't take it back to Fry's and exchange it. If only we could have remained competitive with Nvidia. :)
Part of the reason we were able to exist in such a land of milk and honey was because the 3dfx support was a better organised and larger version of the already good STB support we did before merging with 3dfx.
We were able to solve most problems... That is... Unless you were running that damn "such n such" motherboard with the freaking (insert cheap-ass brand) AGP chipset, and you've got the DAMN WRONG chipset drivers loaded in windows, because like a MORON! you decided to just move your hard drive to the new mother board WITHOUT reinstalling (it used to really matter more, honest). And now you call us wondering why you can't get 200fps like the gamer-website-reviewer goofs who were over clocking their systems to the point of "BULLSHIT, TOTAL BULLSHIT" cause "god knows" if they get just another 10fps they might Out-Frag the other guy .... sigh, that place was fun.
Howdy from a former Voyager.net customer. Small upstairs walkup in Broad Ripple not far from a school in Indy. I would be the guy who left my payment at your door after hours. Pleasent tech support, although I never really needed tech support (billing was another matter :) I rode thru all the name changes until I left for broadband (back to dialup, bad economy).
corpsec: look up Pinkertons. google for Union Busting or Railroad Strikes.
also, your rationale is puerile.
let's see YOU run a solvent news-site, punkass.
I don't get it. Dell is famous for crap support and yet people keep buying from them. Don't respond with "dell gave me great support" I am not talking about you. I am talking to the people that keep coming back to have their asskicked.
My company often bought from Dell because that was the mandate of the client. And for good reason, actually, as the client had a Dell support contract, and anytime one of the machines got fucked up, Dell had a person onsite within 4 hours. Period. That's one hell of a support contract.
I have no doubt Dell's phone support sucks, but then when I was working for this company, I never needed the phone support. If the hardware was fucked and I knew it, I rang the number, said get somebody here, and somebody was there, usually with a whole new system as a drop in replacement. Within 4 hours.
Good service in any business arena is the exception and not the rule.
I wouldn't be so quick to state a blanket rule; I think a large part of the problem is related to (American/Western?) culture. I live in Japan, and though I rarely have occasion to deal with tech support in particular, I have almost never experienced situations such as you or the article describe, whether at McDonald's, at the local government office, or on the phone--everyone I speak with is polite and helpful. I still have vague memories of US support lines, so I can understand (and laugh morbidly at) stories like this, but if not, I'd be completely baffled.
(Disclaimer: I am fluent in Japanese.)
The problem is, as mentioed earlier, their busisness model. No one seems to have developed a resonable and equitable way to pay outsourcers, because the per call method simply does not work.
I've noticed better quality customer service from places that assign issue ticket ID numbers. IE:
Tech: Welcome to TIC tech support; can I have your user ID?
Caller: mst3k@TIC.net
Tech: [Clickety] Right. You last called us two days ago about a networking problem. Is that still the issue?
Caller: No, that's not it. This is something new.
Tech: Well, let's see what we can do.
[Time passes]
Well, since you don't have a dead chicken handy to wave over the computer, you can pick one up at your local butcher's shop. If that doesn't work, call us back and refer to ticket ID number [clickety] 123456789A.
Caller: Uh, chicken.... right.
[Click]
Tech: Oh, damn. I hope he doesn't get one from KFC...
So, if you can come up with a way that pays them per ticket, rather than per call, you might have better results. This system too can be gamed-- such as by techs opening new tickets each time regardless. This can be worked around: tickets considered closed if caller doesn't call back in 30 days on the issue; ticket considered open if the caller references it; ISP pays outsourcer for closed tickets, with an increasing but asymptotic scale ($1, $1.50, $1.75, $1.88, $1.93...) depending on how many calls it takes to fix it.
