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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."
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.
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
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).
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.
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
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.
You've certainly identified the real culprit here. Even before corporations started setting up shop in India to hire people for lower wages (which are probably great wages in India), it was very typical for corporations to misuse, or not even use at all, the advanced skills many people have. It seems they are doing exactly the same thing in India.
There was a situation a few years ago when I lived in Dallas. There was a woman who I met who was wanting to learn more about Unix. Turns out she was being hired on an H-1B visa by Texas Instruments to be a Unix systems administrator. But she seemed to be a smart person so I asked her more about herself and found out she had a master's degree in CS, and the only experience she had with Unix is having logged in as a student user to a Linux machine a few times. So why would an American corporation hire someone obviously well qualified for more advanced work into a lower level job (run around and fix Sun desktops for engineers) she had no experience in? Obviously for cheaper wages (which, despite claims to the contrary, is easy to get away with using H-1B) is one of the reasons. But they probably could have her doing the more advanced work at the lower wages, too, so why not? Corporations also try to keep people down; maybe managers are afraid of being replaced by people that know more. But this has been a common practice for decades, to underutilize people's skills. It didn't change even with H-1B, and it won't change with outsourcing in India.
I can't blame any Indians (or Chinese, or Russians, or anyone else) for wanting to find better work for better pay than they have been getting before. The real blame goes to corporate executives who just try to screw people over, whether American or Indian ... all for profit. People in America are trying to recover their own jobs, and it's quite obvious the only way to do that is a change of government, since the corporations themselves are obviously not doing it (and aren't expected to, since their loyalty is strictly to their shareholders). The saddest part of this situation is that it will breed some hatred for India and Indians that is not due, and may take years to erase.
What I'd really like to see happen is that Indians get together and form all new companies that better respect people than the companies in America run by greedy fat cat scrooges, and end up not only putting everyone in India to work, but also end up coming to America and displacing these crappy companies we have here.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.