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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."
What are the odds of that? I bet you can find the same for almost any position, big or small.
Orwellian? In what way?
I'd have said Kafka-esque, perhaps.
These sigs are more interesting tha
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
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.
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
You are looking at the whole situation from a very narrow perspective. Even though you consider yourself a knowledgable person (which btw I highly doubt), there are lots of american people who are losing their bread and butter because of call center jobs being transfered to India.
And just because the job doesn't require toomuch knowledge doesn't make it any less important. The jobs and the money they generate contribute to the american economy. So your argument that it's not a worrying factor, is mute.
The irony is I am an indian. The sad fact is quite a lot of the indians who work at call centers in india are in fact technology graduates and masters, and quite knowledgable. But they choose those jobs, simply because it pays their rent. And the lack of a familiar accent to american consumers is bring them a bad name.
So the situation is not working in anybody's favour, neither the american worker's who lost the jobs,nor the indian techies who gained them. I guess the only winner is corporate america.
for the last time people, I am "frodo from middle eaRTH", not "middle eaST".
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.
You married a fish? Guess you never get to complain about her being cold... Comcast has awful tech support, a draconian AUP and no. fucking. clue. They are oversubscribing their loops (while vehemently denying it) and they will come to no good end, mark my words.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Was this full-length quote posted with permission of Salon.com? It was certainly done without attribution. Adding injury to insult, this unattributed posting has potentially deprived Salon of income, of which it does *not* enjoy an overabundance. The article is only available to Salon Premium members (I'm one) who pay a modest annual fee to view the usually top-notch content. If this is how we treat out friends....
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
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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.
espo
I figured punter was refering to football. As in 4th down and 70 yards. Time to fall back and punt.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I couldn't agree more. I was working for Vonage earlier this year. Most of the people in my training class were from technical schools that weren't very good. Very few people there actually had a BA/BS in Comp Sci or other computer related degree. I only lasted there for about 2 1/2 full working days after the training was over. It just wasn't worth it dealing with cursing customers and only getting paid around $12/hr. At least I learned a thing or two about VoIP from the training. Since then, I have been infinitly more patient when calling my ISP tech support. They need all the friendly callers they can get.
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
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 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!
Even a stopped clock is right twice everyday.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
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.
Same here. I pay for Salon - I find it worthwhile, I read it every day, and it comes with an insane number of additional freebies - like a subscription to Wired. And it's not as if you're locked out of reading for free what I pay for. You just have to pay by watching an ad.
I don't have the mod points I had yesterday, or I'd have modded the parent down. Sorry, but that's just not right. And it makes Slashdot readers look like a mob of freeloaders.
"How perfectly Goddamn delightful it all is, to be sure" Charles Crumb
How do the American consumers gain? What prices have went down because of outsourcing to India/China? What is now cheaper?
Hmm, why not just surf over to Salon to read this article? Salon.com is the only site I've ever paid for content. And I've found it totally worth it - the writing is top notch, and you're not going to find that in one of 100 +5 mods here. Overall their stories and reviews are great, their books coverage (my favorite part) is outstanding and news coverage is up to date about issues that people actually care about. Any news outlet that wants to chage for a premium service appealing to intelligent people would be wise to look at Salon's model. My 2 cents.
Hansel USA - Chut up and read!
...and yet, there are people (myself included) who are at this time poking around some site called salon.com, which I was previously unaware of. They might even get a subscriber or ten out of this, who knows.
Something about this article said "bogus" to me most of the way through and this clinches it. Ken gave out his email address to the caller? Increasing his average call time by valuable seconds? Why?
qntm.org
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.
I believe that punter referred to the American context of punting - that is, in football, when the ball is kicked back to the other team because they do not believe they can score a touchdown in this down, so instead will so instead will simply let the other team have the ball as far away as possible.
Its a good analogy - "I can't do anything with this, so you take it and get it as far away from me as possible".
Man, I wish I had as much free time as you do. Next time I have a problem with customer service, I'll give you their info, and let you handle the process ;-)
Seriously though, while I agree that this form of action is the only really effective way to make a change, most people (myself included) I doubt have the patience/time to coerce the company to change their policies. It's much easier to complain to the point where you get your answer/result, and then leave it at that. Sad, I know...
"Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion." - Democritus
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!
The american consumer does not win in the long term. At best, it's a very short term gain. Sure he can buy something a bit cheaper today, but if the trend continues*, his own job will be going to India (or wherever) and he won't be able to buy anything tommorow (for lack of income), regardless on how cheap it is.
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.
* manufacturing is all but gone from this country, and services are also leaving. 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. There is only a need for so many doctor (even that they can do remotely these days) or burger flippers.
The funny part of this one for me is when you have a V.P of your company that has your product and needs help and you don't have anyone with a Clue to help them. Watch your manager squirm then.
If anyone is in this position, suggest to your upper management to call the support line and try to get help with something.
This space intentionally left blank.
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
So we should take out MORE student loans, go deeper into debt, lose more years of our life to train for another job that can just be outsourced like the last? Whats more, if the job market is expanding, how come there are fewer jobs? I've not seen ONE source that claims there are more jobs now then there where four years ago that is not scewing the results. What few new jobs there are, are all in the service industry. These are not the types of jobs we need for a strong economy unless you want nothing but CEOs and janators.
"We, American consumers, can now purchase products cheaper."
No we cant. All this is doing is lowering the cost to the company, thus earning the CEO and other managment more money. Prices are NOT going down because of this, proffits are going up.
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
Our client wants problems solved and doesn't care about "Average Handle Times"
Could you please tell us who that client is?
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!!! **
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?"
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.
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?
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
Erm... it's just as likely to be a broken cable, when that happens. Although perhaps less with an integrated POS like that where the cable hasn't seem much knocking, could always have been a dry joint.
The likelihood of broken cable vs broken electron gun seems, from experience, to be weighted towards the cable in such instances of one colour failure.
Because you have to run the scam for at least a few months to make profits. Call logs are the metrics the whole contract hinges on. There are customer satisfation surveys, done by the client at random, if every call just automaticly hung up even after 20 minutes, the client would know whats up very quickly.
compare it to the cheating that goes on with the seti client. They can only realisticly detect cheats that do the work in a ridiculusly shot period of time. The rest, that claims reasonable time for the work done. Beyond that your left with random sampling and statistics.
If you did no work, they know what's up instantly, if you do half assed work they have to get about 3-6 months worth of poor satisfation surveys before you have a trustworthy statistical analysis. Even then they'll usually give the client a chance to improve, so as not to incur the expense of switching to another provider.
Bottom line, statistical analysis of quality lags far behind that of quantity. The client doesn't know they're getting fleeced for at least a few months, as long as you'r doing something.
Chilling, but not really Orwellian. It's more Heller-esque.
In an Orwellian world, you're damned no matter what. In a Heller-esque world, you're only damned so far as you follow the written rules -- if you trump those and follow the ACTUAL rules, you can succeed quite well. Loni is a Milo Minderbinder.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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 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.
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.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
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.
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.
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
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
Punting usually happens on fourth down. You have four downs to move the ball ten yards. If you cannot, the opposing team gets the ball where it lies. Also, typically the same players do not play offense and defense. So, by punting, you are essentially saying, "I've done all I can with it, this is no longer my problem." You are deliberately getting rid of the ball (problem) and handing it off to someone else.
Also, punting often puts you in a better situation, as it gives the other team a much less favorible field position than almost any other kind of turnover. If you simply must turn the ball over, or are seriously concerned that you will, this is the best way to do it.
Last, being American, I've never heard it used in the sense of "doing something completely random". It's almost always referred to in the sense of "getting rid of the problem by giving it to someone else", usually someone you don't like or don't know well or is in a different division (hence, not on "your team"). If you were giving it to a peer or co-worker, you'd probably use the term "hand off", which is how the quarterback (the player who initally takes possesion of the ball and controls the play) transfers the ball to the running back (usually a fast runner, used to move the ball forward by running it) on his team.
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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."
"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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
4) I can't understand a goddamn word they're saying.
doesnt have anything to do with race or expertise. but if i can't understand what they say, how can they help me?
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.
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.
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
I'm sure a lot of people have read Alan Greenspan's comments about how outsourcing will be good in the long run. Maybe I'm a little thick here, but this doesn't seem logical. Here are the facts as I see them:
1. Companies outsource to increase profitability.
2. Companies choose to layoff a majority of the workers, as re-education costs time and money.
3. The market becomes saturated with unemployed skilled workers, as most companies have outsourced their positions.
4. The unemployed skilled workers can not re-educate themselves, as they have little money to do so (most will try to keep their families fed instead).
5. As more and more jobs are outsourced, unemployment rises.
6. Consumer buying plummets as a result of less people earning money.
7. The US economy grinds to a halt.
This seems pretty obvious. The only way I see massive outsourcing being a benefit in the long term is if the cost of living in these countries rises faster than our economy slows down. Eventually a balance would be achieved, but at cost?
Companies, at least nowadays, really could care less about the workers. It's all about the cash flow. And they will take whatever steps to keep their pockets overflowing with green.
The American worker can not compete with someone who does the same job at a fraction of the cost. Even if the lower cost worker makes an occasional mistake, it is still worth it to the big company.
We need a level playing field. And a lot better referees.
~X
Random Quote: "It's easy to find an opening when your opponent is all asshole."
~X~
I certainly encourage you and everyone else to focus your anger on the companies, corporate executives, and their stockholders, who are always trying to screw people over just for profits. Indians are just as much victims of this, if not more so. If these companies could find a way to do absolutely everything in a foreign country ultra cheap, or even on Mars, they would. And don't forget that Bush, Cheney, and many Republicans are in bed with these corporations. Use your vote in 2004 wisely.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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!
You want to claim to me that a country like Jamaica or Haiti is capable of supporting the infrastructure to build fiber-optic routers and CAT scanners and be competitive on the open market? Not today. 10 years, maybe 5 from now, yes. Fact: There are many countries (hint: not the G8) who are incapable of maintaining significant industry and being competitive in the world economy. No arrogance involved.
As for Boeing, when your major customer is the U.S. government, you tend to do whatever they say...
Cheers.