There's better solutions, no doubt, but I DON'T COME UP WITH THEM FOR A LIVING, and certainly not before my morning coffee. I have, however, read a few articles on outsourcing, and they all agree: you will get what you say you're paying for. So if ISPs want better service departments, they can come up with a way to pay for solutions rather than phone calls.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Sounds about right to me. I went there for an interview and walked out 10 minutes into the "pitch." The metal detector and X-ray belt (bought at an airline liquidation no doubt) should have been a giveway. They had a room full of applicants and some scumbag was explaining the pay scale and benefits, and I just couldn't believe the level of suckitude. It's easy to see why the employees might like a little gunplay. It would have been far less entertaining if I was hungry though...
FWIW, my current employer gets a constant stream of applicants that are former or current TAG employees, they always claim that they were in the IT department but don't have the skills to back that up.
1. No one provides services free of charge. You pay for them somewhere. When Gateway unbundled their free lifetime tech support, the price of their systems dropped by over $100.
2. As I said, if Dell DID NOT pass their savings on to customers, they'd be out of business when someone else started undercutting them. This may be changing as they become a de facto monopoly in the business PC market. (I haven't been involved in purchasing PCs for about two years so will not push this point too strongly.)
3. If I REALLY want to feel cheated I can look at the biggest kleptocracy in the world (the US government) but I digress.
"And these people call our socialist economy inefficient and oriented not towards creating actual results, but the impression of results only."
Leonid Brezhnev, the Secretary General of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, after RTFA.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
"We don't support that"
We're not here to help fix your computer. We just want to get you off the phone. A tech-support slave tells his hellish tale.
Editor's note: All names have been changed.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Kyle Killen
Feb. 23, 2004 | Class officially started three hours ago, but our instructor has not yet arrived. This is not uncommon. By now many of my classmates have begun to bring cards, magazines and DVDs to pass the time. "The Matrix" is playing on someone's laptop and has attracted a small crowd in the back of the room. The fact that we're being paid largely to sit around and entertain ourselves has been the source of lots of jokes and smiles, but in the back of our minds we can't help but be concerned.
Several people confess that they've never done more with a computer than check their e-mail. Others admit they haven't even gotten that far. An impromptu contest develops to see exactly who knows the least. There are lots of contenders. I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Ken is standing in the aisle, tethered to his cube by the spiraled umbilical of his headset, holding an unlit cigarette, and yelling. Ken is always yelling, and that's why we love him. Lots of us jot down Ken's more memorable tirades and compare notes on our breaks. Now, standing near my cube, screaming in the urgent and gravelly tones of a mid-40s chain smoker trapped in a non-smoking building, Ken tells a customer, "Quit whining and go get a damn screwdriver. I don't have time for this bullshit."
None of us is sure how he gets away with it, especially considering that Ken saves his real anger for dealing with management. His conversations with the higher-ups all end with Ken screaming, "This is bullshit! Total bullshit!" and hanging up.
We all understand why Ken is angry. We've been tech-support representatives for six weeks and already a third of our training class has left. A new crop of techs hit the floor last week, and two of them are already gone. It might be tempting to believe that the customers are driving the techs away, that they just can't take the stress of dealing with endless complaints and callers driven to near madness by interminable holds. But the callers just want answers. Ken, and those of us who are left, are angry because for the most part we don't have them.
When we pick up the phone we're lying. We don't really work for the company we say we work for. Because of the expense of housing and running a technical support operation, many computer manufacturers choose to outsource the work. We work for one such outsourcer, though you'd never know it just to talk to us. To the customer on the other end of the line the distinction, while important, is invisible.
Outsourcers are paid by the computer manufacturer based on the number of calls they handle. The more calls we take, the more the outsourcer is paid. So naturally everything that happens in this vast carpeted warehouse of cubicles is done with an eye toward speed. Our managers stress something called "average call time," which is simply the average amount of time a tech spends on each call. They want us to be under 12 minutes. Our phones monitor our ability to reach this magic number as well as the total number of calls we take, the number of times we ask for help, how much time we take between calls, even the amount of time we spend in the restroom. In short, your phone is always watching you.
Twelve minutes can sometimes be difficult even if you know what you're doing. It is impossible if you don't have a clue. The stress of always being on the clock without really knowing how to do your job has already claimed a third of my classmates, and from the looks of the bulging vei
I am sure she is aware of that. This is Slashdot, a news site for nerds. Nerds know how to use a proxy, etc.
AST was the Stream group of which I was a part. There were some good people in the group, but there were a lot of punters and idiots, too.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
*ahem*...according to the NDA I signed with them (I think I did anyway)...I am to say "No comment."
Yes. All he says is true. I live in Coral Spgings and I had 2 roommates who worked there and they told me the same things. The metal detector and the minimum wage thing, I know about firsthand since I went there to apply for a job this afternoon. They are really my bottom choice but I need the experience to get a job somewhere else.
I know all about TAG, unfortunately. I don't work there, but I have to deal with them every day. I work for another call center that shares a client with TAG. EVERY SINGLE DAY I read notes on customer's accounts where TAG agents do the dumbest things. For example: we have a modem that you can use the URL launchmodem to access the interface for. I've seen TAG agents try to use that URL with THE COMPLETELY WRONG MODEM, and then send a technician out to replace a defective modem! By the time people get to me, they're usually pissed at TAGs incompetence (though its all the same company to them)
While I'm at it... not everyone that does Tech Support cares about making money for the company. I could care less what my stats look like. My sup's ask me why my call times are high, and I tell them to look at my Customer Satisfaction survey. I might have an Average Call Time of 25 minutes, but my CSAT survey average is 97%.
The other day, I got a call from a customer who needed some help getting LiveUpdate to work with our service. I helped them do it.... its no more than 5 quick clicks to fix. Guess what? I got yelled at. Why? Because we don't support it. My response was "I can help them. I know how. Why should I have to tell them to call Symantec, who charges $30 an incident, when I can make them extremely happy in under 5 minutes?" The answer I got: We don't want to be held liable for any damage caused by trying to fix an unsupported issue. (!!!)
Why does http://www.caughron.com/ not work in Mozilla under Gentoo?
C'mon, a liberally educated graduate should be able to do better.
Oh, yeah, for +5 troll, the troll mod had to come BEFORE the last +1 mod, otherwise it would be +4.
And yes, I am a smart @$$.
heheheheheheh
Fellowship 9/11
> Who needs support for long-distance phone service?
I'm not talking about the LD service in your house. I'm talking about trouble reporting and feature management. You know, you need to change the DNIS on one of your groups. Or, one of your voice Ts goes spotty, and you want to frog it with one of your internet Ts... since TCP is a little more forgiving to spotty outages. Or, your center blows up, and you need to re-route all inbound traffic to another location. Dumb things like these need people with a clue, and they are time-sensitive.
> And how many "infrastructure improvements" did the Telcos make back when they were charging us 26 cents a minute?
Well, I know at the AT&T bunker to the south of us, they used to fly their cable routes every other day, to help make sure their stuff wouldn't get backhoed. Little things like that, which are now gone, do cost money.
OTOH, if you're talking about feature creep... that's a whole different matter.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
As an ex-tagger....
They're not looking for guns or knives. They're looking for cellphones and floppy disks. No antivirus system on most machines, you know. A disgruntled employee could do major damage, and the minimum wage thing keeps most of their employees disgruntled.
Personally, I didn't mind it. I fixed problems whenever I could. I had customers who'd spend ten minutes trying to convince me to format their machines...
It all depends on your work ethic and your TL's work ethic. My POV is that if I don't fix it, the next guy they reach will just break things worse. And if somebody's willing to learn, I'm willing to teach them. My team leaders generally didn't care enough to stop me.
Of course a friend of mine managed to get four-minute average call times by unplugging his phone and waiting for people to hang up when they got dead air.
Posted AC for...reasons
Answer: Electrocute the ladder and throw the light bulb away. If the ladder is female it does not need time to warm up.
scottiebear