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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!
You Are Being Flamed Because
[ ] You posted a Religious Thread
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[ ] You posted a me > u thread
[ ] you posted a worthless offensive thread
[ ] You continued a long, stupid thread
[ ] You committed crimes against pork biproducts
[ ] You posted a "YOU ALL SUCK" message
[ ] You haven't read the FAQ
[x] You don't know which forum to post in
[ ] You just plain suck
[ ] You posted false information
[x] You posted something totally uninteresting
[ ] You doubleposted
[ ] YOU POSTED A MESSAGE ALL WRITTEN IN CAPS
[ ] You posted racist crap
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[ ] Yuo mispeled evry sengle wurd.
[ ] Your parents are related
[ ] You and your wife are related
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[ ] You dated my brother
[ ] You made love to my dog
In Punishment, You Must:
[ ] Give up your AOL Internet account
[x] STFU & GTFO
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[ ] Actually post something relevant
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[ ] Call Bush and inform him he sucks
[ ] Go to your room with no supper
[x] Apologize to everybody on this forum
[ ] Go stand in the middle of a Highway
[ ] Recite the Greek alphabet backwards
[ ] Take a bath in bleach
[ ] Drink out of a spitoon
[x] Eat my ass
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In Closing, I'd Like to Say:
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[ ] Go jump into some industrial equipment
[ ] STFU botter
[ ] All of the above
"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 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)
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
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"
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
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
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!
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
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.
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).
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.
Even a stopped clock is right twice everyday.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
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.
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.
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
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
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"
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
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
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!!! **
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.
Yep, that's still Warwick Castle. I think I'm definitely in Great Britain.
If you put an idiot with a script in front of them on the phone, they may piss off people, but they are less likely to do any real damage.
I actually read the article and found it positively HORRIFYING. Since I am around sysadmins all the time, I forget what it's like to be some gullible consumer running Windows XP Home Edition.
How about some Hippocratic Oath action here? You know, "First, do no harm." The Formatters who fail to fully disclose that consumers are going to lose their family's digital photo albums, video clips of newborns, and contact information for friends and family worldwide are lacking in redeeming human value. If you are a Formatter, please find a new line of work- TODAY.
Call ME gullible, but given our reasonably wide-open markets for building, selling, and supporting PC's, I would think the companies using these "Support Centers" will suffer for their callous disregard for their customers. What's worse is that these practices end up staining all of us in Information Technology as uncaring a-holes. In the future, those PC customers will move on to technologies that they can handle on their own. Hell, they might just buy Apples or some extremely dumbed-down desktop Linux. Just try explaining where "Desktop" is located in Windows Explorer to the average consumer if you think Windows is "simple and intuitive". And the Desktop is the first thing seen after logon!
In principio erat Verbum.
You ripped me off. Word for word.
5 59 755
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=87052&cid=7
Plagarist. I don't mind being copied, translated and quoted, but you passed this off as your own, and that's plagarism. Have you ripped off anything else I've written?
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.
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
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
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.
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 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.