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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.'"
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+++========--------
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
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.
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.
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.
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"
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".
Uhhh, On Monday, I tried my best to speak with as little slang, and as little of an accent as I could, and I still couldn't make myself clear to Ghumpta in New Delhi, because that's where Dell happened to have moved their support to. It too me having to make Ghumpta repeat himself six times in order to make heads and tails of what he was trying to tell me.
It also took Herculean efforts on my part not to blow up on his sorry ass when he told me something that was clearly a lie.
Comanpies are seeing a fall in profits and interests in their products? Good! Put localized support that can speak basically the same language, instead of looking for the cheapest way to piss off your customer base.
"The truth points to itself." - Kosh, Babylon5
The job of tech support is to get the customer off the phone in the shortest period of time. The ones providing tech support bill based on number of calls.
How many call centers track the resolution of the issues and customer satisfaction? I would guess it's a very small percentage. Customer satisfaction is the antithesis of the purpose the tech support is there to provide. The reason that good customer service is so hard to find is that people who convince the customer all is lost and they should give up in 2 minutes are promoted. On the other hand, the person who can solve most problems, but has a 10 minute average call time will be reprimanded by management for not handling their share of calls.
Customer service is an expense to the company providing it. When the company already has your money, what is the incentive to spend more of their money on providing better service? Very few companies care about providing good service. They just have to provide a level of service that's not noticeably worse than the competition.
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 completely concur. Right now I do work as a hourly computer consultant (or "tech support for hire" as I like to call it) and I charge full hourly rate for all time on the phone to the useless tech support people, which only really happens with Internet stuff generally, as I generally build all the machines my clients use myself.
We do no advertising, and even then we have more work than we can handle sometimes, just through word of mouth. Personally, I hope computer stuff gets more and more compliacted and touchy, because that means more money for me. Plumbers make a damn good living, and I don't see why I don't stand to do much the same, seeing as the plumbing I work on is way more complex and far more prone to break down.
so there you were, thinking yourself really tough, making fun of some poor sod in an out-source callcenter who never quite got the training from the not-to-be-named company to really do the job well, who can do absolutely nothing but follow a couple of silly script lines and who gets paid shit to swallow yours? bravo!
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
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!
While I agree that the language barrier can only hurt tech support, I think people have forgotten how bad it was even when it was onshore. The salaries were still pretty low and the skill level of the support people reflected that. Think about it, tech support horror stories have been around much longer than the off-shoring trend. The fact that they're in India now just adds insult to injury.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
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?
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.
Believe me, you'll be happy you did, and not because there are any more tech jobs outside of California than in (though there may be because companies are leaving CA for the same reason people do). Instead, it will simply be because you can actually afford to live on the same (or lesser) pay. At least, as long as you don't move to New York or somewhere with a similarly high cost of living.
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.
This is simply because those that own a home either bought at a lower price than is currently demanded, or can actually afford a home at current prices. Even those with homes are often taking out 2nds on their home to live their lives and take their vacations.
Before I left California the paper had a front-page story on a Habitat for Humanity house that was selling for $250K to a qualified low-income buyer, and housing prices have continued to go up since then. For $250K in some areas around here (Hampton Roads, VA) I can have a very nice house on a substantial piece of land, or a nice house on a smaller piece of land (depending on how close I want to be to work, basically; and that smaller piece of land is bigger than anything in a CA suburb).
-PainKilleR-[CE]
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.
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.
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.
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
I don't have any problem with any person in the world providing the support. I don't care what country they're from, really. But I do expect two things from them:
1. They should be proficient in the basic responsibilities of their job.
2. They should be understandable.
Unfortunately, finding a support rep that meets even one of those qualifications seems to be quite the accomplishment for most companies.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
so there you were, thinking yourself really tough, making fun of some poor sod in an out-source callcenter who never quite got the training from the not-to-be-named company to really do the job well, who can do absolutely nothing but follow a couple of silly script lines and who gets paid shit to swallow yours? bravo!
Bravo yourself! Not in the sarcastic context either. I am so glad that someone brought this up. Call centers are crap. Tech support is hard work, espicially over the phone, and espicially considering these are entry level tech jobs. How many people have worked a Tier 1 phone support job and had a fair-good understanding of correct T-shooting techniques of computers.
Now, I am a unix admin. At one time not too many years ago, I was that asshole on Tier-1 support that knew enough about customer service to keep you from hating the company, but not nearly enough about your computer to keep you hating me. Please people, these are just people that need to keep a job, just like anyone else. Yes, you know more than them, big fucking deal. There are plenty of people out there that know more than you. That and there are plenty of people that could turn your body into pulpy mass, but hopefully they don't. There are laws against physically abusing someone, but none to protect from mental abuse. This job is hard enough, let them and thier shoddy training be, ask to be esecalated, chances are you can and will be.
just my $.02
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank