Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
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.
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
"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
The Stream employees in Kalispell, MT, knew why they were let go. Stream closed up shop there and moved to Canada.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
A punt is a boat used on the Thames and the Cam (at Oxford and Cambridge), propelled by a pole. Hence to "punt" is to push around.
A punter now means a consumer, but previously meant gambler, especially horse racing.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
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.
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.
Orwellian? In what way?
Perhaps it was this quote that made the submitter think of "1984":
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.
According to the article, it's even worse than that. The people with ultra-short call time averages - those who basically just hang up on people - are promoted. Repeatedly.
...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
... 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.
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.
"punt", from American football, "to give up on a failed offensive drive and kick the ball to the other team"
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
This article is spot-on. Typically there's a single blanket email address for customer complaints and compliments. Usually it gets forwarded to a manager.
"Bold as Love"
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.
Yes, however, this is an American article and is thus using the American definition of punt.
The term punt comes from American football, where one kicks, or "punts" the ball downfield when deliberately handing control of the ball to the other side, thus making the opposing team have more ground to make up toward the goal.
Such deliberate exchanges of ball control are part of the rules of American football, so punting is a stategic choice.
In colloquial usage to punt means either to do something essentially random and see what happens, or to "kick" the problem to someone else, leading to the common American phrase, "When in doubt, punt."
KFG
No. The term you are thinking of is "bunt."
KFG
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 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!
And I have heard the act of floating slightly above the ground refered to as "hoovering."
Sometimes people just get mixed up over words that sound very similar.
Bunt is derived from butt, to hit lightly. It is possible that it is a portmanteua word with punt, but there is no actual evidence that this is the case.
Punt means to drop a ball from the hands and kick it. It does not carry the explicit meaning of to do so lightly, in fact generally opposite is the case.
These are both also technical terms of sport, and their meanings have been rigidly defined in the rule books for over 100 years.
KFG
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."