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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."
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.
A: i have a copy of the light bulb here at my desk and it works fine for me. are you familiar with the use of light bulb? okay, can you tell me which version of light bulb you are running - it should say either 60w or 100w on the top rounded surface of the the bulb itself. so, to check the version number you will need to remove the fixture if you have one. is the light bulb installed in a ceiling-mounted fixture light or is it for a desktop style lamp? okay?
right, it appears as if you have the correct version of light bulb. there are a number of possible reasons why you are experiencing this problem. first, however, i need you to explain the nature of the darkness. is the darkness intermittent? is it partial or total? are there other light bulbs in your work environment that are displaying the same problem? are there other problems aside from the darkness?
let's start with the simplest possible solution first. if you have a desklamp or other exposed-bulb installation, could you check to see if the appliance is plugged in. to do this, locate the black power cord at the bottom of the lamp or other installation and follow it to the end. you should find a plug connected to a socket on the wall approximately ten to fifteen centimeters above the floor.
if you are using a ceiling or other permanent installation we'll have to test the switch. first, locate the switch. it should be attached to the wall and be from 1.25 to 1.75 meters above the floor. switches are usually located adjacent to doorways. now, toggle the switch up and down. is the darkness persisting?
hm. is your installation battery operated? like a flashlight? is your installation on a timer or motion detector? is this a refrigerator light bulb? have you tried opening and closing the door? is the bulb florescent rather than incandescant? has it had time to warm up?
okay, it appears as if the bulb will need to be changed. i'm going to give you an incident number. someone from physical plant will be by within ten working days to change your light bulb. please give him your incident number.
2 1337 4 u!
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"Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center."
Things go on inside tech-support centers?!? I thought they just put everyone on hold!
tim
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 didn't see any forced ad viewing?
Seems like the first two paragraphs is all the article-reading you can stand...
I originally worked for mindspring, they found that they got a better class of techs, who responded well on the phone when given a decent work environment; cut forward to 2 years later after the merger with earthlink. The new motto was low call times, let them call back. Costs rose, the work environment stunk, and most of the support personnel developed attitudes, not to mention that management developed a sweep everything under the rug attitude. Unfortunately call center phone support is getting to the point of burger flipping and telemarketing. A lot of friends complain that they know more about the product then the support personnel they are calling (some are semi-computer literate artists)
I'm listening to them battle for the crown of incompetence as I'm dealt a new hand of cards when a frightening thought occurs to me. Our clueless bunch is now part of the technical-support staff for one of the world's top three computer manufacturers, and in seven days we're going to be taking your calls.
Dell's support line was like this when I called them last summer... Hopefully now that Dell is moving call centers back home again, better service is just around the corner.
When I ordered DSL, it had to be MSN. It never worked. But even as the Tech Support guys (in India) could not find the problem in their database (and therefor could not solve the issue, I just bailed on DSL for cable), they where polite and actually spent lots (LOTS) of time with me. Now the Comcast guys, they suck, tried to stick me with a "premium" install service charge even though all they did was drop off a box and a disc (my wife, the barracuda took care of them).
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I've never had any of these supposed problems when calling any computer manufacturer's tech support lines. Is it how I somehow command the attention of the phone monkeys on the other end? Do they somehow become knowledgable or magically able to forward me to tier 2 if it says "Ayanami" on the caller ID?
I highly suspect this is a bogus/fluff article: you know, an amaglamation of a bunch of interviews and war stories about the worst call center conditions imaginable.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Orwellian? In what way?
I'd have said Kafka-esque, perhaps.
These sigs are more interesting tha
I worked doing tech support at an ISP some years ago. Once I gained more knowledge I moved on to bigger and better things. It cannot be easy to hold on to talented tech support persons for the relatively low pay they receive vs the stress of dealing with irate customers and the pressure of keeping call times down. Most probably move on like I did.
some are all about speed, some are about quality.
Why is this news?
Yeah, mod it flamebait, but you thought the same thing.
Some companies give bad tech support. News at 11.
Sent from your iPad.
The last three words does suffice pretty well.
"Bullshit. Total bullshit."
And we wonder why computer illiterate people always come to directly to the geek in their life for help whenever something goes wrong.
And your justification for gross violation of copyright laws is what exactly? Salon.com is a paid-subscription site with limited public access. Its content is NOT under a Creative Commons or GPL license. You have no right to copy an article in bulk from Salon to another site.
sPh
For the time being, I'm the guy doing the monitoring. Recorded calls, live calls, I shudder to think how many I've listened to in the past months. And we do indeed listen to them (whilst existing in that impossible state of forced-web-browsing-boredom) with at least one ear. Occasionally I get callers fired, largely for fun, but sometimes because they're rubbish. Of course, this is telemarketing, not tech support, and the government (UK) have reasonably strict laws on what will and won't hack it. Same third-party, outsourced set up. Perhaps some sort of regulatory/accountability / government-in-your-backyard intervention is required?
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
My "well configured Firefox" didn't stop the ads. So I guess you only read 2 paragraphs, huh? Don't feel bad, you still did better than most Slashdot readers do.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Internet Help Desk skit (it's in quicktime)
It's mildly amusing, but there is grains of truth in the humor...
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
If you're a big fan of "root causes", well, the root cause of crappy tech support is the business model. The people who work there get paid per hour, but the actual company, or in this case "branch-of-other-company-via-internal-billing" gets paid per call that comes into the building. Therefore somebody who is needs three or four calls to fix a problem, rather than just one, is three or four more times as profitable to the company as one who calls once.
In this environment, the ideal setup is about 95% braindead scriptreaders who can cheaply solve the great majority of problems given a flowchart and three or four tries and a tiny handful of people who handle the real problems from the persistent clients. But if you're actually good, and you want to keep your job, you have to play by Management's playbook.
There's an optimal point somewhere where the cheapness of tech-support expenses is balanced against the cost of losing clients, and I promise you, some very smart people have worked out those numbers.
Seriously, that's why consumer net access is so cheap, in both senses of the word, these days.
Mike Hoye
This could be a fun quiz addition for e-mode.com: Which Tech Support Staffer Are You?
I think I am a "Santa"
Allow cookies from cache.ultramercial.com
/Creatives. Your not missing out on ads people - your missing out on creativity. This site bugs me, I thought cool the finally have text ads - but they turned out to be GIF's!
Adblock cache.ultramercial.com/*
Adblock salon.com/Creatives/*
That flags the cookie you've seen the ad, and next time you get a nice clean page that says click here to continue.
Also on Salon, the ads are pathed to
I thought it was fairly well known that call centers are all a numbers game. Management wants minimum call duration and maximum calls per employee; they're not really interested in solved problems.
The more calls you can handle, the fewer people you need (and all the associated overhead costs) and the more profit you make. It's really that simple.
Employees who actually take the time to help people get bad numbers and ultimately get canned, even if they're good at helping people. The successful employees figure out how to crank through their calls ASAP, as well as how to game the system so that they can sneak idle time without appearing to ignore calls in queue.
It's essentially the rules associated with factory work applied to answering the phone.
"The reason they got so much hell from corporate customers is that they have dedicated IT professionals who've already done all the testing and can't afford two hours on the phone to get some replacement hardware sent out. The IT dept will simply switch to a new vendor if that kind of crap persists."
Actually, larger firms can get a deal with Dell where an in-house tech can order parts under warranty on a website. I would go nuts if my company didn't have that option.
-Jeff
Why is this even a story? This is nothing new, first level tech support has ALWAYS been like this. When I was fresh outta school in the early 90's and worked tech support this was the status quo, and low and behold it still is the status quo 15 years later.
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
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?
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".
A punt is a boat used on the Thames and the Cam (at Oxford and Cambridge), propelled by a pole. Hence to "punt" is to push around.
A punter now means a consumer, but previously meant gambler, especially horse racing.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
This reminds me of my days as a TSR for a major printing company. I worked for a total of 4 months, and went three of them without any training, except for the obligitory phone training. People there were and still are scared to go to bathroom because the phone will record how many minutes they're away. Some TSR's get breaks by just answering and "accidentally" hitting the hang up button, convieniently located just next to the pick up one.
Others just told customers the printer was defective and needed to be replaced and sent them a new one. (Now you know why it's so easy to get that printer replaced!)
And for the printers that really needed to be replaced, that really had major defects, it was a big no-no to even mention that this might be a common problems.
You see, tech support is all about image. The company doesn't want to give good tech support. It just wants the customers to not think badly about it.
