Slashdot Mirror
Tech Support Levels Dropping
NeoPrime writes "USA Today is reporting on the growing concern of the language barrier, when it comes to tech support. It appears that each year it is becoming more compelling to companies to reconsider the use of overseas help desks. According to this story, based '[o]n a 10-point scale, the average level rated by desktop owners dropped from 7.0 in 2003 to 6.3 this year; notebooks fell from 7.2 to 6.1.'"
Wow! Could it be that Mr. Nickel is speaking with a forked tongue? I can't speak for Sony worldwide, but the domestic support organisation has an image which is somewhere between SCO and Rambus.
Case in point: A friend of mine bought a VAIO, which never really worked. After the third repair attempt he got it back with a hole in the case, requiring a nasty letter from his lawyer until they finally reimbursed him. That was after accusing him of breaking it himself.
Does Mr. Nickel mean they changed their service model from driving a screwdriver through the computer to let it splatter on concrete from the 5th floor or wot?
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
The curse of free markets is that things like Out sourcing can happen, taking american jobs away. However, the market has ways of resolving things it self. You take a relatively minimaly skilled job like Tech support, ship it over seas to even cheaper labor and you get your ass bitten.
What has happened here is the market provided a cheaper means, but at a cost (Customer satisfication) so hopefully, companies will fix this problem by moving these jobs back to where ever they originally were.
--------========+++Dont Feed The Lab Techs+++========--------
Well, that is the way of the capitalism.
The money goes to whoever takes the job for a lesser amount of money.
The system had the verbosity of HTML combined with all the readability of compiled assembly viewed as bitmap images
"Frank"
"OK, Frank, how do you spell that?"
Gah!
Too true - when the hardware support at my firm (UK) moved to Sri Lanka, everybody was advised to use the phonetic alphabet when making helpdesk calls - it really it a mess with these of-shore support desks for communication.
Spend like 10 minutes explaining who you are.
I'm guessing that the kind of people who read USA Today really *really* need manuals and tech support.
And illustrations.
And GUIs.
And they probably love Clippy, too.
"Ooh! Look! My little paperclip friend is back! Brandy, come look! Say 'hi', Clippy!"
"Oh, cuuuuuuute!"
So what do you do? Rent it until you learn?
>Barr called Dell seeking help formatting, partitioning and reloading Windows XP. "I got a tech in India who spoke British English. I am 73, speak Alabama English and use two hearing aids. We both experienced some understanding problems."
>One communications snag: The rep didn't realize that when Barr said "oh" he meant the number, not the letter.
wtf is Alabama English? you can't just make up your own languange and expect it to be supported. this is just arrogance. if you don't want to speak or type properly that's fine but you live with the consequences.
it'd be like someone from London speaking cockney rhyming slang and expecting that to be understood.
you should always speak in the most clear and correct way when making a non-personal phone call, including additional redundancy e.g. "A for apple".
you can't be bothered doing this? tough.
to put some money into automation, which is probably where most tech support is going to be in 10 years anyway. Outsourcing "hid" the costs for a while, but as the service levels fall(the service was probably initially good because only the best were doing it, once everyone else jumped on the bandwagon, then it started to fall) and costs increase, companies are going to look to new ways to save money, and it probably won't be by hiring Americans.
Monstar L
Their techs are skilled, but I often call again, just so I can get a native english speaker. I don't mind working with heavily accented people, but when you have critical issues which can affect thousands of users, that small barrier becomes more than a nusance, it becomes dangerous.. /coward
I just went insane after having to tell people things like how to turn on their computer, how to turn it off, and being asked "Is that a capital number 1?" As far as I'm concerned the Indians can have my job and the retards that go with it.
~ All comments automatically moderated -1 since 2004 ~
the average person in the workforce is being required more and more to use computers (and similar technologies) in their work (students also). An earlier (down-modded as troll and rightly so) post said "don't buy software if you don't know how to use it." On the off chance that the poster was serious, please consider those who have little or no choice.
Back to me... I said I don't use tech support much, but my few experiences are mixed. On Aug 9, I wanted to know the exact date that I could expect XP SP2 to hit my lab PCs via AutoUpdates, so I called MS tech support. I talked to a lady who said (in a confident manner), "today!" Well, she was off by a couple of weeks. As usual with support issues, I found better information on the web.
You take a relatively minimaly skilled job like Tech support, ship it over seas to even cheaper labor and you get your ass bitten.
Eh, I worked in tech support. The English native speakers are equally as worthless as those that are ESL overseas workers. It's basically a trade off for the most part.
From my personal experience the ESL workers have more technical experience and end up being able to do something for you even if it takes longer for you to get your point across. The native English speakers suck at understanding your point AND they suck at the technical side of things.
$9.00/hr jobs with shitty benefits (if any at all) to put up w/raving assholes bitching at you because your Internet connection is down isn't worth it for most people that have a clue (unless they are college students that need a flexible schedule).
There's a cultural one too. Depending on the problem, users will expect empathy from the other side. With cultural differences, that gets harder. As a European, I've had to call a few US helpdesks in the past, and it's just not the same. You'd expect it to be ok, but i guess Americans just have a different method of social interaction than us Europeans.
"The only way to break through is to throw a tantrum and become an 'ugly American."
I couldn't agree more. I had problems with Earthlink a few months ago after a bad storm had gone through - our DSL was down for most of the day, but I couldn't get a tech to give me a straight answer to my simple question. Eventually, I argued my way to a manager, who still refused to give me a straight answer. By the time I was done, they had lost their "american" accents and were more angry with me than I was with them. We tried calling customer service to get a complaint filed, only to find that the techs I had spoken with never logged any of the calls like they were supposed to, so it was impossible to even attempt to get a free month out of them.
I find that a lot of problems stem from the fact that they refuse to deviate from the scripts that they're given - and won't believe you (with good reason - I know I don't usually believe the useres that I work with) that you've tried all of that already.
Alabama English is the closest thing to the tounge of Shakespeare on the planet, thou saucy knave.
And what's the gratuitous Mac plug? This is not and OS/X thread. A is for Apple. Sheesh.
There's really two issues here, that are both somewhat addressed in the article:
1) Americans speak their own brand of English that's incomprehensible to most of the rest of the world, and vice versa. That goes double for anybody with a regional accent. If I can't understand Mississippian, what chance does somebody from India have?
2) There's a definite technical language gap, irrespective of dialect. Trying to figure out what's actually wrong is usually 90% of handling a call. Your typical electronics consumer only knows that this doohickey isn't doing what he wants it to do.
The dialect-related problems can be solved by having regional call centers, but the technical language gap is a bigger and longer-term problem. As the article says, "We're not going to give you a crash-course in Excel over the phone"... but if the consumer won't give it to himself, he's going to blame the product, the vendor, or the support staff when it doesn't do what he thinks it should.
Over time call centres will mature and provide good consistent service independent of location.
By then, voice recognition and text-to-speech technologies and applications will have advanced sufficiently to enable the next generation of call centre, which will employ zero people.
After listening to Apu on "The Simpsons" all these years, I don't have any problem understanding tech support.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
this article for those folks who think that people are "stealing" or "taking" jobs away from Americans?
Consumers expect top quality products, but are not willing to pay for it. As is commonly known, the margins for computers are razor thin. On top of this, when people want top notch service, how can the companies provide it? I am sorry, but the companies are not wrong to cut some costs where they can by using offshore support for a product with very little margins.
If you want service, buy a service contract from someone local. As in come to your home and fix it.
Seriously, can all these outsourced IT'ers make a living driving around town with an AD-aware CD in their back pocket? How much is the average user prepared to pay for saving his butt?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
Tech support is expensive.
Users are getting dumber and calling tech support for things they shouldn't.
Ever hear of someone calling their ISP to help them clear disk space to install the ISP software?
They can just hang up (frustrated customer)
Or they can help the customer, this is expensive, so get a lower level cheaper tech to do it.
That being said I rarely call tech support for anything other then my ISP is broken. Even then I've just about given up, when I telnet to the smtp port on my mailserver and it replies with an error message, they want me to reboot my computer.
outsource to countries with low pay-rates and high standards of spoken English, such as New Zealand or Fiji.
Could it be that the vast majoirty of people are getting smarter with PCs and therefore less people are calling in? And those that do call in are either computer illiterate or have a *serious* problem? I know as time goes on, my parents and relatives just ask me for help now instead of calling a helpdesk. I guess it end up being a case of what came first, the chicken or the egg.
This sounds like good news for us techs we get pay raises for speaking english to bad all these years of 1337 speak have made me more uninteligble than the people it has all been outsourced to.
The article is mildly interesting (though probably not really big news to /. readers), but what's really the result of mediocre support? It feels to me like US consumers will continue to buy Dell computers and just get used to complaining about tech support. As suggested by the article, there may be an opportunity for local techs who make house calls, but I have a hard time seeing how this is really going to hurt the big players in PC industry in the long run. Short run, they'll get some complaints. Long run, the guys in India will get better at speaking to customers in the U.S. and the complaints will decrease.
I get that it's frustrating to have jobs moved from the States to India, but the problem is also with the computers themselves. Will the day come that computers no longer need tech support?
Given the headline "Tech Support Levels Dropping", I assumed it meant that companies were decreasing the level (that is, the amount) of staffing -- or at least decreasing staffing in the U.S.
But what the headline is really trying to cmmunicate is that satisfaction with tech support is dropping -- especially overseas tech support -- which might lead to more tech support staff being hired in the U.S.
So should I complain "Slashdot Headline Clarity Dropping", or should I just be grateful it's not a dupe?
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
VOIP telephony will improve the quality of technical support because by the time it is widespread, graphical displays will be widespread on desktop phones as well as mobile phones. These displays will be used by support technicians to display diagrams that answer questions unambiguously for the customer.
do you suppose Microsoft tested Clippy, before releasing him to the wild?
The company may be "saving money" by paying the people one fifth of what stateside would get, but I can say with confidence that the call took ten times longer than it would have if someone with competant computer knowledge was on the line. Rote reading from of a incomplete trouble shooting guide does not replace expert knowledge. The worse thing you can do to those folks is to follow there directions literally and exactly.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
People who work at User Support, and especially people writing manuals should be FORCED to use software (general) in language version they support.
I got a CAM program with translation to English. The problem is the translator apparently never used any english program himself, learnt english at school and never had to use it really before the translation. Examples? (with my translations)
Secure Tool - save the tool set to a file.
Save Under
Programme End
Displace - move
Edit Row - (the only way to enter text into project)
Demark - unselect
Adjust position - move point
Size line - measure distance
Clearance - material to be removed by the CNC
No, the program is not an after-hours shareware. It's a multi-thousand-dollar commercial software, a flagship product of the company that makes it. And no, it's not really crappy. The backend is marvelous. It's the frontend and translations that really suck.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I've had so many problems with my Dell laptop that I got to experience this drop first hand over two years. The first year had local support, so when my motherboard died, my ethernet port just stopped working, and my harddrive had a major crash, the tech support was able to understand me and have a replacement part sent out the next day, taking maybe an hour of my time each phone call. This caused me to think Dell had great support and I would recommend Dell to other people. Then the next year came and Dell had outsourced their support. In this last year I've had 4 hard drives die out on me, I was on hard drive 5 when the mobo died. Suddenly with a year left on my support contract they decided they didn't need to fulfill their end. Support didn't know what I was talking about, wouldn't give me contact information, and several times hung up on me. I finally got them to send a replacement computer, but it is slower than my original machine, and my additional equipment (batteries, chargers, modular drives) are unusable in the new machine. When I called them about these problems Dell support told me they would send out equivalent equipment and a replacement motherboard with comparable equipment to replace. So a week later after not hearing from them I called and find out my order was cancelled. So go through the same process. Called them back sooner this time to find out the same thing happened again, no replacement parts for me. It's now been 4 months since I got the original unit replaced and I'm yet to have Dell fulfill their end of my support contract. Bad tech support, bad customer service, and companies hell-bent on cutting costs at the expense of the customer are the problems, it isn't outsourcing alone (though a tech who speaks my language would be a nice start, I know I'm asking a lot...).
If you require your computer to function reliably, or at least have good support when something goes wrong, stay the hell away from Dell.
I've been predicting exactly this story for the past 2 years. Since I was laid off from my oilfield job, then later at HP, I've had a bit of a chip on my shoulder towards the companies that outsource not only my job, but a chance at life with a future.
HP has been outsourcing our jobs for the past year, but when it comes to doing the dirty work, they call me and ask me to come back to work for a few weeks. What, am I their little bitch? I don't think so... you see, the Indians in India (ironic, isn't it?) are constantly screwing shit up and making my life a living hell. If these Big-Wig companies would use AMERICAN workers to do AMERICAN support, then there wouldn't be a huge decrease in sales!
The "Language Barrier" isn't just the only thing getting in the way. Its the TOTAL LACK OF EXPERIENCE! These Indians have no idea what they're supporting and read everything from a script. Great, its a humanoid robot on the other end of my phone line.
www.hireamericancitizens.org
I used to be a firm believer in HP's quality, but since Carleton S. Fiorina took her seat in the captain's chair, the company has sunk to an all-time low. I'm not the only tech who feels this way and if we don't rise up against our employers and protect our futures as well as our childrens', we may not have a future left to protect!
-- Game Developers: Stop porting badly-textured games from crappy console systems!
I have also seen words like [T]he being used in sentences. What is going on?
Thanks a bunch,
Cb..
The reason the approval rate of IT techs has dropped is obviously due to more sophisticated every day users who can tell you what HTTP stands for or how to use BIT-TORRENT, yet still can't understand why they have a 'NON SYSTEM DISK' in thier system when they boot up and will go crazy trying to figure that one out.
So, they rate us lower because we can't fix thier cheap ass Pentium 3's or can't upgrade thier 128meg ram sticks because of the cheapies running our IT department.
But if you want to increase the approval rating of techs, I don't see how a guy 3,000 miles away can make it any easier to help you pop your floppy out of your drive if you don't know what a floppy disk is or don't know where your ethernet card is or don't know where your phone jack is when you have Internet problems.
It's just another excuse to pay cheapy prices for overseas CALL CENTERS - not REAL techs - and steal local jobs.
because the users are just getting so much smarter!
But does it have anything to do with people needing support that happen to live outside of USA? I think if a German, for example, user would like to "talk to someone" they'd rather use someone local (to them) and not calling to US.
I blame the vendors for cheaping-out on training and hiring qualified staff for tech support jobs. Of course, since tech support is considered the lowest point on the IT career totem pole, there aren't many qualified people out there to begin with... and those that are certainly don't want the piss-poor salaries paid to your typical phone jock.
This is very informative. Please elaborate...
When I start asking a rather simple question and the next thing they say is "please talk slow, I understand".
need more morning coffee. you all know how it is.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Its gotten so bad that I recommend people purchase generic computers rather than suffer the abuse of major name brand computers.
Seastead this.
Yeah, everyone loves those touch tone menus on the phones for everything else.
Automation has improved the quality of life and service for call routing everywhere!
Nonsense.
Uh...obviously didn't read the faq for doom3. Took me ten minutes following the instructions on the faq. As for quake3, this is total bullshit. I bought the Loki version back when I barely knew how to spell linux but had decided to throw windows out the door. The install was easy as throwing the damned cd in the drive bay. What? Can't click an icon through konquerer? Christ...
Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late --Ian Curtis
http://www.shadowpublications.com/blog
Originally 'oh' means the letter not the number.
Am-English are experts in finding new words and funny ways to use old ones. Who else would shorten Christmas as Xmas ? Its actually replacing word Christ with a PICTURE of a cross! It maybe funny, but why is it done? Other examples are numerous.
As an example, even Finland has its own state (?) office which gives recommendations on new (and old) words, their spelling etc. This keeps the language more understandable and encourages a logic structure. We avoid using foreign language words when speaking Finnish or at least there exists a "proper" alternative. New words conjugate as other Finnish words etc.
Of course it's the people themselves who finally decide which word will become used.
Now if Americans cannot understand British-English, who is to blame ?
My recent experience was with Connectix - now part of Microsoft. My (legally purchased) copy of VirtualPC went south -- and my installation media was corrupted. Since Connectix was purchased by Microsoft, I had to call Microsoft for support to obtain a new copy of VPC. I was routed to a call center in India and spoke to four people over the course of four hours who couldn't get past the fact that I had the purchased the product pre-Microsoft and therefore could not provide them with a Product ID. Their "solution" was to install the product (with my non-working media) and apply the most recent patch so that a Product ID will be generated. THEN they can help me. In the end I finally just got on Kazaa and solved my problem by pirating software I already legally owned.
The problem with technical support is systemic. The problem is Capitalism. The pig dog executives will stop at nothing to make money. In Capitalist America, you wait in line for a week to get help and deal with someone under strict time quotas, poor training, and poor systems. Bureaucratic corporate America takes the worst out of Soviet Russia, in the name of efficiency. We must stop this and prepare for the revolution!
profit up, CEO salaries up, customer gouging up, fraud and deception up, false advertising up, poverty up
What upsets me so much about this is not that Microsoft sucks at writing secure, reliable software but rather that there are so many people that are so willing to exploit it. Considering how many unique exploits there are on Windows XP, I feel that regardless of secure we think that Linux or BSD or Mac OS X may be, that if they had the dominant market share in their current state there would also be a large number of malware apps running wild on those platforms.
When you consider that it takes a significant amount of time to diagnose and resolve malware issues properly over the telephone, it immediately becomes impossible to offer good technical support. Sure, there are other key issues, such as outright hardware failure, but when malware is slowing down the machine average call time automatically increases. So unless your policy is to shaft users (and their data) and tell them to reformat/reinstall/use the restore CD right off the bat, or you are willing to pay what it really takes to have enough reps to help your customers, then there is absolutely no way to provide satisfactory technical support. Not in California, not in Canada, not in India.
I am feeling fat and sassy
I can't even BEGIN to explain how BAD HP customer support is. Sometimes you will start off with an American support agent, and as they pass you off to 'technical' people I always end up getting switched to some Indian guy in Bangalore. I don't know why, but I can NEVER understand these guys/gals. I work with people all over the world, Latin American, European, Asian, and I can understand their accents. But never Indian accents. Now when something goes wrong with an HP product I always debate voiding my warranty and fixing it myself rather than going through the hassle of calling their 'hell desk'.
Some problems I've had: Hard drive failure, HP Printer failure, Boot failure (required reinstall). On average, it takes me 4-5 phone calls with various people to get my case resolved. They never call you back, when they say they will. Their managers don't seem to care either. I can't understand how any business in the U.S. thinks this is good support.
I would like to condemn any CEO/CIO who supports Indian outsourcing of IT help desk operations to having to use it for themselves, personally, every time they have a question/issue/problem with their PC. I bet $5 they wise up and stop using outsourcing overseas.
Of course, that will never happen because the CEO/CIO always has their 'IT geek' in their pocket, who they can call at any time and they will personally show up and fix anything/everything that happens.
I guess this outsourcing of the help desk to other countries (mainly India) is just another way to 'screw the middle class'. Can't get your problem resolved? Are you 16 hours out of warranty? Buy a new PC/HardDrive/Printer... because the help desk won't help you.
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
This isn't quite accurate. You missed out the blank screen problems caused by the switch from 8K tok 4K kernel stacks in Fedora Core 2. You have to make sure you have the correct set of NVidia drivers for your kernel.
I can compete with foreign workers (i work my ass off), i just can't compete with the increasing industry-wide pay cut that has resulted where now I suddenly cannot afford to pay for existing debts that I could afford previously.
I'm already making plans for my girlfriend and I to move out of california now since it's just too expensive and there are increasingly less and less tech jobs here.
The division seems to be between people who own a home and those who don't. Everyone I see who doesn't own a home here already is struggling and the ones who do are taking vacations. I've pulled out my savings to go on 'vacation' to the east coast to look for work.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
I know we're talking PC's here, but I have to say, Apple has awesome technical support. Are their margins any better than the PC manufacturers? I would guess that they are, given the price point of their systems. Maybe these people should stop compaining and start replying with their pocket book. I've called Apple tech support on three occasions and always had an extremely knowledgable, english speaking individual answer my questions. The one time I was outside the area of expertise of the rep, he quickly transfered me to someone who knew the area better.
Much as I dislike the incumbant (and I'm not even American), blaming Bush for poverty in the 'States is like blaming SCO for frivolous IT lawsuits everywhere, or blaming MS for all buggy software. Yes he is contributing to the problem, but he is not at the root cause. Blame the virus, not the symptom. The cause here is lazai faire capitalism taken too far, and a two party, "first past the post" system of politics with enormous barriers of entry for independant candidates. If you want reform, then fight for it!
RsG
I'm guessing that the kind of people who read USA Today really *really* need manuals and tech support.
And illustrations.
And GUIs.
And they probably love Clippy, too.
"Ooh! Look! My little paperclip friend is back! Brandy, come look! Say 'hi', Clippy!"
"Oh, cuuuuuuute!"
I think it was Dave Barry who accused USA Today of being the direct descendant of Weekly Reader.
" I'm guessing that the kind of people who read USA Today really *really* need manuals and tech support."
More importantly, it has to be in colour.
I agree that language differences can result in some problems. It is also the expectancy of the customer that has changed.
Where a few years ago people who needed help were willing to do something themselves and were helping to find the solution, now customers just want it fixed. I am not saying that that is a bad thing. It just is a fact.
Imagine when a few years ago someone called an ISP and said that his internet was not responding, you could ask to open a DOS window and do a ping and as a rep get the resukts in about a minute. Now you need to explain how to do that with the customer moaning that he does not understand it and that it should just work.
I live in Belgium and Belgiun being a country with three languages, we understand perfectly what the situation is with language barriers. The Belgian-French is not the same as the French-French and Flemish is not the same as Dutch. The dialects that are spoken especialy in Flanders can be so different that the people from one side do not understand the people from the other side.
The willingness of BOTH parties will result in a solution. If however one does not want to work with the other, you have just created a unsolvable situation. I have heard people who called in from France to the call center in Belgium and did not want any help from a Belgian rep. I have heard Belgians not wanting to be helped by Dutch reps.
Luckily I myself am able to get support in 4 languages within several dialects, so for me personally the situation is non-existing.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"One customer service call can easily take the profit out of a product," says Rob Enderle, an analyst at the Enderle Group in San Jose, Calif."
Lord - is there no newspaper column he's not around to bung a quote in for?
Cheers,
Ian
I have a Compaq laptop with an extended warranty. The first time, the experience with the people on the phone was frustrating because of thick accents and the "support" person not clearly understanding English (and very obviously using some kind of script). But, the repair went smoothly. This was at my current home.
The second time, the people on the phone were even WORSE. Then, they shipped the return box to an old address. This was after THEY confirmed my address was correct, so they very clearly knew the right address. I called to ask where the box was, and they told me where it was shipped. I corrected them, and they shipped another box. Where'd it go? You guessed, to the wrong address AGAIN. It took a series of email messages and phone calls to finally get them to send a box to me.
All in all, I probably spent between 3 and 4 hours on the phone, and had a laptop I couldn't fully use for about a month.
The first experience was acceptably high that I bought my wife and HP computer when she needed one. Now, after this, I won't be so quick to buy another HP.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Yeah, everyone loves those touch tone menus on the phones for everything else. Automation has improved the quality of life and service for call routing everywhere! Nonsense.
Touch tones are not automation, they are just a different method of inputting information. Automation is going to be you speaking into the phone about your tech problem, and a computer guessing what you are speaking and figuring out the problem for most of the customers. There is still a long way to go, but saying that it will never happen is at best myopic and at worst naive. Hell, people are currently experimenting with systems that will write programs for you.
Read Timequake by Vonnegut, pay attention to aculturation(not sure on the spelling), the computer is making more humans obsolete every day, and the number is only going to grow. Whether or not that is a good or bad thing has yet to be seen. So far it is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that the day will come when capitalism starts to break down because nobody can sell their labor to anyone else.
Monstar L
I hope Apple can get all those G5 chips it's going to need....
Seriously, though - as a journalist, I find it disingenuous that USA Today doesn't include Apple on its little table of tech-support satisfaction, especially since PC Mag
- did
include Apple in its survey."Even for Slashdot, that was a very obscure reference!" - Anonymous Coward
Proponents of offshoring have propped it up as the new religion of business. Like the TQM or 6-Sigma of the past. Wildly irrational business decisions are being made by the groupthinkers who are today's and tomorrow's CEOs, because everyone else is doing it.
Most of my nontechnical acquaintances are savvy enough to select "help" from a menu or read the glossy "getting started" summary card packed at the top of the box. If Clippy has the answer for them, they don't call tech support.
The problem is not whether the person on the phone has a detectable accent or a professional demeanor. The problem is that for the last five years, tech support people, foreign or domestic have been human versions of Clippy. Only with fewer preprogrammed answers. The problem is that in so many cases they appear to be reading from a top forty FAQ sheet and cannot solve any problem that the average user can't solve themselves.
I'm happy with anyone who actually solves my problem, and I'll be most other customers are, too.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
As an interesting aside, most call centres in the UK are in Scotland, because people perceive Scottish accents as educated and authoratative. English accents are, apparently, too annoying to be much good for call centres. Strange but true.
For me, it has little affect because I build my own machines or buy apple(support with apple is IMO absolutely amazing).
The worst part of all this however is the way I get treated when I did have to talk to the dell people. They acted as though it was my fault that I couldn't understand the accent and mumbling over the ambient noise in the background. Also they just downright refused to listen when I was telling them I had already tried some of the procedures before.(apple generally believes you but asks that you do it again with a meaningless twist. this accomplishes both assuring to the tech that you have tried it without affending a tech savy user).
Piro: "I see the RAID controller got 'the screwdriver'."
Largo: "It was not l33t. It deserved d34th."
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Yep, snap for Apple UK. I had one warranty and one paid-for repair to be done. They shipped the box to not just an old address, but an old home address when I'd specified them to ship to my work. They then wanted me to go and find where they'd sent the box to - nope, won't do that. Another box sent to the right address please.
Second box came, and after a few days my machine was returned to me. Not bad? Well, no. Only the warranty repair had been done. My paid-for repair had been ignored. More phone calls - apparently, my credit card details were tied in with the original lost box number, and hadn't been transferred to the second box. Hence the people actually doing the repairs had no knowledge they were supposed to carry out a paid-for repair.
Machine goes back again (this is a 12" Powerbook, by the way). Promised return in ten days. Nothing. Rang - it had been shipped that day, and I should expect a delivery. Of course, nothing turned up. A further week of calls took place before I found out that they'd still been trying to deliver the thing to my old home address, despite me ensuring on the phone that they were going to deliver it to a work address. It was eventually escalatedto the Dispatch Manager before the problem was sorted.
Total time: about five weeks. Actual repairs required? A snapped-off key and a new base to replace a dented one following a fall.
Not impressed.
Cheers,
Ian
pompeyspeakcomments
I work as tech support for some homebrewed software suites. More often , when another company calls for support on the product, im talking to their support staff. More often now, their support is outsourced. Since we only work 7am-7pm , with these clients we have to hop on the phone at 7am to talk to them at 8pm India time. This doesn't leave the biggest window of time to solve problems, on top of the language barrier. I've been on conference calls with a few of their support people, and one of them was almost the designated translator, with the others English so garbled and fast no one in the States could understand. Anyway, I can perfectly understand how outsourcing support can be frustrating for the caller, especially when its burning a hole in your wallet.
- I got my free iPod and a free Nintendo DS....why not
I've called Apple tech support on three occasions and always had an extremely knowledgable...
Not to seem trollish but Apple also has a few advantages:
1. Less software means that there is less chances for a third party to screw over the PC.
2. Less virii/adware means less problems to contend with as well as a greater chance of a non-fouled system
3. Most of Apples hardware is from Apple. This also means not having to contend with third party problems
4. Most Apple owners seem to have a very specific use for the PC when they buy it. Joe Sixpack buys an E-Machine because it's cheap and it runs the best-known OS. Joe Sixpack is less likely to have as much experience as the Apple user. I doubt many people by an Apple as a first PC because most people either don't know what they want/need or they just want a general PC.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
To some extent I have to say - what do the eMachine-style budget PC users expect? They cost like $399 and come with more processing power, memory and hard disk space they could ever use. The savings have to come from somewhere.
Useful advice
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Every day I am amazed at the lack of skill and knowledge in IT personnel. 9 out of 10 of them should never have been a sys admin, programmer or support person.
I think Microsoft is largely to blame. When people leaving school suddenly awakened to the fact that you don't just get handed a well paying job, Microsoft were pushing MSCE, etc. on the technically challenged masses.
In the end only Microsoft gained. The masses eventually got paid less because of the laws of supply and demand, but still companies felt that they were bestowed with armies of skilled people certified 'smart' by Microsoft.
Actually the armies of idiots might be the one thing that gives Microsoft staying power in companies. Migrate to Linux? Unless you re-hire your whole IT department you are in big troubles.
At least your department will be much smaller.
If you cannot even manage something you are certified for, what about something that actually requires a brain. Now make that idiot a manager and it becomes impossible.
I must apologize for using 'idiot', its a relative thing. I am smart in technology, but an idiot when it comes to stuff like financial investment, legal matters, fixing cars, etc. See, no harm done.
Now helpdesk personnel need to be patient. Thats where the Filipino's shine, pleasant and patient, but not very smart on the technical stuff no matter what they tell themselves.
I guess its a catch 22, very few tech savvy people will work in a helpdesk. Maybe it will be the first true mass market for good AI?
Had a similar Earthlink problem, & it WAS ELink's problem, and they LOST! Responses from the Hindu accented Tech Support: "We will have your DSL line reconnected in 5-7 days". "We will have your DSL line reconnected in 7-10 days". "We will have your DSL line reconnected in 28 days". "You wil have to contact your Phone Company". Their foreign TS crew is cluelesss on what to do, don't document it, and will plainly lie, just to get a customer off their back, and U.S. management doesn't have a clue as to what goes on. When I got mad and accused ELink TS of not knowing what to do and not being willing to give me to someone who could fix 'Their Problem' (how to keep their revenue stream coming in from me), there was silence. Technical incompetence is at the heart of Tech Service problems. It could be on the side of users, but I sure hear a lot of BS, in the very few times I call. The one place I do NOT get B.S. with Tech. Support on software is SolidWorks, but then I pay nearly $2000/yr for upgrades and phone support...out of Utah, in my case. So I cancelled my ELink service & asked to release the Elink hold on my Ph# and that resulted in "That will take 7-10 business days." which saved me $20/month. But, I had to cancel my existing phone # and get a new one, because Earthlink Tech Support couldn't execute for a customer that wants to leave their grasp. Earthlink is going to lose subscribers with the inept offshore Tech Suport. I doubt the Elink manager of TS has any clue of what is going on, as I doubt he shops his own system pretending to be a customer like me. JD Powers reports judging customer satisfaction in the first 60 days of owning a new car or an ISP service is a joke. Earthlink will also have no clue that I will no longer recommend them, which over time can have a large effect when "Word of Mouth" goes against you.
Companies sell stock.
Stockholders expect a healthy percentage return, better than the market average.
Company must make large profit to return value to shareholders.
Consumers demand cheap cheap cheap computers.
Company does whatever it takes to show large profit while still selling computer for ridiculously low price, including sending all manufacturing and tech support and accounting and so on to low labor cost foreign country.
Company upper management/shareholders rejoice at increased profitability.
Everyone else suffers.
The company I work for is in the process of relocating IT and accounting to a lower cost IT support center in Mexico (time zone restrictions prevented using India or Manila). Their stock is kicking butt because they've demonstrated all this efficiency and profitability. I have roughly 6 months before I know I'm out of a job. It's ugly, but that's how the whole thing works.
Incidentally, incompetence is running amuck in plenty of US based IT shops, too, just because first line tech support is probably the lowest paid job in the house, and you sometimes get what you pay for.
maybe one day i'll be smart enough to come up with a cool sig, too.
If you think that you are getting tech support in the U.S. from a unnamed 'well known' computer company, think again. What most people don't know is that when they call that 800 number, their call gets routed to some of the call center firms here in SE Asia where a bunch of ex-pat Americans happily take their call as if they themselves were still in the country--but they're not. They're actually calling someone in a far east country, but given that most people who call tech support aren't the brightest of individuals, it's not surprising that they notice any difference... ...except, of course, when we call them a "fucking idiot" in another language. That's when they say "Huh?", and we say "Don't worry about them, sir! That was just one of our international tech support reps talking in the background. Ignore him. " :)
It seems that all of the computer companies have outsourced tech support. So the expectation has been lowered for support calls. You can have a middle of the road tech support ranking if you outsource your support. There is no advantage to having support in the US becasue nobody else has support in the US.
Would a fledgling computer company be able to boost sales and charge a premium by advertising its quality of service? Is this a competitive advantage, or will that company be wiped out by the low cost leaders? We cannot complain about support if we won't pay for it.
I'm sure I am in the minority as I am "tech savvy", but I wonder about others who are not as adept with technical devices.
That being said I don't think the QOS is any better in the US. You still have some idiot on the other end who has no clue about the product he is supporting. But I get what I paid for I guess.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
that http://www.scronline.com/ handles all of our own support and I've turned away over 20 offers for "off shoring" even though they can give me 24/7 support and do it cheaply, I think I'd rather have my customers understand the tech they are talking to. Besides, you don't need that much support when everything just.....tends to keep working.
:)
Sorry, had to put in a shameless plug for my company there
I really felt this article understaned how bad the situation has become. I'll describe my Dell "experience" below, but while this was for my home system, I also buy $500K+ per year for my company and am on a team that set policy for a $5 billion dollar company's purchases. Dell shouldn't assume that it is OK to send home users to India and keep corporate users in the US. many of us unimportant home users get to decide how oompany's spend their $$$.
I called Dell technical support. I initially had a terrible connection. One assumes the IP telephone technology wasn't working well at that point. Even when I tried back and went through all the menus again, the volume was low. I had to ask 3 times to get the person to speak up.
The next problem was that the people you get know very little. I'm a very expert computer user. The operator refused to listen to me when I described the problem and insisted on going through a checlkist of stuff about installing anti-virus, patches, etc. It was very aggrevating and they are not traied to recognize people who have expertise and not trivial problems.
The person's attitude was one of uncertainty and confusion at each step. They literally disappeared for 3-5 minutes at each step. I assume this was to read a document and then ask someone else what it meant. Very annoying. When I tried to discuss things they clearly could only reread the script. When I asked if there was someone more expert they said we had to go through the steps first.
I'm sure they were following procedure, but my problem was a hardware problem. I knew it and that was the issue that they agreed to after 30 minutes of wasting my time. I tried early in the call to just get to the hardware discussion, but had to give up and go through stupid questions and a variety of time wasting steps.
Finally, there was the launguage / accent problem. The person's English was passable and the accent was heavy and made udnerstanding difficult at times.
overall, I hated the experience. I will look for alternatives to Dell with US based support for my next purchases, including my $500K+ of corporate purchases.
...is this the point at which all of us just say
"Well.....DUH!"
Add to that, a lot of tech support is moving to the Internet where you can input your choices using your mouse and keyboard (not everything can be done this way; I hate it when I call up Adelphia to complain that our cable internet service is down and they tell me about their website's customer service section).
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
The basic problem - the reason why tech support in general (especially from a large company) is almost certain to suck whether it's in India, Wales, the United States or even Texas - is that people who are clueful don't want to do technical support.
Tech support is generally a low-paid entry level job. Many people in tech support aren't there to make a career, they are there simply because they need some kind of job. (It always amused me when I was a teenager looking for entry-level jobs how it always said 'Why are you applying for a job at company X?' and you had to write some BS-filled 'go forward' corporate speak response on how the company is so wonderful, and how it'll be the start of a long career etc. when the genuine answer is simply 'because I need the money'.)
Generally, the people in tech support will not have a clue and don't care to have a clue; they just want to collect their paycheck. Those with a clue would never do tech support even if you doubled their salary because the job is utterly stultifying.
I have worked in a small call centre (12 positions). Fortunately, it *was not* tech support, but railway information. But even there we had the same problem: the job really demanded someone who knew geography well and had an interest in the railways, and the majority of people there just wanted a paycheck. Turnover was fast - it was rare that anyone stayed in the call centre for more than 6 months before leaving the company or finding a job somewhere else in the company. The trouble is there was quite a bit of knowledge you needed to do the job well thanks to the byzantine fare structure and the complex geography of the national railway network, and usually at 6 months the person was just getting competent and fast at doing the job - and they'd go and leave. I would imagine tech support isn't much different.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
This will probably turn out to be a good thing for smaller businesses that keep their tech support in house and have a more personable feel to their support.
As consumers get more and more frustrated with not getting the support that they have come to expect, they will take their money elsewhere and that else where will be to smaller more local businesses.
I've had bad experience with Sony laptops, too, and a wacky response to requests for repair.
I'v had a couple of run-ins with Apple support, and they are truly stellar compared to Dell and angelic to Tele2. Ibm also har a very smooth operation in their support systems.
Dell sells clones. They aren't truly any better than any other PC out there. They make some pretty nice cases though.
That said, the ONE thing that made Dell better than the rest was their support. It did't take long before they realized that it was a BAD BUSINESS DECISION to move their corporate support overseas. They moved it back to the U.S. pretty quickly when companies started dumping Dell.
That said, it proves they are aware of the problems it causes -- this is not a surprise to them in the least. The message I get from that fast? They prefer to abuse their users when they think they can get away with it. If you're not a corporate user, they don't care about you. Simple right? They might try to deny it, but their actions speak the loudest.
Touch tone systems are gradually being replaced by voice recognition systems, so the maze of twisty little menus will disappear. Several of the companies that I use (banks, cable company) are already doing this.
At the beginning of the last century, as the telephone was becoming commonplace in every home, the telco's would have eventually faced a shortage of workers (unmarried women) to work as telephone operators. If telephone switching networks hadn't been automated, the demand for operators to switch connections would have exceeded the total world birthrate for the female of the species.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Sad to say if you're PC is beroke it means you cant do any work 'till it's fixed. If your plumbing is broke you cant take a dump 'till it's fixed.
People will always pay more to be able to take a dump when they need one than get their PC fixed.
When I called Penske earlier this summer to see if I could rent a moving van, I was presented with an automated menu where you just spoke in your choice, much like you would do with a person.
Ugh, those are the worst. The menu system interrupts you or keeps talking, since its voice-response system isn't as intelligent as a person's, plus they're not intelligent enough to have several logical permutations of the menu options.
I depressingly frequently get an email from some twit with no decent excuse (ESL, etc) that reads like this:
When I get something like that and am feeling irritable or they're being unreasonable ("FIX IT NOW!" when asking for free support on a mailing list, etc), I tend to reply with the original text quoted and FIXED, like this:
The point here, which sadly probably goes "whoosh" over the heads of most recipients, is that email is not a license to attempt to best the next guy in the illiteracy competition, nor an excuse not to bother to fix typos. My time is important too, especially when they're not paying me for the use of it.
I only tend to do this to people who really need to be beaten with the "here's the shift key - use it" bat, among several hundred others.
There is a shift key. Use it. No! Not the caps lock key, the shift key.
The full stop key does not have to be hit three
times in succesion, not should it be most of the time.
Three full stops do not equal one comma.
A message should almost always contain more than one sentence.
The enter key is important. I promise.
You have a backspace key for a reason (oh - it's the one with the left-pointing arrow near the top right). Along with the fact that your computer displays what you type, it lets you fix typographical errors. This opportunity should not be ignored. If you insist on using your computer like a broken keyboard that's not connected to anything, I'll be happy to provide you with a real one.
Frustrated?
Just a little.
The idea of a "Free Market" and the economic system called Capitalism are not one and the same thing.
The United States of America is historically thought of as a having a Capitalist economy with equity markets playing a central position in its economy. But Capitalism, with its implication of a central role for equity markets, is much older than the US and is often thought to have emerged in its modern form in the city-state of Venice in the fifteenth century. The word "bourse" is a French coinage that refers to what Americans call a stock market.
On the other hand, this phrase "Free Market" is little more than an idealistic slogan. It's not too far removed from the term "socialism" in the sense that both merely refer to a general tendency that is never really expected to exist in the absolute sense and would require vastly different societies than the ones we have today even to begin to approach.
I just want to remind everyone of this fact because when someone starts a thread with the phrase "Free Market Capitalism" it really just leads to a lot of misunderstandings. It's not unlike the ETS writing question that asks students to give their opinion on whether artists or engineers contribute more to society. This is a misleading question because the disctinctions upon which the topic are premised are false.
That's really Australian - I'm pretty sure anyway. I live in Australia but grew up in New Zealand. The full traditional text would be:
;-)
"She'll be right, mate".
More New-Zealand-ish (at least in the semi-rural Northland where I grew up) is the inclination to postfix everything with "eh, kuz?"
Talking to my brother, who lives in Dunedin (South island of NZ) is an interesting and new experience every time
OK They're not philanthropists and no doubt the accountants hold as much sway there as anywhere else, but they do seem to be thinking a bit further ahead than tomorrows bottom line, unlike many other companies I could mention.
*--BigMan--- Time flies like an arrow.. but personally I prefer a nice glass of wine!
That's what it sounds like to me: "Gosh, we hate to export US jobs, but we have to because of the language barrier. As you can see, our phoney statistic thingy has gone from 7.0 to 6.3. Clearly, we really have no choice. Also, although we never hire BSCSs, we have noticed an alarming drop in number of students graduating with a BSCS - the govenment must allow more H1Bs, there is just no other choice. If these alarming trends don't change, IT staff will start demanding more than minimum wage, and that would hurt everybody."
No, they are not perfect, but they will improve in time as voice recognition technology gets better. This one was actually not that bad, so the technology is getting better.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Just because you can't understand someone on tech support doesn't necessarily mean they are an Indian, or other foreign-based call center. There are plenty of American Citizens with poor command of the English Language. I have had several people call me for various telemarketing reasons who could hardly read their script. I promptly laughed at them and hung up, but their accent was clearly an American one.
The problem has nothing to do with where call centers are located but rather who's doing the work on the phone with you. All good support personnel should be trained in "standard" American English to help avoid ambiguity, since everyone can understand the version of English you hear on the CNN or other standard media outlets, even if you dont' normally speak that way.
I myself work with customers on the phone and make a point of suppressing my slight New York accent and not using any slang that might not be clear.
It's difficult enough trying to bridge the gap between technical and non-technical people without a 2-way language barrier getting in the way. A support rep should be able to decipher people's accents, within reason and should be trained in speaking a relatively standard form of the language they are providing support in.
This doesn't just apply to English, but also Spanish. We have support rep where I work who is responsible for helping spanish speaking customers. When on the phone with a customer she speaks "standard" spanish that you would usually hear on Telemundo or Univision. There is a definite difference between the dialect she speaks on the phone and what she uses when she's on the phone with her husband for example.
Well, I took an old NEC Nopebook to NEC office the other day since their main tech support office was in Akihabara, Tokyo and I happen to work there. Its been out of warranty for over two years. They asked me to leave the machine for checkup. The notebook wouldnt power up due to a looooose power jack on the motherboard. After their initial checkup after a couple days, they called me and told me that this power jack Part of the motherboard is covered by a permanent NEC warranty and they will replace it for free. After a couple more days, they shipped the computer back to me at their cost with everything back to normal and fixed. I was really shocked to see this kind of attitude from NEC since they are notorious for charging too much for everything. This fix reeeeally changed my perception of NEC support....though I still hate them for their charges to common pc users on normal computer problems...like Yen 40,000 for a 30 GB hard drive replacement etc....
I agree with this article. I continuously have to submit support calls to Sun Microsystem around JES (a topic of another good discussion). I encounter bugs, and issues, where I have to log a support call. 95 % of the time, I get someone outside the country. I find that I have to spend MUCH more time: A:) repeating myself, B:) restating the problem, C:) going into much more detail then usual to get a clear focus on the outstanding issue. D:) getting the tech to repeat/restate what he's saying so I can understand what he's saying.
I prefer to talk to someone on the phone, as I find you can usually do much better troubleshooting, and resolve issues much quicker, then by email. But 95 % of the time, I usually insist email-only conversations, because these techs are too difficult to understand. Besides, they are just working on a script, NEVER can they immediately suggest a solution or workaround for even small issues, it's always "I'll have to bring this to the attention of my backline engineer" (Which means, "I have no idea what your talking about, let me find someone I hope can...")This exercise is at LEAST a 12-24hr turn-around.
It drives me crazy. I strongly believe that outsourcing to India severely impacts "time-to-resolution" calls. I'd say any issue I open up now, I forecast a minimum of 7 days for resolution.
Heh, we're having trouble at work. I work in a bowling alley. It's less than a year old, and was constructed at a cost of like $5 million, much of it being spent on the bowling equipment.
The mechanics are having some trouble, and keep calling tech support. We get a much higher level of service than you might if you buy a CD-ROM drive; we've had their techs fly out several times as part of our service.
But we rarely get anyone good on the phone. Last time someone called, they got really ambiguous directions on what to do. Our mechanic asked him to clarify what he meant. He couldn't, because he was just reading out of a book, and really had no idea what he was talking about.
I think the whole tech support approach is flawed. The 'first level' techs should know the basic problems by heart, and not have to use a book. And if they need the book, I'd rather be passed up a level, rather than read to.
Maybe they wouldn't make money, but I'd rather pay a little more for a quality product, knowing that some of the money was going to ensure that tech support knew what they were talking about.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
The southeast US is one of the cheapest parts of the country to live and do business in. Atlanta excluded. Wages are low because the cost of living is cheaper here. I know there are a few call centers already in the SE but I don't know why they haven't looked at this area of the country more. It seems to me paying slightly extra for native english speakers who could effectively help someone would pay off more than shipping the jobs overseas.
Ok, please refrain from the redneck jokes.
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
Funny story.
I inherited an "hINSPERON" laptop, and during the course of use ran across an odd LED error code. Found nothing about it online, had nothing better to do, so, what the hell, I called hell.
I have called hell many times in the past, but this was one of the longest waits I've ever had, raising the question of where all this money they're saving is going. Finally I get through to a support rep with an indian accent that was understandable, at least to me.
However, clearly she did not understand anything I was saying. I needed one piece of information, very specific (Middle LED Orange-Orange-Green repeating), which SHOULD have been available on their website. I asked the question, she put me on hold for ten minutes, came back and said, "It's not important".
"Maybe not," sez I, "but I still want to know."
Ten more minutes. "It's not important"
"Yes, you said that, and I said I still want to know."
Ten more minutes. "You don't need to know."
I DO need to know, to justify the last two hours of my life!"
Ten more minutes. "It's a battery code."
"No, really? The little battery ideogram next to the LED would never have given me that impression. what does it MEAN?"
Five more minutes, then I hung up. I've had many bad experiences with hell, but that was the worst in terms of sheer pointlessness.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Day ain't over yet.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something. - Thomas Edison
I keep on hearing about how *insert big computer company*'s customer support is crap, but this doesn't seem to be affecting their profits any. Does bad customer support really affect the bysiness they get? If say Dell's customer support is crap, don't the customers just whine until their nearest geek friend/relative do the work for them free? The average buyer of computers relies on price and big numbers on the box (the MHz myth) and the ooh-shiny factor in terms of making purchasing decisions. Customer support is hardly ever considered (ditto with things like security for software purchases...). If the consumers don't care, why should the companies? If consumers want good customer support they should be willing to pay for it by making it part of their purchasing decisions eg. two identical systems from two computers, one with good customer support, one with not-so-good but the other one is cheaper, the vast majority of people will go for the cheaper one.
If customers don't vote with their wallets then why should Dell/Sony/HP et al. care about good customer support (from the POV of a business)? The idea of good customer support is to build loyalty but the average computer buyer doesn't consider support important at all when buying stuff as they will just get their nearest geek to fix it for them and they don't want to pay the extra money for good support as they want it as cheap as possible. Then from a financial POV to the business, it's just an annoying expense they have to have that doesn't add anything to the bottom line (since customers don't seem to be deserting them in droves or making purchasing decisions based on customer support reputation) and so it makes sense (from a financial POV) to do it as cheaply as possible even if it is crap.
It has nothing to do with support level, it's the american attitude towards a person speaking with foreign accent.
I have actually started to use a local company in the city where I live for my personal computing needs.
I get local support, faster response, and it is very easy to get an appointment to bring in one of my computers for service.
The last computer I owned that was from one of the big companies with overseas support, is no longer used. I had quite a few issues with this computer, and got tired of waiting on the phone for hours, just to get my message through. One thing is the language barriere, the other concern is the time it takes to make an appointment for service.
I probably paid a little more when I bought my computers from the local store, but the service and follow up is a lot better, and it saves me money and frustration in the long run by having a personalized relationship with a local company.
-- Arild
The language and accent related issues are really just a natural consequence of offshoring. In the beginning most of the people working the call centers in India (for example) were probably among the best educated there. As demand grew, more call centers were opened and more people in India heard that this was a good way to make some money. Well, the proportion of well educated and talented people in India is probably no different than in the U.S., so it was inevitable that many of the people working in the call centers now are not among the best educated and most talented. Not that they're morons, just average folk. I mean really, how many of us could communicate fluently in a foreign language? I could communicate very very badly in two or three others. With a predetermined script I could do better, but that's about it. And forget about casual conversation!
While companies could try to better train their workers, I think that with respect to foreign language skills a limit is being reached. That is, even if the person in the call center understands English perfectly, they may still have an accent when speaking it that a U.S. customer will have a hard time with. I personally like accents, but Indian accented English is one of the most difficult for me to understand. I usually have to know the person for a while to fully understand what they are saying. Unfortunately, an already upset customer in the U.S. is not likely to have the patience for that.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
No one values the tech support enough so no one pays enough and those techs who are good get frustrated when the 'manager'(read person who sucked up to a superior) harasses to them about call logs/volume.
(1st sig) If this were a snappy sig, you'd be reading it right now. (2nd sig) I'm a karma whore. >Insert FUD here
I've seen a few times when telneting to port 25 does fail and its not the ISP's fault.
Spyware, Viruses, and my favorite anti-virus software.
The problem as I see it is that 99% of the user problems are the same. I almost think that working in a factory would give you more satisfaction then working in a Call centre doing support. So, those who have real technical skill will get out of doing support, and those who don't won't.
Remember back in college when you had a TA -- or worse, a prof -- who could barely speak English, trying to teach you a subject you barely understood anyway? Remember how frustrating it was to have to simultaneously learn some extremely difficult subject and learn what sounded like something halfway between English and some other language?
/bitter
Well, lo and behold, computer companies are finally realizing that it's hard for people who may or may not be good at computers, to receive Tech support from someone who barely speaks English.
You'd think that fall into the realm of common sense, but then again, most universities don't care that their TA's hardly speak English, so why should computer companies care?
Yes, I am a sales person, and was trying to get a customer to consider giving us business, and was asking a CEO some technical questions. He didn't know the answer, so he decided to call tech support to get the info. After going into a voice mail maze, he finally got some English as a Second Language guy from who knows where, whome he could not understaqnd at all. I told him our tech support call center was located about a 45 minute drive from where we were sitting, and closed him on the spot.
http://www.geocities.com/sethseekstruth/great_out
It's not always the reps fault that service sucks.
There's a tech support call center a few blocks from my apartment here in Ontario, Canada (looks like jobs aren't only being outsourced to Asia). Though I could really use the experience and the money, I have been informed that anyone with above-average computer knowledge is inelligible. HR wants each support rep to read a script, not think for themselves. Thus if you have any problem not on a sheet in front of the rep, they're going to have no idea how to help you.
This issue applies to way beyond the computer support issue. IMHO, the operational technologies that this society are using are experiencing exponential rates of increasing abilities and intelligence demands to operate and maintain effectively. When you mix this with the declining or stagnant knowledge base present in the users of the equipment at hand and the increasing use of "script kiddies" who suffer from the same issue (tech support centers staffed with low-cost script readers and people found at bargain basement prices just to read books and CAN'T INDEPENDENTLY THINK), this issue just magnifies. People and companies are unwilling to pay for well-trained and knowlegable people because their abilities can and will command a high wage and companies only worry about profit. I do not see this issue going away any time soon and will just get worse. I work as a support engineer and the vast majority of the people I have to work with I wouldn't trust plugging a lamp into a wall socket because they are of the mindset to put their tongue across the wallsocket to see if it is powered or not. It appears that as long as companies are not willing to pay the $$$$$ necessary to get competent, thinking support personnel and the users of the equipement are not willing to learn to maintain and operate the equipment they purchase, this issue will just keep inflaming. Where is the "X on the wall" when I need it!!!!
I am a call center tech. Those who do it for the most part are there (like most have stated) to collect the $$$$. I am there to help people. That is my nature. I get up each morning and look forward to being the one who takes care of the issue(s). I love it so much it makes most of my co-workers sick. I work for one of the biggest companies (one that is mentioned in the article), and yes I too have a problem with our over-seas "friends". Not in just that they are clueless, but that most of what they do just munges the system's more. So what do I do? I take ownership of damn near every call I get (but stress to customer that if they have a different problem they need to call back in and speak to another tech) and take care of that customer till the problem is fixed regardless of how long it takes. Do I get annoyed? Like you don't know, but I love my job, love the company I work for and NEVER take anything that is said personally. If a customer is transfered to me , I do what I can for them. Most of you who are bitching have to realize that there is only one of me and I can't do it all. Those who call in and get me are so pleased that it warms my heart, and confirms why I do this job. For the people. Ohh BTW I used to own my own IT firm and gave it up to do this.
The problem with tech support is that so many end users are ignorant and afraid of the software/hardware they are using. And they DON'T really want to learn it. Especially when the software is slow, poorly written, and has a poor user interface.
So end users want someone to hold their hand Step-by-Step (sometimes baby steps) This is very time consuming and frustrating. You both may be speaking the same language. You may have even gone to the same high school together, but that doesn't mean you'll understand each other.
For example: You wouldn't believe how many people don't know where the # key is on their cell phones when you call it the 'pound' key (technically it's called an octothorpe key, so you'll tell them it's below the 9 or it looks like a tic-tac-toe symbol) nor do they know what power-cycle means.
Heaven forbid you use any acronyms like PCMCIA (People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms).
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
" So, you were being overpaid for your job when the market stabilised and re-adjusted itself, leaving you with a smaller wage which means you're not as well off as you were before."
;)"
You know I wonder what they don't teach in schools these days? Here's something for you to chew on Dave. You're overpaid for your job. You'll be getting a "market adjustment" tomorrow. Here's what you need to do for the rest of the day. Justify to your boss why he should keep you at your present salary. And just for the hell of it. When the second round of "market adjustments" comes around, you'll need to justify why he should even keep you around instead of shipping your job off to India. After all, you are overpaid.
"If IT workers didn't insist on inflated wages, we'd be a lot more happy. The jobs are going overseas as Americans ask for too much money to do what is essentially a basic task. Anyone can program a computer given enough books to read. Anyone can fix computer problems. It's not like it's a gift - IT professionals aren't "chosen by the elders" or "pre-ordained by the prophecy" - they're just guys and gals who type on keyboards all day.""
Spoken like someone who actually hasn't been long on this earth. Here's the big clue for you. We're NOT all alike. We look different, talk different, think different. We have different skills, and temprements. Likewise IT isn't "just guys and gals who type on keyboards all day." any more than Ray Charles is just someone who bangs on a piano all day.
"I'm not trolling - this is a point I've tried to make countless times on slashdot (but always been modded out of existance)."
Maybe not trolling, but not enlightening either.
"The free market America tried to hard to push on the world has finally come of age. It was instigated when America was a very economically-viable place to have a business. Now, that free market has gained more momentum in other, more economically steady, parts of the world. Because of that, the jobs are now flowing the other way, which America doesn't seem to like."
There's more to it than that, but since you insist on simplistic answers to lifes hard questions...
"Something about cake and eating it springs to mind...
Oviously someone bitter about others ambitions bearing fruit.
As someone who's taken a number of linguistics courses, i'd like to point out that the techies in India are speaking English *perfectly*...they do not speak it accented by some other primary language, but rather they speak a different dialect of English - just as those from the 'deep south' speak a dialect nearly as unintellible at times to us northerners.
I am not a number - I am a free man!
Certain companies (name starts with N and ends in etgear) will go through the knowledge base, try the solutions there and then tell you that you device is broken, and tell you to exchange it for a new one. Talk about bad tech support.
But others, like MacSense have tech support people (web) who actually know what they are talking about.
It is rather annoying to be told that a product that works perfectly fine is broken (especially when its the second time they said that).
I think my head is going to explode. People are just know realizing that it was a bad idea to have an end user call India for desktop support? LMFAO! Want a good laugh? Call HP. You will spend most of the day being asked for your personal information because the first, second, third, and fourth person who asked you for it never really typed it in, I guess. Seriously though, I have spoken to managers at their corporate office in Palo Alto, and have asked them if they think outsourcing has created more problems for them than benefits. Every time I get a very quick, "yes, sorry". I have no problem with Indian people, I just never want to talk to another one for the rest of my life, thanks to HP.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
While I have had more than my share of support nightmares, try getting Antec Tech support to replace a power suppy in a rack server case in timely fassion, or just getting them to return your call in the same day you placed it. One company's tech support has always shined in my experience, CISCO. Sure you pay a premium for their support, and I do mean a premium. However when you log a support case with CISCO, either via phone or from the CCO website, you know that depending on the severity of your case, you will be intouch with an ENGINEER, not some lacky off the street, in a very timely maner. Depending on the time of day that you open your case you could be speaking with someone in the US, Europe, Australia or just about anywhere else in the world. Each and every time that I have had to contact support, the person that I spoke with was pleasant, sympathetic, and very knowledgeable. Issues have always been resolved quickly, and on a few occasions the engineers have gone beyond what was required by my support contract. Cisco from my experience seems to be one company that understands that a customer with a resolved problem will likely remain a customer. I dread the day that I need to contact TAC, not because I fear an unpleasnt outcome, but because I know that my users are going to be climbing down my back because of a network outage. I take comfort in knowing that while there is an issue that will put the heat on me, I have the wonderful people at CISCO's TAC to save my bacon.
Remember, tech support has to be one of the most thankless jobs on earth. Dealing day in and day out with people with problems and quite a few of them not the most pleasant, or with the most realistic expectations. We all have a right to gripe when support fails us, and quie often it does. On the opposite side of that coin though, remember to thank the support person who has done a good job, resolved your problem for you, and on that rare occasion gone above and beyond. A simple "Thank You" costs you nothing, but goes a long way for the poor soul who has to listen to bitching and moaning all day long, no matter what their pay scale.
Just my two cents worth.
I work for a respectable call centre in Canada that is basicaly a tech support dept for hire for American & Canadian companies, so I guess this is an opinion from the other side of the fence. A lot of people mention a language barrier problem with speaking with overseas call centres. You might be suprised to find out those might not be from overseas. Many call centres are built in poorer areas, where they know they can get a good suply of replaceable cheap labor. With the world economy the way it is, a lof of immigrants to the United States do not have large amounts of money coming in, and have varying degrees of technical experience. A lot of them are perfect new employees from the point of view of the call centre. I hear more non-english speaking accents when I call any of the american call centres than I do at the location where I work.
And I would not be so negative about speaking to a foreigner, a lot of them have better educations and a stronger work ethic than an employee you could get here at 5x the price. I deal with a large area of New York and most of the time the really, really dumb customers speak perfect english, while many of the foreign speaking people are at least smart enough to know how to unplug something from the wall for 10 seconds.(Honestly, no word of a lie, some people have no Idea what an electrical outlet, socket, plug, power receptacle, you know the thing you plug things into to make them light up and go, is. They are completly unaware that most household appliances need to be "plugged in" to function. I can understand if they dont know which cable to unplug, but being in your thirtys and not knowing how to install anything from a clock to a toaster is a we bit slow in todays day and age)
For those of you interested in working out the pay scale difference of hiring Canadians, I provide tier one internet support for $10CAN/hour.
Yeah, but if it breaks and the manual doesn't discuss error codes, what then? Google? What if google is as clear as mud?
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
In fact is actual policy in many Call Centres to cause callers to hang up ( abandon the call ) rather than queue for a long time and speak to someone. This is because a lot of the time they are measured on the average queue time but not penalised for there abandoned rate ( because this is harder to measure accurately ).
Some call centres actually keep you at the back of the queue once you have been queuing for so long to encourage you to hang up and then ring back later so they have a chance of answering the call within their deadlines and improving their performance ratings. Evil I know but it does go on.
. . . and thank God I got out of that horrible, stifling, dehumanizing business.
Helping someone work through a problem is one thing.
Having to be less than honest with a customer because the salesman's mouth wrote checks that our engineers couldn't cash is quite another.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
That Maddox missed the point of the show ENTIRELY. As you apparently did too. The show was about people benefitting from ILLEGAL ACTS and the immigrant issue merely came up during the show. What the lawyer responded to was a statement, a blanket statement, that illegal immigrants were stealing jobs. Actually, what they are doing is JUST LIKE me robbing you of all your money, and being allowed to keep the fruits of my labors with no consequences. Once again, Maddox and his Howard Sternesque/Andrew Dice Clay type website, seems to think that he is a shining beacon of knowledge, merely because people respondto, or read his webpage. You made the same mistake. For shame!
"I feel that regardless of secure we think that Linux or BSD or Mac OS X may be, that if they had the dominant market share in their current state there would also be a large number of malware apps running wild on those platforms."
*sigh*
Slashdot, slashdot, slashdot.
Why do we even have a moderation system if all we end up with is the half-baked, and the simply plain wrong.
Oh right, no editors.
I have also received excellent tech-support from the BookEndz folks (Docking station for me TiBook). It's not all bad out there.
Pick One: http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~stremler/sigs/sigs.html (Note - disable Javascript first!)
There are two sides to this story... It is unbeleivable what kind of shit you have to put up with in this job. People will call you up with their brand new computer that they have already managed to get chock full of spyware and god knows what else, then get royally pissed off at you for telling them that this is not a hardware problem and that we cannot send an onsite technician out there to fix it.
;) ). Customers don't want to hear this, they just want someone to come out there with new hardware. Then they turn into the 'Ugly American' and scream at you and your manager. So please be nice the next time you have to call tech support, because every day is a rough day in this job.
IMHO, spyware is the biggest reason customer satisfaction is dropping. At Dell, where I work, we are not supposed to support this. I will recommed that people download ad-aware or spybot, but even this will not get rid of some of the worst adware. We simply don't have the time to spend hours picking through a customer's registry or going over hijack-this logs. Sometimes a reinstall of Windows is all that we can recommend. Of course, almost everybody who calls in has some kind of spyware, but none of them understand what it is or how they got it. They will often blame you for it, or even accuse you of making it up to cover up a "lemon" computer. Now, I work for an elevated tech support called "Gold," for which people pay extra money to talk to someone who is qualified, not to mention a native English speaker. Everyone working here is more than qualified for this, and most of us would be working as Sys Admins and the like if the IT economy wasn't shit right now. Yet, customers who call their computer a "modem" or a "hard drive" call us incompetent. I have had people screaming at me, then they want to talk to my manager, and then they will tell the manager that I called them all kinds of bad names. Fortunately we record all of our calls so its easy to prove what a lying sack of shit this person was, but there's nothing I can do about it. Give me 5 minutes alone with some of these people who call in and I might start to know the meaning of "job satisfaction." Don't get me wrong, there are also plenty of competent people who call in, mostly people who work in IT, and they are a joy to work with. But at least 90% of the people who call in have no right to call anyone in tech support (India or ortherwise) incompetent.
Take, for example, the DVD skipping issue mentioned in this article. To most people, this might obviously be a hardware issue. wrong. 95% of the time it turns out to be roxio or some other software causing the problem. (I solved this issue on my own Dell at home by installing Linux on it
I think that one of the reasons customer service has dropped is because of a fundamental change in who does tech support.
Way back in the Dark Ages of the early 90s, my first job during school was helpdesk work. (Picture starting during the first year your university offered dial-up Internet access. Evil stuff...) It was sometimes very frustrating, but it sure beat all the other student jobs like working in the cafeteria or driving the espresso machine at Starbucks. It was also how I found out that an IT job was right for me, so it served as a training ground.
The landscape has changed somewhat now...back then, everyone in support was at least somewhat tech-savvy. Now with fewer domestic entry-level support jobs, and fewer people willing to go into IT, the call centers have to settle for lower-level workers. It's also a vicious cycle...the low skill frustrates the customers, the workers' bad attitudes frustrate the company, who moves the jobs offshore, only to get the customers angrier.
My solution to this problem would be to have US companies (a) raise support salaries by enough to keep the workers happy and their bills paid, and (b) to locate call centers in cheap areas of the country so they could still make the same profit margin. My Rust Belt city really got a boost in the 80s/90s when companies started locating their support functions there...it practcically rebuilt the middle class after the factories died!
"Tech support suffers because of marketing and feature envy. "
Tech support suffers because a long time ago. companies needed to sell a product to the masses that was complicated. So what to do? Well a good thing, and a bad thing. The good thing is that computers did get easier to deal with, hardware and software. The bad thing is that because of the campaign to get products sold. The industry convinced the masses that hardware, and software are easier than they really are. Read the marketing material some time, and contrast that with one's actual experience using the product. Throw in the overall social attitude towards education, technology, and science and you can see a recipe for disaster. Customer service is just the tip of the iceberg. Now as someone who used to work customer service. not all customers are bad, and quite a few have legitimate beefs with the company. It's a matter of weeding.
Try calling the nightmare support for AOL these days. It's over an IP connection to India. Besides the fact the connections suck, the accents are often difficult to understand, but you just acan't ear anything and you have to repeat yourself ten times to get anything accomplished. The worst part is, I'm a 32 y.o white guy. Imagine what my 60+ customers have to deal with when they try AOL support. It just doesn't work.
This is not to bash Indians in any way. But it's AOL's poor choice to use foreign tech support in this manner that's very inneffective, especialy when they're reading from those annoying scripts they're given.
I think Dell's mistake is in trying to provide it all. They should take a leaf from the airline industry, where the equivalent of Dell and Gateway, I mean United and US Airways, can't deal with the complexity of customer relations, so they let Travelocity do it.
Today I got into a complicated situation: my wife made a reservation for me, using her credit card, through Travelocity, on a United flight operated by US Airways.
I needed a boarding pass and a way to enter my frequent flyer number. First I tried US Airways. Nope, not our problem. We're busy going out of business, so leave us alone. Then I tried United. Umm, no, we don't know anything, execpt that we can barely make ends meet. Next, Travelocity! Travelocity's heavily Spanish accented rep (I say that to emphasize that she may be in another country, like the Indian Dell reps) just solved the problem without bugging me too much. Presumably, Travelocity extracts part of the very small value of my ticket for this effectiveness.
What needs to happen in tech support is that the customer deals with the company providing the tech support, rather than the company putting together the hardware deals. Dell can put together hardware deals by efficiently bullying various providers. They should receive some value for that, but there should be a separate company I make the purchase from and call for tech support.
When I get on a plane marked US Airways with a United ticket in my hand, I still know that it's Travelocity I will turn to to decide my next flight and to handle any associated wrinkles. There should be an analogy in buying PCs and tech support.
Otherwise, just pay a premium for an Apple and kwitcher bitchin, because they CAN handle it all. They just charge more to handle it all. TANSTAAFL!
Okay, how do I put this? If you call tech support with or without RTFM, you deserve what you get.
Return that box to the store, you're not qualified to use it.
They also note that quality of support is dropping pretty much across the board, from all computer manufactuers. They note cost saving as an issue here.
And they take special note of offshoring affecting quality.
They advise consumers that if you are having trouble understanding or being understood on tech support phone calls, ask to speak to a manager.
So I'd say the problem has hit the mainstream.
However it's not exclusively an offshoring problem. It's a quality of service problem. Good support costs the seller money. As buyers we have the power to reward sellers who don't short us on support.
The could have done what JetBlue did, and outsource it to your house.
"Crap service is going to undermine their reputation."
Or computers are going to be so cheap that you throw them away when you have a problem. Just look at inkjets.
I managed a Computer Store for 3 years, and developed a reputation of being able to solve problems. This brought the customers in and kept them coming back, and telling friends that also came in. My business was selling parts, so I gave information away for free. This produced great sales and great rapport with the clients. Not for any reason other than the solutions were explained, the language was without accent(other than a Southern Drawl), and the recommended solutions WORKED. It increased sales because the clients understood that any problems would be resolved Fairly.
I left that position to work for a Software Company as the Technical Support Manager. This is when Problems became " Issues " and my team of techs also had to make Sales Calls, and after a time were instructed to SELL more than Fix. Time on the phone was rated, solutions were dropped down to quick fixes to get them off the line and get to the next person. Towards the end of my tenure a 900 help line was implemented, and the company went to EMAIL or 900 calls ONLY. They never understood why Technical Support costs them money, and couldn't MAKE money. No matter how many times I tried to explain that SUPPORT should be given freely, as the clients have already PAID for the product (At least for the version they bought). Soon it broke down to releases being rushed (almost a year before they were even ready) because the stock holders wanted to cash out. The Product and the company later went under, in part due to the Internet boom ("Everything on the Net Should be FREE!!") and partially due to no support being given to ANY product without a signed and paid contract.
Technical Support taught me more about human nature than I cared to know. It also taught me that when someone BUYS something, they should be able to call the manufacturer and get support when the product fails. These days it seems that it is easier and cheaper to just replace the product (meaning spending money for a replacement) Rather than fight through the Technical Support nightmare (Language barriers DO affect SALES. ) or the non-solutions provided because the person on the other end of the phone has no clue what it is you are talking about.
When I buy a car or a major appliance, and there is a recall or a problem, I take it back to the dealer where I purchased it to get it repaired. If I have a question on how something on that vehicle or appliance I call that same dealer. They sold it, they shoudl REPRESENT it, at least if they want me to buy from them again. I consider any purchase over $100 a MAJOR purchase. I shouldn't have to go through a translator to get an issue resolved. I shouldn't be talking to Hamir in India when I bought the product downtown at Sears or Best Buy. I should and EXPECT to get the problem solved ASAP rather than say "Oh, thats just how it works, and I have to live with it".
Computers are the ONLY industry where being treated properly (sure, its because of my ignorance I am asking a QUESTION) and with respect to being a CUSTOMER is not required. It has been this way for Years and is only getting worse. Companies in the Industry don't feel they OWE the customer anything, because we have become a Nation/World of consumers. THX1138 anyone? Its turned into a "Brave New World".
You keep going until you die..."Me".
Wish I'd seen this article earlier to make some important observations. Please mod this up if you think appropriate. As an Indian -- I can categorically assert that Indians are simply not cut out for call-center and tech-support type jobs. This is totally politically incorrect, some idiots might even ascribe this as a racist troll post -- but the education system and religious customs in India permit and encourage ABSTRACT thought and behavior. Routine, repetitive tasks go TOTALLY against the grain of the Indian personality (in general.) An Indian taking tech-support calls will simply get bored out of his mind and won't do the freaking job properly (I mean who could under the circumstances.) I suggest that only programming, and design jobs that require a higher level of abstract thought be off-shored. Send the mundane jobs elsewhere. Granted this won't be popular in India where sheer number of jobs are needed; so I'm only speaking from the corporate standpoint. Peace out.
parent:
"As is, we're all at the mercy of the horde of vindictive idiots who insist that nothing can possibly be wrong with [insert product here] because it was working yesterday. Of course it was working yesterday; if it hadn't been working yesterday they'd have called in YESTERDAY. What changed? It broke! What's so hard to understand about this?"
What broke? I just spent all day tuesday troubleshooting a Cisco 1700 router. The client's office was mysteriously lacking an internet connection. We phoned the T1 provider, and they assured us, twice, that from their end everything looked alright. The router wasn't their equipment though, so we had to take care of that ourself. I now wish I stuck to my CCNA courses in school... anyways, after a 6 hour crash course in IOS and much communication with several people who all had similar thick accents, we phoned the ISP again and demanded that they send a tech with a laptop and connect to the internet. We had poked around on that router all day, and I knew that nothing should be wrong with it... the startup configuration was the same as the previous running configuration. It should have established a connection almost immediately. But noooo.... It's obviously messed up and broken because our ISP hasn't changed anything without telling us... they'd never do that.
Only they did. And as a result we wasted a whole day not fixing a problem that should not have existed in the first place. Why the hell a certain something (I still don't know what) was changed without our client being notified is beyond me, but as soon as we demanded that the tech be sent to verify that their gear was working from our end, they suddenly found a problem and fixed it in a matter of 2 minutes. I was, still am, and for many years will be disgusted by this.
Ok, I've seen two replies that imply that service jobs don't add value.
Is this really true?
Law and medicine are service jobs, aren't they?
As is transportation and education.
And software development, imo. I'm not completely convinced that producing configurations of bits counts as manufacturing (but I suppose I could be).
Hmmm...
John.
When ever you get a support rep on the line, in the middle of talking with them, ask them what time it is, if you catch them off guard normally they will blurt out what time is on their clock, computer, terminal what ever.
Most places tell their support people never answer this question, or have their clocks set to US time, but in just about every situation I have tired this in, it has worked (works with live support online etc..)
TruePunk | Games
The second drive they received was identical to the first drive they received.
Now, not _all_ of this time was spent talking to someone in India. Only about 2/3 of it was.
Even so, small businesses are in no better shape to tolerate this crap than a Fortune 500 company -- and they _did_ have a business support number.
Seastead this.
Are the coders supposed to talk with you directly?
what else is new.
there are a lot of new/non english speakers in support, always have been, even when the terrible english speaker is from an english speaking country.
Between the mumblers and the bling worshippers, I can barely understand half the people I talk to. I have found that some people that are obviously from another country are more understandable than native "english" speakers. At least they TRY to pronounce the words.
I saw a show on Tech TV where they showed how the people in India get the job, and what training they go through. It's basicly cultural racism in their training. They are only allowed to speak in English when they are on the floor. They are expected to learn about American sports and cultural references. It's like "How to fake American 101" but it's the fact that they try to educate the 'Indian'ness' out of them that scares me. And not being able to speak thier native language at work for fear of reprisal. In the US and in Australia, the children of native people were kidnapped by the government and put into schools to 'Americanize or Australianize' them. They were forced to talk dress and act like a white, and they were beaten like dogs if caught speaking in their native tongue. It was terrible and a common practice through the 1950's.
"Calculated crap management is what makes IT a science."
Well I guess that answers the question. Whatever happen to Norton?
Sir, we need to shut off the computer.
Good, now we need to unplug all of the wires from the machine.
very good. now wee need to open the case and unplug the widget x
very good, now turn on the machine.
Sorry, nothing happens
did you press the power button sir?
Etc for 5 or 10 minutes.
Notice that the script did not require re-plugging in the power cable, and that the "tech" did not pick up on this. Also note that the "tech" will likely get reprimanded for deviating from the script.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I do tech support for an industry-leading (isn't everything these days?) Windows retail product.
The basic problem with Support is: it's where the buck stops. Stops being paid that is...
When all you have access to is some third parties support number or email address that's where you direct all your problems no matter what their root cause.
Your average home user has a two or three year old, un-updated, Windows install with several different products in there that maybe don't get along too well created by several different companies who don't know or paticularly care about each other. Run Adaware for 'em and you get 200 to 500 hits, etc. Basically within a couple years most customers own a Mess.
Now, when something goes wrong with The Mess, could be anything, they call Tech Support for the last company they bought something from that provides Support and is actually available to them (unlike MS for the most part).
So now guess what, some third party Support Desk now has responsibility for The Mess that was created essentially by MS programming, marketing, and other business practices and the Customers lack of computer knowledge.
Legit costs which should have been borne in the first place by MS (build it right) and the Customer (make an effort and learn something) have been successfully pushed down by them to some vendors Support Desk and anyone is surprised they don't want to pay big bucks to staff it?
See what would happen if Support were great? Everyone upstream would do even less about software quality than they do now, problems would all just flow down to Support where they'd be magically eliminated.
