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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."
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.
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 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.
The fact that Dell is one of the top 3 computer makers and that this call center is setting up to take over for calls that have to be handled elsewhere right now, leads me to start thinking that this call center will be where your calls to Dell are going to be routed soon...
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.
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
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.
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?
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!
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?
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...
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.
I will attempt to help back up the article with a resounding "yes, a call center is meant to take a lot of calls, not solve problems".
See, I work in a generic call center. We do our own support here for member accounts (non-technical) and we attempt to bring in farmed work from other businesses. When the management goes to talk to companies, they automatically reject anyone who says they want quality numbers. They come armed only with quantity. Average call times are to be under two and a half minutes and full time reps are required to take over 200 calls per day lest they be put on the chopping block.
There's two benefits to this approach: 1) management can claim a high quality call center to prosepective outsourcers based on the fact that we take a lot of calls and 2) H.R. can keep average salaries low by firing people who are not meeting quality standards and unrealistic quantity standards. Effectively, the only way to make these mutually exclusive goals is to remain as generic and unhelpful as possible. I was once told flat out by a caller that I'm "really good at saying nothing in as many words as possible". Trying to solve a person's problem inevitably leads to complexity which slows down call times which leads to a meeting with a manager.
Don't blame me though... I'm just a code monkey now, nobody listens to me.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
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.
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.
Having just read 1984 again since it is bandied about so dang often, I'd have to agree the Orwellian aspect of the situation isn't there.
Don't just use the phrase and assume you know what it means. (I'm not referring to Cpt Albert, but the Orwell comment) Read the book Michael.
Tech Support managers that emphasize low call volume is where any industry should go to research bad examples of "Management"
Take a subjective topic like anything someone would call for technical support and try to apply "METRICS" to it to be able to grade employees. So it's my fault if the customer is a moron and I still want/try to help them? No thanks.
This space intentionally left blank.
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
I get email addresses all the time, it's their work address. I've had anything from payment histories, account balances, and even the history of comments on their computer emailed to me.
If you've ever worked in tech support, this is 100% true, even the guy who doesn't help anyone but has the best call times gets promoted part.
Runnin' On Empty
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.
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
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...
Admittedly, "Orwellian" is most often applied directly the 1984, but not always or exclusively.
sPh
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?
Information can't be bought or sold. They still have it if you get it, so they don't lose anything except the ability to restrict what you think and say.
Copyright is the biggest scam since organized religion.
Sigmentation fault - core dumped
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.
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.
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
The article is an accurate description of some call centers. The (very large and well-known) company that I work for outsources its tech support to Houston and India, and we have had a ridiculous number of complaints from our customers regarding the poor quality of our tech support. Everything I have heard here fits with what that article described.
We have been working hard on turning the situation around, with some success. My wife ran into a problem with her account a while back, and in light of this I decided that I would try to play customer rather than just getting the responsible engineer to fix it. The people I talked to were helpful, courteous, and didn't have a frickin' clue how to solve the problem. The standard response was "we changed something about your account, but it won't have any effect for a few hours. Check then, and call back if you're still having a problem."
I went through that three times before I just had a coworker fix it. Sounds an awful lot like the experiences described in the article.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Exactly. So it is not surprising that the support service for products that are generally sold by being the least-cost box available is a DISASTER. I bought a Gateway box for $399. With one exception, it has worked just fine. I suspect that if I ever make a call to tech support, Gateway ends up losing money. The one time I had a problem, their Web site actually had useful information that allowed me to recover gracefully -- much better information than I think I would have gotten from the call center.
Ah I remember that Debug Script. Back in da' day for Windows 3.11 support we used that bad boy all the time. These were in the days of prePnP so we would have to move mice and modems and sound cards (oh my!) to resolve various interrupt conflicts. The great part of this script was teaching a customer how to use Debug. For many it was their first time to see what memory actually looked like, and a glimpse on how their computer actually thought. They felt empowered. I went and dug up this old script for posterity.
Build a file com.txt
E40:0
F8 03 F8 02 E8 03 E8 02
q
run Debug com.txt, shake with one pentium math error and enjoy.
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
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.
Negative. This article is absolutely accurate.
I don't know if other outsource companies do this, but Stream uses the title "mentor" for its second-level people (the tech support guy's tech support).
I worked at Stream, and I can personally confirm that it is completely accurate in describing what life is like there. The metric for success is NOT "Did you solve problems for the customers today?" but rather "How many calls did you take today?" Nothing else matters. It was particularly bad in our group, because The Customer was really fastidious about checking over our shoulders. This meant that punters would be caught much quicker than average, but it also meant that we had two sets of almost mutually contradictory objectives: "Solve Problems!" and "Get off that phone NOW!!"
Perhaps the most revealing story I can tell is the one about the staff meeting where our manager's boss was meeting with our manager and every tech on our team. Our manager was standing behind the Boss when a tech asked a Yes-or-No question of the Boss. Our manager immediately started wagging his head "No" and frowning, as though he thought it was a stupid question. In the next instant, the Boss said "Yes" and proceeded to expand on that answer. Almost simultaneously, our manager switched from a frowning "No" to a smiling "Sure!", wagging his head up and down instead.
It was one of the most amazing brown-nosing performances I've ever witnessed.
I can't tell you how happy I am not to be trapped in that dead-end job anymore, but if I absolutely had no other choice, I'd do it again. There's a lot of pressure, but no one ever asks you to take work home or work extra hours.
DFL
Never send a human to do a machine's job.
Same goes, for the NY Times : THey have great articles at times, and registering with my register/spam-email account is totally worth it.
Right. And if your privacy concerns are so acute that you can't register for a website, you shouldn't be using the world wide web to get your news in the first place. Their weblogs are probably far more useful in tracking you than some stupid username.
In fact, when I worked for an online newspaper provider, I would generally have mine the logs when we needed more information on a user. Example: somebody posted a death threat to a reporter using our forums. His username pointed to a yahoo account, no use there. Luckily, I was able to trace his account's last login back to one of our reverse cache servers, and get his IP address from the logs. His local PD used this info to contact his ISP, and they tracked him down pretty good.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
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.
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.
All the people who tried to economize on His Billness's time would have left for the day, and callers would get tech support from Bill Gates.
This is the New Mexico era I'm talking about here.
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.'
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 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.
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.
Sounds like stream too. I would like to blame them for the problem, but companies like HP/Compaq and IBM monitor and make test calls. They know exactly what the score is.
I worked at a call center that lost a contract to stream. The computer maker knew we were better than stream, in fact their own call QA person said we scored better than any other center, including internal centers that delt with high end business customers. But it's all about money. In our case, we could get under 12 minute calls, but weren't extracting enough $35 non-supported help fees.
Hey, it's better than selling pet food on the Internet.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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...
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
The point about burgers and doctors is that (in my doomsday scenario) those would be the ONLY jobs left in the US (for practical reasons, nothing to do with racism). Enough jobs to employ just a small fraction of the US population.
When manufacturing jobs went abroad, everybody said - fine, we'll be a service based industry. But service jobs are leaving too. So, please tell me, what else is there? I do hope that someday that "better job" you describe will make itself evident.
There is an arrogant view (just below the surface in your post) that Americans are smarter than foreigner and therefore we'll always be one step ahead in terms of skills and jobs. As a foreigner (now living in the US) I don't buy it. There is no reason that every single service job in the US can't be moved to India (or wherever). It just will take a little time to implement.
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.
Let's put it this way.
Is Ken Lay in jail for stealing tens of billions of dollars? Doesn't seem so. How about Rush Limbaugh, who sent his maid out to buy drugs by the thousands? Not a chance.
However, Slashdot pulls a post about Scientology's OT3 "Xenu is an alien" theology, even though they broke no laws.
Ah, I read today that John Ashcroft (Attorney General, anointed by Judge Clarence Thomas) is going to keep prosecuting Scott Ritter, chief American weapons inspector for Iraq, for something involving that faked kiddie porn charge that was leveled against the ex-Marine after he told everyone that Bush was lying about WMD's. Pure vengeance, pure evil, pure abuse of law to punish those who speak truth to corrupt power.
Here I see that RIAA has hired thugs to wear black windbreakers with the letters "RIAA" emblazoned across the back. They are raiding flea markets and "busting" people. The first recorded use of corporate private law enforcement on the streets.
With all this, who cares about breaking the law about "intellectual property". It's an article, it's on the Internet, it's free. That's how the Internet works. That is how file transfer technology works. Deal.
Stupid laws, and rich bastards who can break any law they like with impunity weaken respect for the law. Enron didn't care. Thousands of CEOs who are looting the nation don't care. Why should we?
The only ethics anyone with cash cares about is: if I can get away with it, screw legal. Obedience is for suckers without lawyers.
Why should we care either?
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
This story is great. Man, there are some serious parallels to what I saw working support at MS. Punting was a really big thing in support there especially amoung the contract guys.
We also had the "bullshit" guy who'd curse his customers but could fix anything. I once heard him trying to get a guy to hit his F8 key at the right time to go into safe mode saying "dude, hit the F8 key!! Bang on that sucker like your beating off on a picture of Pamela Anderson". The guy got into safe mode.
He got fired about 6 months later when they started recording his calls. They got one of him talking to another guy there about which female managers they'd like to have sex with. Heck of a way to go.
This space for rent.
I use the Supertrak SX6000 in a raid 5 configuration. Stupid moron (me), never backed up the RAID config on the controller. So when the controller failed, I thought I was out 100+ GB of data.
:-)
Turns out that Promise stores array information on the disks themselves, so if you plug them back in order (disk0 on raid ide0, etc.) it boots the array just fine. My scream of joy nearly blew the roof off (after spending 3 days getting LVM working with SuSE 8.2 and the pti_st.o Promise Driver... fucking SuSE installer...
Needless to say, I'm continually dumbfounded by the inclusion of RAID 0... <sigh>
Mmm... 0+1, 4 disks to get reliable fast performance that I could have gotten by buying Seagate Cheetah's and SCSI... for the same price. yeah.