P.S.: To be fair, the TS was nowhere near as bad as described in the article, but I was only in the (comparitively) highly-trained laser printer dept. The ink-jets were shipped out to India a LONG time ago.
www.eissq.com/BandP.html Ball and Plate System. Amuse your friends. Crush your enemies.
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.
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....
A gambler. (One who "punts" money on the horses.) A customer of goods or services. These days the term is applied so broadly it can refer to any member of the great British public: anyone who is in the market for goods, services or help. "It's what the punters want," is an excuse for pandering to the lowest common denomenator.
Back when Microsoft Office was pretty new, Bill Gates was touring the facility and in one of the call centers, he discovered a couch in the center of the room. When he asked about the couch, he was told that it was the Mail-Merge couch; because when anyone needed help with Mail-Merge, they would be on the phone for a long time.
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
The high turnover rate of employment is cause of concern for me. However, it won't end until people realize that the job is horrible and shouldn't go after it because of the money. $8/hr to flip burgers at McDonalds or $9/hr to get screamed at, both by management and the caller, and have to worry how to get "customers" off the phone as quickly as possible, I'd take burger-flippin' any day. I may come home smelling like french fries, but a quick shower will fix that and that extra dollar just isn't worth it to me.
Amigori
"The quality of life is determined by its activites."--Aristotle
I've been having some outstanding support from HP lately. I just bought a laptop from them last month, and had a number of questions for them regarding upgrades and repartitioning my hard drive to dual boot linux and windows. I'm very impressed and glad that I went with HP.
- Their technicians have responded within 24 hours (usually within 2 hours) to all my emails.
- They provided useful information without a load of sales pitch and other BS (minimal indemnification and warnings where prudent and necessary)
- The replies were in good English using complete sentences and proper technical document style and language.
- They told me up front they don't support linux (reasonable because there's so many distros and different ways to configure linux; I'd have expected REAL linux support if they were selling/endorsing a particular distro, of course), yet their techs went ahead and gave assistance with setting up the partitions for dual-booting anyway! (I wasn't just wiping the drive, but needed to re-size the partition so I could avoid having to reinstall, configure, and tweak all the WinXP stuff, and they were very helpful and responsive to my requests for information.)
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
"Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
alteran is obviously the owner of the advertisement! It's a consipracy!
Pereant, inquit, qui ante nos nostra dixerunt.
"Confound those who have said our remarks before us."
The Register has published glossary of its jargon It defines punter as
.
Originally a term for a person who went to racecourses and put bets on nags (horses) in the hope they might come in and win and save their individual financial bacon, the term is now, in Britain, extended to anyone who makes a bet on anything, whatever - such as whether their PCs will work. A punter in Britain is not, as one of our readers pointed out applies in his country, a Canadian kind of boat.
A reckless, novelty seeking consumer, perhaps?
Hear, of course, it's just someone who punts (kicks) their problem over to someone else.
...I called their tech support last week and ended up with a guy in Panama whose English was fine. He had me run some hard drive diagnostics and figured out that it had some errors, so he had a new one shipped to me and I got it two days later.
The whole call only took about 5 minutes, and now my laptop is happy again. Good times.
The Army reading list
Not by a long way are all of the tech support call centres this bad. I have a buddy who works in one, and I myself once undertook the training to work for the same one. Which one? Not telling, sorry... suffice it to say that they're pretty big. It only took them a week or so to decide that we were not compatible. My fault. I have a smart mouth when it comes to tech issues, y' know?
Anyway, they weren't all hardcore geeks, but they were all computer literate, the guys in my induction group. The instructor was a distinctly non-techie type of chap, but they called in the real techies for some sessions. The suit was only to educate us in the fine art of customer service, and company policy. Don't judge all call centres by this article, please. T
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Tech support is horrible because the customers are letting it get horrible.
Complain. Often, constantly, daily. Write letters, not email, call every day.
Tie up their support phone lines to the point where nothing gets done. Tie up their sales lines as well.
Demand to speak to the president of the company.
File complaints with every consumer group you can find.
Write to magazines, tell them how horrible the support is, tell them you hate the products.
If the company has 12,000 unresolved complaints filed with the BBB in a 2 month period, what do you think will happen to their customer service?
More important to them, what do you think will happen to their stock price?
Back in '92 I called MS tech support with a windows com port problem. The guy I got actually knew what he was talking about, diagnosed it in under 2 minutes. I still remember how he would say "hmmm.... baddah baddah baddah...." while he was typing on his keyboard. Anyway, he even called me back on the east coast and read me a "debug" script to nail down the "floating com port" problem.
What I wouldn't give for those days....
... is whot bwings os tugevza tsuzay.
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
If you haven't seen it already, go to the Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie web site and watch their "Welcome to the Internet Help Desk" video.
... since that's what the company I used to work for Tech Support had us doing (thankfully, my current employers are a world away from that). Before any return could be authorised, you had to advise the end user to reimage, or there was no return. If you hadn't done this - and the users couldn't lie since the reimage gave out a number we could check on - no return. But here's where it got really sneaky. Not only did people who didn't buy an extended warrantee for their home PC have to spend 50p - 1.00 a minute on the phone, but they also got no reimage disc. So to get their PCs returned, they needed to reimage, but couldn't reimage without a disc. I doubt this was legal, but we ended up advising users that they had to buy an extended warrantee to get a reimage disc. Or pay 50 pounds for a reimage disc! For a disc which cost maybe 50p tops to make. There are so many tips and tricks the article only skims the surface. Rings a lot of bells for me though.
"I believe you'd get your ass kicked sayin somethin like that man." :)
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
.. which isn't as important as the first, or when I wasn't working in my now non-crappy job, is 'it's a training issue'. Quite useful.
Soon, manglement decided that since they couldn't get the onhand inventory to match, they would give several of us cordless phones and have us field the 'pricing and availability' calls to the store. This was running around the store and checking to see if the product was actually there, and actually 9.95 - on top of trying to help people who had decided to physically come to the store and perhaps buy something.
The best part was when you were telling someone about an expensive piece of hardware and some call comes in (we weren't allowed to ignore calls) for the price of a printer cable, or if we have the '20 CDs for 20 bucks' deal in.
I had one guy go off and scream at me, to which I responded, "Please go back there and talk to Rick. He's the boss. I am doing the job(S) he gave me. Tell him he's a fucking moron." He responded, "YOU'RE THE FUCKING MORON" and stormed out.
I tried to tell the boss what bad service this was causing, and he said, "You need to try harder." Grrr.
About three weeks later, the phones disappeared, and I was back to software. And hardware!
At this time, I didn't own a computer of any sort, as they were unattainable on my hourly rate. And here I am trying to sell them. Ugh. I gave up my fakery and lies. I became a 'troublemaker'. If I didn't know if software did a certain something, I would crack the box and read the manual (this was discouraged) even if it was for my own education. If someone wanted a telphone, fax machine, or sound card, I told them that the 'extended warranty' was a ripoff.
I became well versed in the Mac line we carried, and sold a lot of them because I liked them, and they were easy for the customer to demo themselves.
People seemed to like my honesty. And I learned more about selling, and sold more than lots of smarmy 'say-anythings' there, because I only sold the stuff I knew, and liked. Of course, I quit not long after for other reasons. After that, I was well on my way to knowing my stuff, and built my first computer out of Salvation Army parts.
Oh, lots of retail stories came out of that evil place...
From the IT dept of a very large phone manufacturer to an even larger outsourcing company, I can reveal that my job is now no longer to fix problems and design solutions to help my colleagues, it is instead, to make money at the expense of my former colleagues.
Unlike the article, we do currently actually fix the problems, but guess what. Now 60% of fixes have to be within 24 hours, so what do you do with troublesome customers? Ticket goes on "waiting for customer" immediately, call them back at lunchtime, three calls and it gets closed. The metrics look good.
That Apache upgrade? Not part of baseline break/fix. Now costs you money and 3 days of my time (how much per hour?) as we update the OS, apache rev, modules. Oh, it broke your application? But you approved the change managment and we don't support homegrown applications.
Grid computing. Yum. $100/month/machine for supporting workstations becomes $1,000/month/machine as the desktops are migrated to *clustered* servers in the machine room. And you thought it was such a good idea before the outsourcing, at least they aren't on your budget, I wonder is it corporate who're taking the financial hit as the numbers of supported servers rockets?
Out of hours support? I'm off at 5 mate. Hourly rates double in the evening and double again at the weekend. And they start in 3 digits. What? You want a production system upgraded at the weekend? Oh you need a DBA and Financials administrator as well? And that 100Gb restore which is taking 10 hours? You get billed for every second which is out of baseline hours.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
The worst part of this whole setup is the poor, clueless end-user, who actually thinks tech support knows what they're doing.
I work in the repair department at a large electronics store. One of my duties (other than actually repairing or upgrading computers) is "inspecting" equipment such as wireless routers to make sure that we aren't getting scammed. It burns me up when someone brings in their 3rd unit in as many days, saying, "wow, what's wrong with you guys? I've been on the phone with D-Link all day, and this is the third bad unit I've gotten". I just want to yell out, "no sir, you've been on the phone with an outsourced guy in Manilla who may or may not have ever even seen a picture of your product, and he says it's faulty because his only concern is getting you off the phone in less than fifteen minutes."
I had a young woman come in the other day with some random Gateway desktop that looked like a CRT iMac knock-off (an all-in-one design where the mainboard and drives were installed in a section below the monitor). She plunks it down on my desk, and says, "The guy at Gateway's tech support says it needs a new video card." I took one look at this obviously completely integrated computer, and said (without thinking), "Are you sure he said that?" "Of course he said that," I thought immediately afterward, "he's tech support. He has no idea what that product even looks like. He doesn't know that the video is integrated." Just for grins I opened it up, on the off chance that there was some ghetto six-inch VGA cable that ran to an actual card. Interestingly, there actually was, but it ran from a proprietary pinout that allowed video to flow up to the monitor to a DB-15 connection on the motherboard, and power to flow down from the single AC jack that was located in the monitor . I showed the connection to the woman, then showed her a couple of video cards, and explained why they were wrong and what she could do (basically nothing, as she was outside of warranty). The funny part about the whole thing was that it looked like it was actually the CRT that was damaged, as it was exhibiting that "missing one part of the color spectrum" bit that is more often than not a CRT defect.
It's a shame, but I don't know of any consumer computer manufacturer that has what I would call "good" tech support anymore, with the exception of Apple (and then you only get 90 days unless you spring for Applecare).
There is not popup ad if you have subscribed to Salon, which really does not cost the world. I am in Germany and I figured that subscribing to Salon would be my little contribution to keep the critical media in the US alive. And they need critical media more than ever over there.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
If we farm all of our jobs out to India, who will be left to buy anything?
Indians, of course.
Globalization will balance everything out in the long run, but the first few hundred years are going to piss a lot of people off.
The USA is increasingly catering to companies and those that own them, at the expense of the individual. Taken to an extreme perspective, the USA might be seen as a land of corporations surrounded by a sea of poverty, an extreme polarization of wealth.
Fortunately there are a few things that can't really be moved overseas (today, at least). Things like person-to-person service, sales, government, construction. Well, and lawyers. And crime. As other jobs dry up and move to less wealthy nations, these industries will probably boom. But in the end salaries will balance out just about everywhere. The only way you might outperform local salary averages is if your position requires physical proximity, and many don't, nowadays.
What can you do? Buy some stock.
The one I worked for was a bit different. Small Internet Providers throughout the country contracted us to handle their technical support for them. Since many of these were "mom and pop" operations with just a few hundred customers in one city, they relied heavily on maintaining that local image. As a result, we were NEVER, EVER allowed to give any indication that we were not located in the area the person was calling from. I remember talking to customers of a Florida ISP about how nice the weather is, when in fact I'm sitting in Toledo, Ohio (hint to the company's identity?) in a snowstorm. If we were asked for our location, we had to respond that we were not permitted to give out details on our location due to security concerns. I had to give that line a few times a day.
We also had to be crafty. Although some "premium" customers had dedicated phone numbers so that we could find out which ISP they were calling for, many of the individual ISP's calls were routed to a common toll free number, so we'd have no idea as to which of the hundreds of ISP's we do support for the caller is from. We answer the call generically ("Tech Support, how may I assist you?") and usually asked for the customer's e-mail address for an indication of which ISP they were with. The domain name would give away the ISP. Unfortunately, people often did not give the domain name, or had offsite e-mail accounts. Since we couldn't give away that we were not with "their ISP", I couldn't flat out ask. I'd have to narrow it down by area code, and then search between ISP's in that area to find out who they were with -- often taking 10-15 minutes.
I remember one time management signed a deal and gave the call center side a chance to prepare. It was a HUGE customer - larger than all of our other ISP's combined. One night, on my shift, they simply forwarded the tech support number over to us. We went from an average 3 minute call queue time to well over an hour. We did not have the staff to handle the calls, and had no information at all about the specifics of the ISP -- dialup numbers, e-mail servers, etc. It was days before we even had the correct info to give customers. In the meantime, we just had to go with it.
And finally, we had no training program at all, so the company tried to hire people from an outsourcer in the area who had already been through their hideous training program. We paid a dollar an hour more, so it was usually pretty easy to do. Unfortunately, we supported dialup customers, and the company we stole people from supported cable modems, so new hirees usually knew nothing of dialup.
I lasted about six months there surprisingly. When I started it was a small operation with only a dozen or so techs. By the time I left, they had on average 30-40 people per shift. We grew so fast that they had to temporarily build a room in the warehouse and put up folding tables to make room for the new call center people. I'm sure they are much bigger by now, but probably still working out of the warehouse.
"The scripting is bad, the fact that they can't operate outside the script is abhorrant."
I've got news for all of you. It's not just overseas tech support who are "not knowledgeable" and rely strictly on pre-written steps and scripts to resolve problems. It's just about every tech support of a large company I've dealt with, in Canada and the US.
My ISP "Sympatico" has this problem. My dealings with McAfee tech support results in the same thing. No matter what you tell them, they step you through the same ridiculous "newbie" steps regardless of what you tell them you've done or discovered already. In fact, McAfee described to me 5 or 6 steps to take which basically could have been summarized as "completely uninstall the software and then re-install it"--Somethign I had already done and told them so!
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
I have a "Ken" at my current support job. Sometimes I overhear the conversations and I laugh to the point of tears and suffocation. He has what I call "Tech Support Tourettes" and uses the mute button on his headset to great effect.
Whenever I start to get frustrated with calls, I simply take a five second break and listen in on "Ken". He is the office stress reliever and we have a pool going around on when he is going to kick the bucket. I think that is the only reason the company keeps him, as mental health for the rest of us.
My most memorable incident recalls a customer who had the unfortunate luck of calling in to "Ken" to complain and make legal threats. Sharp as ever, "Ken" transferred him to our "Legal Department" (we don't have one that I know of) at extension 600. Funny thing is, our extensions only go to the mid 500's, so no one was going to answer the call and the guy would wait on hold potentially forever.
Did I mention he deals exclusively with Macs? I can't imagine what would happen if moved to PC support. Probably could replace his chair with a coffin.
For some companies that service niche markets like ours does this is not the case. We have less than 10 full time tech support people but the average experience they have working for this company is likely 5-6 years. The difference is that customers pay (a lot actually) for the support but are happy to pay it. Also the tech support people here are actually paid reasonable salaries. While this model works for niche markets I don't think it would work for larger markets like say Dell laptop support, expect to continue getting crappy support there.
Punter is a reference to American Style football where one kicks (punts) the ball when it is too close to your goal-line and the other side gets the ball on the next down.
Cheap storage VM.
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.
"punt", from American football, "to give up on a failed offensive drive and kick the ball to the other team"
Why do they have a picture of some bloke phoning a sex line next to the article.
Karen is part of a growing group called givers.
When looked at in a tech support experience sort of way, the whole Goatse Giver / Receiver model seems apt, as a long drawn out episode with tech support will often lead to one feeling like the receiver.
__ Someday, but not this morning, I'll finally learn to use the preview button.
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".
just to give my fellow slashdotters an idea of what working for this company is like:
they employ over 5,000 of the worst possbile computer illiterates I've ever seen. most have never even seen the inside of a computer. they specificly say during interview "We do not prefer experience or certifications. we will give any one with computer knowledge a job but prefer that *we* train you"
they pay $11/hr WHILE logged into the phone, minimum wage when not logged in (which btw will be most of the time).
security is soo tight there all employees are run through a metal detector coming AND going from the complex (would say building but there are 6 of them). I asked once why they did this they responded "to protect the employees from the employees" referring to a couple times people started shooting guns in the call center.
This company is evil incarnate. the place is a total sweat shop. 3-400,000 sq ft per building of cubicles. it's soo disorienting navigating the cubicle farm you have to go by the signs posted.
Oh and everything the article said about the place is true. yes they are one of the largest support providers, they do compaq, HP and IBM, plus bellsouth/comcast, directv, and a bunch of others. All they care about is getting you off the phone in 12 minutes (thats what the dead giveaway was, totall company policy, if you spend 15 minutes you have 3 supervisors breathing down your neck). they will even go so far as you find a reason to manually disconnect @ 13 minutes telling you to call back again.
ATTN Florida Slashdotters: Can someone back me up on this place, I know someone else has to have worked there. I can't possibly describe how bad this place really is since I only worked there 4 days, but man it did ring some bells.
Oh btw, here's the whois info:
Registrant:
TAG (TAG6-DOM)
7562 Southgate Blvd
NORTH LAUDERDALE, FL 33068
US
Domain Name: TAG2.COM
Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Nunez, Juan (JN8854) jnunez@TAG2.COM
TAG
7562 SOUTHGATE BLVD
N LAUDERDALE, FL 33068-1362
US
(954) 724-6745 fax: (954) 726-0015
Record expires on 08-May-2008.
Record created on 07-May-1996.
Database last updated on 23-Feb-2004 12:07:40 EST.
Domain servers in listed order:
CMTU.MT.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 12.127.16.69
CBRU.BR.NS.ELS-GMS.ATT.NET 199.191.128.105
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.
You got a manual? So much stuff these days comes with a manual.
When I bought a 486 from Gateway2000 back in 1990 or so, it came with nearly 15 pounds of printed documentation.
Is it just me, or should articles like this include an anger rating system from 0 (happy child running through the meadow) to 10 (about to go ripshit in the streets of boston after someone totalled your car during rush hour traffic, preventing you from going back to your unloving wife and kids). Seriously though, after reading this article, I felt like the only just thing to do in this world would be to take down these operations, SWAT style.
:)
A rating would help prevent readers like myself from getting this huge adrenaline rush right before going back to the lab and running experiments requiring patience, not the ability to throw large blunt objects at retarded management.
grumble grumble... i feel better now
my last sig was too controversial... now, a new and improved useless sig!
-- To Err is human, to Ignignokt divine.
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.
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.
So, who loses on this deal?
At the very least, the consumer trying to get tech support loses. The support is supposedly lousy (and tech support in general is pretty lousy, so it has to be worse than that. There's also a weird cultural thing going on when people from India are suddenly acting like they're in the US and trying to speak with US accents, taking on fake favorite sports teams, etc. Is that really a good thing for India?
The economic picture is more fuzzy, but at the very least it's taking money away from US cities and sending it to India. That's not really in the interests of the United States, but it is in the interests of the Big Corps. The lipservice is of course that this all benefits the consumers, as if that makes up for everything. Gee, wow I can get the computer for $3 less because super-corp decided to outsource to India. Frankly I'm tired of all this malarchy about how everything benefits the consumer. Does extra cheap widgets from Super-Corp really make your life any better?
AccountKiller
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
This article is spot-on. Typically there's a single blanket email address for customer complaints and compliments. Usually it gets forwarded to a manager.
"Bold as Love"
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.
The LCD was harder as I had to convince the staff that they had said any pixel problems was enough to get it changed and any pixel problem includes an always on red sub pixel. But got it changed.
Yet almost all people I meet say that they prefer to buy name brands because of the warranty and phone support. Both are crap but it probably gives them a nice fuzzy feeling.
I buy from shops and although I have needed it so far for computers it is far easier to demand to see the manager in person then it is over a phone line.
So I got exactly one question for you. Was this the last time you bought from this company or did you vote with your dollars and say "Yes sir thank you sir can you waste my time again SIR!"
Since the call center people work for the call center, and not the company, they have no incentive or access to institutional knowledge - you know when you tell someone about a certain model and they don't have to look everything up?
WRONG Since people keep buying from companies with lousy support these companies have no incentive to improve tech support. The problem isn't the techs the problem is the customers who keep accepting this crap.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
To me punter will always be a file transfer protocol from my beloved Commodore days.
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
And the lack of a familiar accent to american consumers is bring them a bad name.
No -- what brings them the bad name is their inability to exhibit critical thinking skills and do anything beyond read from a script that's totally outside the realm of the experienced problem.
For example, I have a Netgear FVS318 (several, actually). It would randomly reboot itself, and when it came back up there would be no network connectivity (LAN and WAN were both hosed). The only solution was to reset it (paperclip in the back of the machine)
I call tech support, get India (the guy didn't have a "fake" American name even) and he suggests that I fix the problem by resetting the device. HELLO!!! DOOFUS!!! Did you listen? When I described the problem I said I had to reset it! What does resetting the device when I'm on the phone with you do that it didn't do the other 37 times I had the problem?
THAT is what gives Indians a bad name.
Many moons ago, I had a laptop with a failed floppy drive. I tried calling the tech support center, explained that I had failed hardware, and it was still under warranty. The person there said she would transfer me to the right department, would I please hold. Pretty soon I was disconnected.
Tried it again. Same result.
So the 3rd time, I said "I have some failed hardware, I need an estimate how much it would be to fix it."
This time I got through to a technician, and when he asked me what the problem was, I explained, and then mentioned as an aside, "Oh, and it's still under warranty!"
Maybe they were just having problems with their phone system... makes you wonder.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Like so many of you out in the world of IS/IT, I too started in the 2nd layer of hell, Technical Support.
The problem, in my experience, and highlighted in this article, is the corporate love of outsourcing. Using my own experience as example, I started some years ago working for a particular linux based company doing tech support. At the time I started, the in-house support people handled phone support for corporate customers, and web-based support for non-corporate customers (i.e. those who didnt pay for a specific contract). The phone support was handled by an outsource "Partner" who had call centers on both coasts.
When I first started, the level of customer satisfaction for support was abyssmal. Being the "in house experts" we were drafted to monitor calls and offer critique to the outsource company. In the end, nothing we could do worked, and their treatment of our customers was so bad, we finally dropped them like a bad habit, and brought all support in-house.
Now, flash forward a year later, and the dirty word is mentioned again. So, in a nutshell, after the team I was on turned support completely around, from a low 30% satisfaction rate to nearly 95%, they turn around and ship our jobs off to another oursource company in a different country, and we were mostly out of jobs.
And same thing happened. Customer satisfaction fell through the floor.
So, the moral of this story is: outsourcing something that is customer facing like Support is a Bad Thing[tm]. Like the article stated, oursource techs dont really care one way or another (or those that do care are quickly replaced with ones who dont) and the company is just out for low call times and high volume. Techs who are actually employed by the company they represent are much better workers, and provide much better support to customers. Why? because for the most part, outsource techs are just hired guns who could care less about the company whose calls they are taking, while in-house techs have a certain pride in their work, knowing that when they look good, the company looks good, stays in business, gives chance for promotion, etc etc...
And again, thats just from my personal experience on both sides of the fence.
"Our funds have never taken part in toxic or death spiral convertible financings of any sort" -BayStar's managing partne
Yes, but you have to pay for it and do all the work.
Let's recap this little transaction for our readers:
[1] Dell reduces costs by getting rid of first-tier support or moving it overseas
[2] Dell charges you or your company a fee to enroll in this program
[3] You do all the technical support (testing, troubleshooting, etc.) thus saving Dell on per-call communication costs
[4] Dell pockets the savings from #1, #2, and #3
Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?
-Alex
Well, your wrong. I've worked in a few of these places, and for the outsourced operations this is always how it is. In-house is a completely different story, your employer wants you to fix it. Outsourcing, you're there to take calls.
The problem is, as mentioed earlier, their busisness model. No one seems to have developed a resonable and equitable way to pay outsourcers, because the per call method simply does not work.
Usually the drive to run businesses this way comes from execs with profit sharing, they get their money and leave before the client is completely pissed, and their resumes look like waves of profitability!
I worked at a company w/ an oustource division, that hired an exec that had just finished pulling this stunt on another company. When i got their, our segment was unprofitable (as support should be), in 3 months we had our first $1 million month, followed by a 2$mil and then $4mil. Folowed by a pissed client, and exec jumping ship, and the downward spiral to loosing the client and the profits.
The exec? He moved on to his next job and showed off the exponential profit growth that this company had under his fine direction!
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?
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. I'm stealing and using that.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
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?"
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.
Yes, however, this is an American article and is thus using the American definition of punt.
The term punt comes from American football, where one kicks, or "punts" the ball downfield when deliberately handing control of the ball to the other side, thus making the opposing team have more ground to make up toward the goal.
Such deliberate exchanges of ball control are part of the rules of American football, so punting is a stategic choice.
In colloquial usage to punt means either to do something essentially random and see what happens, or to "kick" the problem to someone else, leading to the common American phrase, "When in doubt, punt."
KFG
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
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!!! **
No. The term you are thinking of is "bunt."
KFG
I had problem with my office jet some months ago. The printer gave an error saying that the cardridge was not inserted correctly. So I bought a new cardridge, but the same error occured. I was really pissed, because the OfficeJet had just received a fax but could not print it, so I even could not switch it off without losing the fax. When I called HP tech support, they not only solved my problem within minutes (wash the cardridge with water and soap and insert it again), but a few days later I found a new cardridge in my mail. Oh, and I had a professional tech support from HP that helped me setting up an Itanium machine. That support was superb.
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
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?"
A sensasional artical than it is factual. Now I don't doubt that many of the issues raised in call centers ring true, been there done that, there are a few things that I personally have seen that need to be taken into consideration.
First of all, it's average call time. While most of my experiance has to do with ISP support there are still a lot of parallels. Say you get a 30 min call, then a 5 min call, then a 10 min call. Right there your at 15 mins ACT. Not great but if your trying to actually solve problems rather than "punt" or "give" the call away it's a respectable ACT to have. Now how do you know that 15 mins is a respectable call time if it's 3 mins over your 12 min limit? Next point...
Any good call center has peer review and then the big client review. (I don't touch on client review here but suffice to say there are often frantic scrambles down to the "floor" from the boardroom to tell tech X that he better do a good job on this call, time be dammed!) Peer review is typically a weekly thing that every manager has to submit to their "Account Manger" every week. Plug into the call queue and listen though a call. Not the most fun but it really does need to be done to ensure that people have a clue what they are talking about. (This is assuming you as the manager actually have a clue, but I digress.) Many times this job is left to the managers lackys, sometimes called "Team Leads", but the important thing is that it gets done by someone who has a good understanding of what to listen for in a call. You then can use this data with the statistics on call times and such to get a real picture of how a tech is dealing with calls. Only looking at the #'s leads to...
The drive to get as many calls as humanly possable, problem solving be dammed. And yeah, it's there and will be until the clients (The people who outsource their support needs.) realize that paying by call instead of "resolutions" is a truely asinine way of doing things. However, since many companys have yet to realize this you will have call centers gouging at the trough of calls/money. So often what is done by clever managers is to strike a balance of techs who do both, those "turn and burn" calls and those who actually try to fix problems. It is far from a perfect solution as those who don't fix anything tend to leave the customers in a very upset state for those that do actually try and fix things, or even worse the punters manage to make the problem worse before ending the call. But it's a way to actually keep the gravy train running while still being able to keep most of the angry customers from writing scathing letters to the powers that might actually cancel your contract.
I could go on but I think everyone should get the idea by now. Hopefully one of these days the people who outsource their support will get a clue and use that magic word resolution rather than trying to just look at #'s but for right now it's at best a frog in the blender mix of both kinda deal.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I used to work there. it is the worst of all employers. the article is dead on and I'm also convinced that they're talking abot TAG. I worked there myself for three months. It is the shittiest company in the world.
If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage.
I actually read the article and found it positively HORRIFYING. Since I am around sysadmins all the time, I forget what it's like to be some gullible consumer running Windows XP Home Edition.
How about some Hippocratic Oath action here? You know, "First, do no harm." The Formatters who fail to fully disclose that consumers are going to lose their family's digital photo albums, video clips of newborns, and contact information for friends and family worldwide are lacking in redeeming human value. If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
Call ME gullible, but given our reasonably wide-open markets for building, selling, and supporting PC's, I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers. What's worse is that these practices end up staining all of us in Information Technology as uncaring a-holes. In the future, those PC customers will move on to technologies that they can handle on their own. Hell, they might just buy Apples or some extremely dumbed-down desktop Linux. Just try explaining where "Desktop" is located in Windows Explorer to the average consumer if you think Windows is "simple and intuitive". And the Desktop is the first thing seen after logon!
In principio erat Verbum.
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
Which Tech Support Staffer Are You?
I think I am a "Santa"
You're sacked. I on the other hand am Rudolf the "who knows?" Reindeer.
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?
The customer has to hang up first. You can't hang up until the customer does. It's monitored.
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
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
Water Technologies from GE
Helping conserve one of our most precious natural resources.
See what's possibleThere. Was that so painful? If you're going to plagerize the article, you might as well plagerize the ad too!
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
The American economy may be expanding, [...] The American economy is not creating jobs nearly as fast as it's loosing them.
You can't have it both ways. Either the economy is expanding (net job increase) or it's not (net job decrease or stagnation).
Do not fold, spindle or mutilate.
I disliked that job. I didn't hate it, like the Two Guys stint I wrote about last month, but it was not a great experience.
The management was bumbling and just on the edge of mean - always sitting on us to get times down. But, it was Back In The Day, so I had GREAT stock options, so I put up with it for THREE YEARS.
The worst part were the customers, for me. Some were nice, and I liked them, but some were complete IDIOTS.
Here's a few conversations I remember:
Me: So, you're getting a what error?
Caller: Ah got me a tap negative ONE error, and then nuthin happens.
Me: Type one? Sounds like it's a problem with your extensions - some kind of conflict.
Caller: Oh? Wull, lemme check that out raaaht now...
(The sound of the reciever clattering on the table and footsteps across a wooden floor. The sound of furniture moving. The sound of more furniture moving. Fottsteps coming back tothe phone)
Caller: Why it CAIN'T be an extensheeyuns problem.
Me: Really? How do you figure?
Caller: Wull, ever-thang's plugged in JES' FINE!!!
Another fine user of our product:
Caller: Hi! My name's JIM! Who're YOU? ... how does it not work?
Me: Ralph. How can I help you Jim?
Caller: Well, my (program) won't fucking WORK! (puffs from a cigarette)
Me: Bummer. You're using it for what purpose there Jim?
Caller: I'm the webmaster of the Bluebird Trailer Court. I'm tryin to set up a way that we call all get onto the web and order supplies for our, ummm, homes without any kind of time wastin' - so like if someone runs out of Propane, they just get on the web and bingo: everything is done all automatic like.
Me: That's a pretty sophisticated job, Jim.
Caller: DAMN FUCKIN STRAIGHT! AND YOUR GODDAMN SOFTWARE AIN'T FUCKIN' WORKIN! (swills something from a bottle, and smokes some more.)
Me: I understand Jim, and I'm here to help you. Where you located? What's your serial number? (We do the business part of the call) Wow. Texas? You must be hot there this time of year.
Jim: It ain't the heat, it's the damn humidity (slap of skin. Truck roars by... I'm getting the impression he's sitting there crushing mosquitoes, drinking whiskey -his speech is beginning to slur as he gets louder and louder; in his underwear - because it's an oven where he is, and lives in the trailer next to the Highway - judging by all the traffic noise. A vision of HELL - a trailer park in southern Texas...)
and DAMN it's humid here today!
Me: Bummer Jim. so, let's see
Jim: It doesn't do what I want it to.
Me: Are you in front of it now?
Jim: YEP! AND IT'S DOING IT AGAIN!!!!
Me: What? I thought it didn't work...
Jim: It works - IT JUST DON'T WORK RIGHT! DAMMIT! (swills more booze smokes more cigarette...)
Me: OK OK - quit the app and do EXACTLY as I tell you...
Of course, he didn't and all he did was get completely shitfaced drunk and go through a pack of Merits. Eventually he started hitting his computer. At that point, I couldn't stop stifling my laughter, and put him on hold. I conference called him in with another tech, because Jim was a LOSER beyond loser. We were both hitting the mute button because we were laughing hysterically at this nincompoop. It devolved to something like this:
Jim: SEE? THERE!!! IT DID IT AGAIN! I'm tellin ya this fucking thing is CURSED!!!!
Me: I'm sorry Jim, I didn't see anything - we're on the telephone. Tell me what you saw.
Jim: OH RIGHT! uuuuh Well, IT' DIDN'T WORK AGAIN! DAMMIT! And (hits computer) this damned Compaq is a piece of CRAP. I friggin HATE this thing.
Me: I'm not sure it's the computer, and while I know you're using a very old PC, we do make the same software for Macintosh, if you do cross over to Mac. So either way, you can use this program and not lose your work.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
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.
Sorry, no offense intended to Indians, but I have a difficult time understanding the accent. Some accents I just have trouble with. But that really isn't the issue for me. The issue is that phone tech support can only fill the role of a live FAQ list. Seriously, the bulk of tech support questions could be covered by a few beginner's computing courses and a small handy reference.
I'm sure the Indian call center staffers are intelligent and knowledgeable. The problem is that these big mail-order PC mega-corps dumped product at ultra-low prices and killed off the little local computer shops. Those places were actually the first line of tech support for these companies, and it didn't cost the mail-order companies one red cent. Plus walk-in or on-site was a more efficient way to solve problems, since the customer didn't have to sit there for hours and describe things to a support rep. My former customers (I no longer do PC repair) were more than happy to pay me money to fix a warrantied computer so they didn't have to call their vendor's tech support lines.
So, I have two views on this. I'd like to see some of these mail-order companies endure a harsh consumer backlash. On the other hand, I'm kind of glad to see consumers put the screws to these big mail-order companies, and force them to keep their support promises. Along with this, Indians have job opportunities that otherwise might not have existed.
I'm begging for a flaming here, but I'm not too worried about the Americans; When the average Indian can start a business in one day but paying $20 for a S&U Tax permit, and actually expect to make a living, then we can compare US jobs to Indians jobs.
Fred
"A fool and his freedom are soon parted"
-RMS
Who can either reeducate to get a better job, or who can transition into another job (our economy is expanding you know.)
...and Indian laborers gain.
The recovery is considered a jobless one. And whether the economy is improving or not, being out of work stinks, and intangible improvements to the economy do not put food on the table or pay the rent.
Maybe. I'm not necessarily saying there is no merit to offshoring, but keep in mind that other countries don't have the worker protections the US does (minimum wage, work hours, etc). Some might be as good or better, but no guarantee.
And it looks like economies would benefit by higher income jobs, but globalization can do some wild stuff to economies, including making economies dependent on the global economy, rather than self sufficient.
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.
Yes, it signifies that the article was writen in Tuscon, Arizona. In context, the writer was clearly using the American defintion of punt, and thus punter.
Your milage at The Reg may vary.
I perhaps composed my post somewhat poorly, not explicitly pointing out that I was supplying the defintion of "punt" to those who were not British, or otherwise not American, who might misapply the British definition to the article, where it would make little sense, implicitly recognizing that although the article might well be written by Americans and for Americans the web is, nonetheless World Wide.
Thus, because England and America are two countries seperated by a common language, and English being the lingua franca of the web, confusion is oft the result, especially to those for whom neither English nor American are their first language.
If my attempt to clarify only added to the confusion it was not deliberately intended to do so.
KFG
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 did that _on purpose_ and it took me awhile. Let me shake this idiot's hand!
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
AT & T Universal Card: Companies are not only using Indians to do jobs that were done by Americans. Companies are using Indians to further abuse their customers. I talked with one Indian woman at AT & T Universal Credit Card customer support who told me that she had no way to contact anyone but her Indian manager, and that the Indian manager had no way to contact anyone at AT & T. So, there is no way to resolve any legitimate problem. The logic seems to be, "Why should we hire Americans to abuse our customers? We should get Indians to do all the ugly jobs."
ECS (Elitegroup) Motherboards: One of the answers is to call the technical support for a product before you ever buy the product. I wish I had done that before buying and testing 8 L7VTA V1 motherboards from ECS. I found that the ECS technical support line is a recording that says something like, "All of our customer support personnel are busy helping other customers. Please call back at a later time." There is no opportunity to leave a message. If you don't believe me, try it yourself: 510-226-7333 option 4 for technical support. Only one of the 8 motherboards works as advertised, and ECS will do nothing about it; they don't answer email either.
Support Ed Foster: Maybe the only person who is doing anything about this is Ed Foster. Here are the companies in the GripeLog Hall of Shame: 1: Dell, 2: Microsoft 3: VeriSign 4: Intuit 5: Symantec 6: Network Associates 7: HP 8: Cisco.
I've personally been abused by Microsoft, Symantec, Cisco, and Intuit. I have no desire to repeat that ugly experience. So, I try to stay away from anything they do. In my experience, they are not companies that sell computer software and hardware, and are sometimes abusive. They are abuse companies that also sell software and hardware. The world of computing would have been a far better place if Bill Gates had had a caring childhood. The world of computing would be a far worse place if we didn't have good leaders like Linus Torvalds.
Based on the last line of the story, I had to wonder if the whole thing was made up!
But, I recall one of my best friends being trained to handle support at [name withheld, but a hugemongous PC company in Texas] in the early-mid 90s. If the user had an actual problem, as opposed to simply not being able to figure out an app, the first two things my friend was taught to try were:
1) reboot the computer
2) if that doesn't fix it, reinstall Windows.
And he wasn't kidding me - that was how he approached his home system, afterwards, as well.
He didn't stay in support very long, either.
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.
And I have heard the act of floating slightly above the ground refered to as "hoovering."
Sometimes people just get mixed up over words that sound very similar.
Bunt is derived from butt, to hit lightly. It is possible that it is a portmanteua word with punt, but there is no actual evidence that this is the case.
Punt means to drop a ball from the hands and kick it. It does not carry the explicit meaning of to do so lightly, in fact generally opposite is the case.
These are both also technical terms of sport, and their meanings have been rigidly defined in the rule books for over 100 years.
KFG
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, with very limited exceptions such as Slashdot, I will not even go through a registration process. I have emailed the NYT to tell them that I did not find their content compelling enough to convince me to register to view it. (They were justifiably unimpressed, and offered to sell me a paper subscription. ;-)
I do read all kinds of sites with banner ads. Who knows, maybe someday one will look so interesting that I will click it!
"Rub her feet." -- L.L.
I used to install phone systems for a German company and there was built in software that recorded all sorts of statistics. However the average answer time of the switchboard operator wasn't recorded. I found out later the reason was because of the strong unions in Germany there is a law preventing this type of information being recorded.
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.
Although i hate bad tech support as much as the next guy, i thought the article was over-the-top. it sounds like tech-support stereotyping. the author has been permitted to omit identifying information. I wonder if salon really did due diligence on this piece.
The writer says he works for one of the top three computer manufacturers. Presumably he's talking about PCs. Who would that be? Dell, HP, IBM?
I've dealt with Dell. Sorry, they are simply not nearly that bad. I'd say the same for HP, although they are less competent than Dell. I've dealt with IBM on the server side. They are far better than the writer describes. Some posters seem to think he is talking about Indian tech support. The writer never said that, and all the names are English/American. I have generally found Indian tech support to be really bad, but they haven't been able to authorize replacement parts. That has always been done by usa-based Level 2 support. At the writer's company, they regularly authorize replacements (see "givers" in the article).
An interesting article, I conclude, but not to be taken literally. It is an encapsulation of all that is wrong with tech support. But not a fair representation of Dell, HP, or IBM support. BTW, the Salon website is really dragging today. I've been getting timeouts. The Slashdot Effect strikes again!
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.
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.'
This made the job just a teensy bit more difficult when a customer is demanding you stop sending them porn popups and you have no way to say it's not coming from us and we have nothing to do with it, because you're not allowed to say no. Instead you have to try and quickly come up with some hippie bullshit that's "phrased positively" like "These popups are used to generate advertising revenue and usually come from the website you're reading, or sometimes from software that has been installed on your computer. We only provide the internet connection so the popups come from other sources." Which always results in a customer going into a screaming rage about how they never had this with AOL and they never installed anything that does this etc.
Oh, the other fun one was that while trying to keep your call under 10 minutes, solving a problem or getting a customer to believe it's someone else's support they need to talk to ("But my computer is fine, it's the internet that's broken!") you have to document all your calls and everything you've done on them in a form which is saved so people can later look up what you did. Most techs heavily skimped on this to save time, which meant whoever had to reference their sheets later when the customer calls in for the 4th time that day screaming about slow downloads has no idea what the problem is or what the last tech tried to do to troubleshoot it.
And yes, I did solve all the problems, even the lady who had a BIOS with bad power management that would cause her HP to shut down anytime the USB ports recieved too much traffic, like when using the USB port on the modem, who had already called HP 4 times recieved a replacement computer twice from best buy, etc. I called her back when I found out the problem by searching on my lunch break and had her reconnect on ethernet. Then I told her to call HP and tell them she wanted a BIOS update (I had her write it down) and here's the technical articles explaining what's going on and why it's their fault.
Yeah my times were crap, barely below the cutoff levels. But after 2 months I tried to stab myself so I'd have an excuse not to go into work, so I decided it was better to quit. Back to job searching again.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
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
You cannot even begin to imagine how big this H1B scam is my friend. .NET" (sic) when they've only recently finished their MS. Some guys are smart and/or hardworking and once they get a job they manage to stick to it. But I have seen people thrown out in a few weeks because they did'nt know shit.
,Oracle etc)
Have you heard about these "Consultants" that will hire Indian(and other) programmers for your projects? These guys will get you a job regardless of your skill or experience. If you are an Indian recently graduated (in US or wherever), they will FABRICATE a resume according to the skills of the job required. I've seen people put "4 years exp in
That is why although consultants will take anything from 20-40% of the programmers salary they treat them like SHIT. While they wait for a job its not uncommon to see the consultants "helping" out by making 5-6 guys stay in a 2 room apartment. They search for ANY job and turn up one day and say "Ok you have an interview for a job about J2EE tomorrow, read all u can about it". One girl recently got thrown out in two weeks from AmEx. She had "eight years of experience".
My cousin however, came here on a dependant Visa, got a job through a consultant(who got her an H1B),worked on 34K $ for a year or two by making sure she knew all that was required by the job. (She does not know what a Mac is or even Sun or AMD)
I have yet to see ONE case where an H1B programmer was genuinely needed. Theres only one aim for companies when they hire H1B's : all for profit.
For the record: I am Indian. And I will be desperate enough for a job when I graduate to go through a consultant.
But I too do not like the hatred developing towards Indians in the US tech community. I would like to get hired because I am much better than an average American programmer, not because I work cheap. But I will work cheap if the job is really to my liking !
Indian companies(ie based in India) have never done anything innovative in CS although many Indians have done well in American Universities and companies.(just start photoshop and see the credits for example). I do not think there will be innovation from Indian unless the local market develops. Most companies in India doing good work are branches of US/Western companies.(Intel, STMIcro, TI, MS
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
4th and 70? That's field goal range man... why the hell would you punt??
Actuaries - making accountants look interesting since 1949
You all should read The Electronic Sweatshop by Barbara Garson. Basically, in a company decisions are moved up the hierarchy so that people at low levels can be easily trained, paid less, and easily replaced. In that order. Ideally no training would be required, cutting the employee replacement cost even further. You see this obviously at McDonald's but less obviously in fields like social work, and more slowly in education.
The book itself is mostly conversations with people in jobs of this kind, or anecdotal records of those people. There's very little preaching by the author, if any.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/01 40121455/103-0830543-8955814?v=glance
Ravi
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
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.
-------------------------------------------------
Some quotes from the guy I mentioed in the cubicle next to me:
"...are you fucking retarded?"
"I am sorry, I can't fix stupidity."
"Yeah, it's the email chip. Maybe someone at the factory replaced it with an idiot chip."
"Of course it works, it's a god damn Mac."
"You're annoying me, I am cancelling your warranty."
That's all that comes to mind right now.
I work with a guy whose answer to any problem he can't or doesn't want to solve is to tell the user to go to Windows Update and install all the updates and call back when they are done. I've heard him do this even on problems where an email has been sent out with the exact instructions on how to resolve an easily resolvable known issue. It's brilliant though, because it usually takes the user so long to do that chances are when they call back he's either gone or doesn't answer the phone and someone else has to deal with it. And who is going to argue that patching security flaws is a bad thing, even if it doesn't solve their problems.
I have blog like everyone else
I'm sure many here know what I'm talking about. Having done tech support for many years, I noticed that I started to develop a certain tone in my voice, a subtle condescending ring to statements when I would try to help a customer, for example, who claimed to have a problem, and noted there was an 'error message' but didn't think the actual error message was worth remembering. In these situations, it's SO hard to not just want to call the customer a complete idiot. Many help desk people have this recurring frustration which eventually leads to the classic "computer nerd arrogance". What can you do about it? I noticed that I started carrying this tone into other conversations and it was getting very annoying. Unfortunately, the condescending approach to dealing with many problem users ended up being very effective in making them aware that much of these problems could be solved themselves and that they weren't paying attention.
Eventually I got away from having to do so much tech support but to this day, I'm aware that my personality is affected by years of dealing with idiots who refused to even pay attention to the problem as it was clearly described to them.
If you're in this field, you need to be aware that this subtle personality mod can happen. It's driven home when you see skits like SNL's "Nick Burns, your company's computer guy."
You need to accept cookies. That didn't solve the problem? You may need to reformat your computer.
Linux: Free if your time is worthless.
"I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers."
Most computer users that I know think computer mayhem is just normal. Most folks just want it to work and don't want to put in any more effort than the minimum to continue on with life.
Taking it a little further, most folks just want things to work in general. The less hassle, the better, and companies know this. At the end of the day, people take the path of least resistance.
I generally think people are too used to being screwed over to hold the company accountable or they're just too apathetic. That's why these draconian contracts and bad service are the norm. Until people stop giving these companies their money, this is the problem we'll have.
Cheers
~Dalcius
Rome wasn't burnt in a day.
I got hired on doing tech support for (one of?) the largest software companies in the world. The only call center for this department of theirs is in Austin. If anyone knows who I'm talking about, say it, for I am fearful of their wrath. I'm not fond of getting LEGAL WARNINGS AT MY HOME ADDRESS FOR SOMETHING I DID ONLINE (HINT HINT).
The training was decent, when the instructor was able to speak over the people in the back of the class talking. Usually that was only when the people in the back of the class were sleeping. We were told to try and keep a 7-minute average call time, which was impossible because the databases to search for registered customers were slow as hell (especially since they ran off the software developed by the company we were supporting...HINT HINT). If a customer wasn't in the database, we had to add them, which was even slower. Then we had to search on the intranet's knowledge base (KB), which, by the way, was slow, until we found the problem. We were told specifically not to say anything that wasn't in the KB and that if we were smart, the only words coming out of our mouths would either be from a script from training or a script from the KB. This included denying knowledge of pending lawsuits against said company for fraud, much less denying knowledge of the Attorney General looking into unethical business practices, etc. Thankfully, I was fired on the third day because I opened up a DOS prompt to ping a user. Sure, I had to save a file called dos.bat onto the desktop that contained the line "cmd" in it to get to the prompt, but even so, I was never told that going to a DOS prompt was an offense punishable by termination.
I wasn't sad to go, though. So many calls were related to the previously mentioned class action suit against the company or the problem that inspired the lawsuit that I wanted to wash my hands each time I finished a call. The official policy was that if the user hadn't purchased an extended warranty (possibly needed 2-3 if they had purchased their product long enough in the past), then they would have to send in their product and pay a $100 repair fee because a faulty part in the product finally failed completely and, even though the company was aware that many products were shipped with said faulty products, they still charged the customers. They also did not recall the products or even acknowledge that there was any kind of specific problem. We were simply told to alert the user that they needed to send the machine in and our repair center would take care of the rest.
Up till last November, I worked for an outsource company. The problem with these companies is that their not motivated to fix people, just make money off the call volume. They want their techs to rush and get the customer off as much as possible. They also will hire as few people as they can get away with to do the job and cross-cue people between contracts without the clients knowing. On my last contract, it was more like working directly for the client rather than the outsource company because of how the client interfaced with the techs and that the outsource company expected it to turn into a bigger contract, which didn't happen. They ended up closing the call center where I worked because the parent company wanted to reduce the number of call centers in the US. Basically the parent company bought the outsource company to raid them of profits thru the economic downturn. I heard recently that they want to sell the company now. It's all about the money...
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
First of all, the wait times are typically 2-5 minutes. I wish I could turn off the background music so that I could just leave it on speakerphone until it gets transferred, but 2-5 minutes a couple times a year strikes me as okay.
Secondly, the TS specialists seem to know their stuff. They seem to have been well trained. I've been getting people in Austin... anyone know whether they are Apple empolyees or whether it is outsourced? I'd guess they are Apple employees, but I don't know for sure.
In any case, I called them twice recently. The first call was because the email application started croaking a lot (once or twice a day). The technical support specialist was very knowledgeable, spent quite a bit of time with me discussing what it might be, etc. He actually listened to my theory that it was related to the junk-mail rules engine, pointed out how I could reset the rules engine, and that in fact seemed to solve the problem. It's nice when tech support will actually listen to your theories :-)
The other call was because my laptop hard drive started making bad noises. I felt like they might have made me go through more steps than absolutely necessary (OS reinstall, disk-erase/OS reinstall) than absolutely necessary, but the trouble shooting they wanted me to do was not unreasonable. Also, they (after some persuading) were willing to send me a drive and let me replace it, rather than have to send them the laptop for a week (it's my everything-including-work computer, so it's tough to let it go for even a day, nevermind a week).
All in all, I've never felt like they wasted my time, the stuff they ask me to try makes sense, and ultimately I've had my problems solved with a reasonable minimum of fuss.
Applecare is not exactly cheap, but given that I tend to keep my Macs for 4-5 years, it's not an outrageous expense. I think other computer manufacturers could win some points with their customers by being more like Apple.
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.
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?
There is only a need for so many doctor (even that they can do remotely these days) or burger flippers.
Have you seen the kitchen of a McDonald's lately? The griddle they cook the burgers on folds in half like a waffle iron to cook both sides at once, so the patties take less time to cook (I imagine other fast-food places will follow suit, if they haven't already). The burgers don't need to be flipped. Even the American bastion of lowest-common-denominator-ism, the noble McDonald's burger-flipper, is now defunct. What is the world coming to, when even our stereotypes are becoming obsolete?
For security, the MD5 hash of this message and sig is 09f911029d74e35bd84156c5635688c0.
It's a pretty rare punt that does fly through the uprights. We like to call that a "field goal."
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Hey, it's better than selling pet food on the Internet.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
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.
> there's always a chace that your delicate data will be harmed by the onset of a good hard kick.
It was a Commodore. Most times, a kick is how you fix the computer.
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...
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.
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
4th and 70?
:)
Holy crap, your team sucks
My team is the Bears. It's a wonder they still have the ball.
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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.
Yes, I used to work for a company that did a majority of the tech support via email. There were two of us who did the support, one guy in the morning, and me in the afternoon. More than 3/4 of his email responses were to the effect of "Clear your browser cache and delete the cookies, and thanks for using our software!"
So, he'd leave at lunch with a vast majority of the questions "answered", and I'd get slowed up for two reasons: 1) actually answering new questions that came in and 2) re-answering the questions he'd "answered" when the customers wrote back in the afternoon.
Guess who was promoted?
-=[You cannot consistently judge this statement to be true.]=-
I used to work at Gateway before thier stocks got flushed down the toilet. I worked at the call center in Rio Rancho, started there about a month after they opened (was part of the second class of techs to hit the floor) and watched our call center go through many stages. When I first started there, we were all about getting everyones problems fixed the first time every time. Call time was important but if you were solving problems, without messing around, then there wasn't any problems. THey were focused on quality not quantity. The year I started Gateway was named #1 by pc magazine for tech support. Everyone was proud and excited to be working for such a company. It was not uncommon to spend the entire day with one client to get certian problems fixed (was rare and only for strange and unique circumstances but it did happen).
Slowly and gradually, things started getting worse and worse. I was gradual enough that we didnt actually notice it at first... basically the frog in boiling water. They started getting tighter and tighter on calltimes, slowly lowering the maximum time. The reason we were given was that before we were running more like a help desk than a tech support call center. I personally didnt see much of a difference, both set up to help people with thier problems. We of course didnt support everything, no 3rd party hardware or software. But they slowly started limiting our scope of support.
Then Ted Waitt stepped down and Jeff Weitzen was named CEO. Talk about going to hell in a hand basket. I dont think it was personally Weitzen's fault, but I could be wrong. All of a sudden we werent a call center, we were a cost center, as we cost money to operate instead of generating revenue for the company. They set up pay support lines for the more obscure stuff and stuff we normally didnt handle. They gave everyone scripts to follow. A lot of us had been there 2-3 years at that point and knew these systems inside and out and could fix problems faster than tier flowsheets allowd us. However, if we didnt follow these guidelines we were punished. Written up, yelled at, etc. By this time I was working laptops, and we had a max call time of about 7 and a half minutes. I think standard desktop support was at about 12 or 13, cant quite remember. I was also working with home networking (anyone remember hpna cards?) so I had a little repreive.
They came up with the great idea of lets have tech support sell people stuff when they finish thier calls. I thought that was a totally bogus idea as before if they needed something like more memory or a bigger hard drive we would just transfer them over to the sales dept. for a quick and easy commisioned sale. Now they were expecting us to sell stuff to people that didnt need it. We didnt get commision, but we had numbers to hit. Now as most of you know, Tech support people dont always make good sales people. I was only able to sell extended warranties when the 1 year (used to be 3 year) warranties were over, and the occasional memory upgrade and hard drive, if it was justified that they really could use one. My manager would get on to me about more sales. I told him that I felt cheap and dirty making sales, as these people trusted us much more than sales, as sales people are there to make a sale and nothing more, but we were there to help them. He said, exactly. They are more open to sales from you because they arent expecting a sale from you. You should be pushing everything you can at them. Well of course that didnt go over very well with me, but at the same time they did a restructuring of the que's
With the que restructure, I now sat idle for hours at a time as I was one of about 12 people in all of gateway (at least in the US) that was still on the home networking que. (The rest were smart enough to get out... at about the time that Gateway outsourced thier IT department) So, I wouldnt take any other calls unless the other ques were hopelessly backed up, but that was rare as if you didnt have wicked fast calltimes you
Unfortunately, the ad in question (some flash monstrosity flogging GE's water purification tech. I guess they want us to forget they also make nuclear weapons? *shrug*) crashes my browser like a three ton male cow with BSE being dropped from the top of the empire state building onto a porcelain establishment. So i've watched their fucking advert twice, vainly hoping that I'd get to read the content. No such luck, and I even happen to be using a gui browser with flash. So thanks to the efforts of a fellow slasher/ette I can read the article.
Just think, if I was blind and using a braille device, that kind person's effort would be the only think letting me read the article. Forced delay ads authored in a proprietary plugin environment are almost criminally stupid given the recent legislation regarding web accessibility.
Oh, and feel sorry for commercial entities trying to make old-tech biz models survive in the digital realm? Hahahahahaha. Fuck them and their cretinous, heavy-handed attempts to make the web like teevee. The net was such a nice place until the suits showed up to whore it out.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I used to work for an undisclosed ISP in Australia. ..
Whilst working there, we got a new call/distribution/PABX system which used TAPI & run on NT, so we could watch the queues from software on our desktop.
It didn't take long to figure out that if you DoS attacked the NT box, the whole queueing system would go down! no more calls! it took them bout 4 months to fix it
You tried your best, & you failed miserably,
The lesson is:
Never Try
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
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.
Tulsa, Oklahoma is a call center mecca. It also has the second worst job market after San Jose, CA. Among Tulsa's 80 call center firms are DecisionOne, West, US Cellular, Cingular, Metris, Dollar, Thrifty, and Avis. They can be extremely unpleasant places to work. Most are outsourcers for other major companies, so it doesn't do the workers any good to unionize. The primary company would pull the contract. These jobs pay from $7 to $12/hour. Most are in the $8-9/hr range. Call center jobs have notoriously high turnovers. Employee careers are measured in weeks, possibly months. With the economy sucking so bad, they can be measured in years now.
Oklahoma is like a third world country. So big ass companies don't outsource your low paying shit jobs to India or China send them to Oklahoma. They have more high school edumacated people than West Virginia, Arkansas, and Missippi combined! And the cost of doing business is low.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
The fundamental problem with tech support is that:
1. The people who call in, by and large, are not computer literate nor very good at troubleshooting. (Troubleshooting in this case being the ability to reduce the problem to "when I do X, Y happens") So they are frustrating to work with. Problems that, were you at their PC, would be solved in seconds take 12 minutes.
2. No one with any level of skill or communication ability wants to work on the phones, because users tend to not be computer literate nor good at troubleshooting.
3. Users with a level of technical ability and skill don't want to call in for support, because they know they'll hit a script reader who won't be able to solve their problem. So they check on the Internet or ask friends to solve their problems. So the only users who call are less experienced users, which brings us back to point 1.
How to break this cycle? I'm not sure. I will point out the computers seems to be a rare instance where an untrained person is expected to be able to perform sometimes complicated operations only by voice instruction. Would you call the manufacturer of your transmission for help "over the phone" in installing it in your car? Of course not - it's understood this is a complicated operation that needs to be performed by a professional in order for things to work correctly. At minimum someone who can actually touch and see the work that needs to be done.
I will also point out that the companies who have historically had good support (Cisco, among others) tend to have users that don't fall into category 1.
Ack!
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.
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.