Look, poor Support is just how the last guy into The Mess turns around and says "get f-ed, I ain't payin" to everyone else up the chain all the way back to Mr. Bill.
Expect this to continue because it's a systemic problem.
Some people, like me, have PCs because they /need/ a PC over an Apple for various reasons. The software I use won't run on an Apple. Don't be so quick to assume that everyone would be better off with a Mac, or that the only reason Random Person doesn't have one is because he's ignorant/uninformed/lazy.
Then again, the only time I ever call tech support is to find out if my DSL is down, and my husband and I build our computers, so we don't have to worry about bad tech support either way.
http://angel.merseine.nu - Stuff for the poet, diva, geek, romantic and angel in all of us.
Sanskrit/Hindi/etc are all Indo-European languages.
Sanskrit is officially "proto-Indo-Aryan"
(indo==india) and English itself is descended from
old/high german+latin which comes from the same
tree as proto-indo-aryan.
I've had several bad experiences with off-shore tech support recently in which the support people have actually lied to me in an effort to get me off the phone. I can only assume that they get paid based on call volume, and want to pack as many calls as possible into as short a time as possible.
It rests in Bill's lap:
1 - made windows OS the way it is (unstable)
2 - sold it cheaper than Apple (you pay more for Apple including its relative stability and better support)
3 - dosn't do his own support, at a consumer level it's mostly left up to other third parties who get caught in the overall Windows mess of the 3 V's: multiple vendors, versions, viruses while attempting to support their own small slice of the wintel product
You will not be escalated. You will be passed among 6 different peers who "can't help you" and will attempt to pass you to another department. I have been passed around to people who will say they are passing me to someone else and the extension they pass me to tells me, "The number you dialed is invalid. Goodbye." *click*
You're right, tech support is hard. I'm working my second tech support job right now and it's taken a bit to get used to. But, the point of this article is that adding a language barrier to the problem is completely unnecessary. Don't trick yourself into believing that the reason why this language barrier is there is anything other than because the company only cares about the bottom line, not the customers.
From the article:
Orderered after 4 on thursday, battery was on the porch when I got home. Could not believe it.
Dis me for paying $300 over the cost of a comparably sized and priced Acer if you want.
Was the battery fully-charged? I would shutter to think one of those gay technical support persons at Apple asked their local iGay community to order its manwhore tranny to walk onto my porch and "eject" their battery direct from their iBook onto my doormat. Was the battery even in a box with the seal of a postal delivery company? *shudders*
I agree, and have also experienced the same where somebody with a bachelors in CIS, A+ with several other certs had to be taught how to slave an IDE HD. Certs & Degrees (Maybe not a PhD) shows memorizing skills only and speak nothing of the ability to apply what is known.
These fancy pieces of paper are no benchmark, all they show is somebody is able to memorize things in books. Great for the people that can afford the books and/or classes in addition to the tests, bad for anybody that assigns the slightest value to them. I can't count the number of times I have had to explain basic IT principles to somebody with an alphabet after their name in a position where they should know advanced principles like the back of their hand. Want alternate solutions, how about a standardized test based on real world application of knowledge and experience to show how much you shine. Applying for a job: Complete a lab if your resume shows the needed experience and earn an interview. Fancy pieces of paper should at the most get you a shot at the test lab to show how all your book memorizing means shit in the real world.
Support is only as good as the company wants it to be. This includes: payscale, filtering applicants, training, post training support, structure of tier system and quality of each higher tier, language and communication skills, and quality tools available. If a company shows you what they think of their customers by continuing to provide horrible support due to offshoring or ignorance, speak with your wallet. Speak in groups, organize and show a presence to be taken seriously. A rally that becomes statewide with the banner "Dell Sucks: Build your own! Free workshops!" just might start to get attention.
"It's spelled P h r a n k"
OR
ffrank
frankk
phrankk
etc etc etc etc
User: I can't get this stupid computer to work!!!!!!
Nick Burns: Ya, cuz it's the computer that's stupid, right?
-D
Support on software is SolidWorks, but then I pay nearly $2000/yr for upgrades and phone support...out of Utah, in my case. So I cancelled my ELink service & asked to release the Elink hold on my Ph# and that resulted in "That will take 7-10 business days." which saved me $20/month.
And there you have it.
Everybody wants tech support, but nobody wants to pay for it.
Let's say that, instead of a minimum-wage script-reading monkey, you get a really competent network admin to answer calls. Also keep in mind that phone support is not a very fun job to do, and that said network admin may demand more money to do support, and that phone support, being a customer-facing job, has requirements on accent and behavior that being a regular network admin may not.
Let's suppose that this network admin makes, say, $50K/year, which, for a competent troubleshooter, is certainly not very generous. There are ~250 working days in the year, ignoring holidays and vacation and sick leave and the like. That means that our network admin is making $200/day. Given an eight-hour day, that's $25/hour.
Now, let's assume that this guy works *constantly* every minute of his day, doesn't have a lunch break or anything, never fails to close a ticket in a single call, and has to escalate anything or the like. Let's assume that he maintains a call average of only 15 minutes.
That means that this guy, not counting management overhead, the guy's benefits, the infrastructure (A/C, the phone line, the costs of the building he's sitting in, etc) run $6 per call. I don't work at an ISP (I suspect some Slashdotters can provide better numbers than I can), but I'm guessing that on $20/mo service, that call has pretty much blown all profits for the month, even with all our generous assumptions.
Now, sure, Earthlink could provide really great tech support. But they'd have to charge $30/mo instead of $20/mo to pay for the tech support. And they'll lose out to their competitors.
I have a friend who just had his mother call him twice -- first that she couldn't get online, second that the wireless hub was malfunctioning, and third that she had called someone else and he had figured out that she had unplugged the wireless hub. She's been calling just about every other day with technical problems.
So people want this good, free tech support, but they simply do not want to pay for it. Expert knowledge simply is not cheap -- most people that really understand a system can get a more comfortable job than tech support.
Really, the only tech support I've ever thought even remotely decent is the MSDN Universal support -- which costs even more than your Solidworks package does.
Retail figured this out a long time ago. The guy at the appliance store doesn't know how to fix any problems you have -- he can take any returns you have, but that's about it. Problem? Just return the thing.
I'd like to see more services have "no support" options, or at least "charge per call" support, so that I don't have to subsidize others. I'd strongly prefer web pages with common problems than to pay to have some guy waiting for me to maybe call.
May we never see th
Experts are not likely going to be on the helpdesk. I know helpdesk workers often consider themselves experts, but come on.
The funny thing is that people expect to have an serious domain expert on the other end of the line at their beck and call (and no $2/minute charges or anything like that) when they call up for tech support for a service that they pay a lousy $20/month on. Or maybe on a $500 computer with essentially no profit margin. You can't do it. It's just non-economical. The only sane way to deal with this is to try to make products that are as idiot-proof as possible so that people never call tech support.
Frankly, I'd like to see a "zero tech support" sticker, so that I could buy only ZTS products, so that I don't have to subsidize people that need tech support. It's just more of my money down the tube. Have a good web site with the same data that you'd feed your tech support people, and I'll be happy.
May we never see th
I work as a Supervisor for the M$ ISP. ... not all call centers are in India). /. usually forget how many people is in front of a computer these days. .... and they were not able to do it. So I'm not programming on a mainframe, I'm just trying to create a simple DUN. ... but would any of you guys would like to teach a 84 years old lady the whole concept of "drag and drop" over the phone for 2 dollars an hour?
I'm from Argentina (yeap
I can see that "loosing" jobs over seas can sound really bad. But let me give you my 2 cents...
The people reading
I've tried to get customer to press 3 keys at the same time (Ctrl + Shift + F12) for over 20 minutes
Sure, we are doing IT work
I though so...
These are actual calls from the US to an offshore call center. TECH: I need you to right click on My Computer icon. Cust: yes, I click. TECH: then you'll have to select Properties Cust: no, I don't see properties. TECH: sir, you should have seen the menu pop out and you'd find properties at the bottom part of the box Cust: no, no menu. i click on icon, yes? TECH: No sir, I need you to right click on the icon. Cust: yes, I click, right? I click. program opens, no properties. - - - - - - - Cust: I'm just wondering what these shiny circle thingies are. TECH: Sir, those are compact discs and you'll need them to install a few programs in your computer. I'll be guiding you through the installation process, now I need you to place that on the CD drive. Cust: I don't know where it is. (TECH explains how to locate the drive) ...yes, that's the one which appears like a platform with a hole in the middle.
Cust: oh, you mean the mug holder?
Another issue with these over seas help desk deals that no one ever mentions is that once the american companies provide access to their customer databases to all the employees in foreign countries, your personal information is now available for missuse in a foreign land and at this point there is nothing you can do to stop it. Think of it any service you pay for ships their customer care over to india and all your billing info is there for the taking and you don't even know it. There are currently some lawmakers talking about putting some safety checks in place but at this point there are no such checks to make sure its ok with you that your personal/billing information is shared with foreign nationals.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
>"USA Today is reporting on the growing concern of the language barrier" "USA Today is reporting on growing rumors that, in response to tech support issues, Microsoft is developing BableFish XP. To use it, simiply stick it in your ear and press ctrl-alt-delete."
--A witty sig proves nothing.--
Some people, like me, have PCs because they /need/ a PC over an Apple for various reasons. The software I use won't run on an Apple.
Sorry, but my experience is that Apple is a more stable, friendly and intuitive system (not to mention much more secure) than Windows is or ever will be. Noobs, especially non-geek, artsy fartsy or tech but non-geek (biogeek or nano/engineering geek) pick up OSX in seconds, compared to Windows' hours/days/never. It may just be that you actually DO get what you pay for. This is why Windows is crap, because most Windows users don't demand more from Microsoft and believe it is free with the computer.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
Also, DEMAND that the software you /need/ be made to run on Mac/Linux and let the software publisher know you will otherwise take your business elsewhere. Additionally, MAC OSX is unique, since you can run Windows and Linux on the same box, so you COULD run your software you /need/ on a Mac and enjoy a more stable and secure and joyful/clueful platform while reaping the benefits of Apple's GREAT tech support.
Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
There is no air conditioning in the kitchen, :)
and that's why offices are preferred to kitchens,
but i'm sure you knew that
What you could get for a quarter million in South Dakota!!
----- Question authority, but not ours. Hate the man, but we're not him.
The thing that really gets me is that most people can generally blame themselves for this problem. If you put two near-identical computers side-by-side, with the only difference being that one costs $300 more but includes much better after-sales support, the vast majority people will buy the cheaper PC every time.
Consumer price pressure has pushed base model prices down to the $500 mark. Microsoft Windows sucks up 20% of that right off the bat. The hardware is already near zero margin. The only place left to cut cost is in services.
I work for an IT services company in the small business sector. We use Dell a lot, but we always strongly recommend the OptiPlex models over the Dimension models. Customers always complain that the OptiPlex costs significantly more then the Dimension does. The first time they call tech support, they find out why. Everyone who has overrode our recommendation and gone with a Dimension has lived to regret it. Some even learn from the experience.
Penny wise, pound foolish.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.