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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.'"
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
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'll tell you what:
I work for a large corporation and we made a big deal out of the language barrier and complete ineptitude of some of the people on the other end of the phone. Now, we've renewed all of our support and paid extra for the premium level of service. HP/Compaq's call center is in Canada somewhere and IBM's call center actually announces itself on the phone menu:
You're call is now being routed to our support center in Atlanta, Georgia.
If enough consumers made a stink about it, tech support wouldn't be in India for them. Come to think of it, if one of the big PC vendors wanted to get a leg up on the competition, they could advertise "English speaking tech support" as the number one feature of their PCs. They'd be sold out in no time.
Life is the leading cause of death in America.
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.
"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.
I am in Pompey, England. I regularly deal with people in Montreal CA and East Hartford USA - big problem - with my English accent and the speed I speak, they just can't understand me - no matter how I try to speak.
The usual fix normally ends up as an E-Mail.
this article for those folks who think that people are "stealing" or "taking" jobs away from Americans?
I think you are understating the differences in regional dialects and accents.
I live in Ireland a reletivly small country and I have sometimes have difficulty understanding people from different regions!
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"
Its gotten so bad that I recommend people purchase generic computers rather than suffer the abuse of major name brand computers.
Seastead this.
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.
In the uk (for me at least) its around £30-40 per home machine.
That includes cleaning off all the nastiness, installing either a popup stopper or firefox etc.
Not bad really, getting a machine back up and running in under an hour, having a brew and a chat to the users. Its just a bonus to be paid for doing what I would do anyway.
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.
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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 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.
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.
Peculiarly enough, I've had the same experience with Non-Indian (read: American) tech support as well.
Besides being inexperienced, and unable to communicate very clearly, they're also largely obnoxious and condescending, something which I am yet to see from an Indian centre.
I don't know why, but I get this feeling that a large amount of tech support isn't bad because of it's ethnic background, but more because tech support workers are usually not trained much, except for a few days of "orientation" (which basically comes down to how to report, document and bill your calls. Not about the products you're supporting)
The kind of support I sometimes look for can only be given by the developers, but they wouldn't be developers if they spend their time answering calls, would they? Invariably, the people who do support are not those who develop their products, and this will remain. It's all fine and dandy to spew forth large dollops of righteous indignation at every mention of a lost job, but the facts might not (in fact, do not) corroborate what you choose to say.
This is not a troll, This is just information from my experience. Take it as you see fit.
The ones providing tech support bill based on number of calls.
if the company that hires the callcenter chooses this kind of contract, then yes, that's what yóu're gonna get. You get what you pay for and stuff. I know for a fact that when I worked at an out-source callcenter that one of our customers who DID care about service levels paid by the minute, not by the call. They also had people checking the service levels on a daily basis, so things don't always work this way. In fact, working callcenter in a NUTS company right now, our level of service is pretty much the biggest difference there is between the various competitors on the market, so there's a very big emphasis on keeping the customer happy.People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
It should be noted that such a problem is not inherent to tech support centers overseas. A representative from Vermont may have just as much trouble understanding a caller from South Carolina as the representative in India. Thus this issue does not do much to support the racist/ethnocentric view that no one in California should go unemployed while people in India have work.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
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.
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.
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Why is it specifically a `curse' that Americans lose jobs? Those jobs mean people in a much poorer country can finally make a living.
It's a curse for anybody to lose a job.
I certainly agree that the pollution and exploitation represent the worst end of the spectrum.
The fundamental problem with all outsourcing though happens when the country exporting the labor is still not able to develop the local economy. Example, people in india get good jobs programming or doing tech support for U.S. companies. These workers now want the various trappings of geek life and can now afford them. So, they buy all of that from Asia and the U.S. Oops, there goes the local economy. At the same time, their pay has no hope of scaling to the point where those goods have the same real cost to them as they do in the U.S. since as soon as their pay gets to that point, the outsourcing will shift somewhere else, leaving a country full of highly skilled workers who can't find work.
If India really wants to build it's economy on tech, local companies will need to start producing tech with the costs and prices scaled to the local economy. Anything else is just ba dotcom style bubble that is sure to burst just when things start looking really good.
All that said, that doesn't mean the outsourcing is actually BAD for India, it COULD provide the tempory boost needed to bootstrap the local economy. Of course, as soon as that process starts, U.S. corps will try to pull a quick switch and outsource elsewhere before they accidentally fund the company that will later eat their lunch.
Disclaimer: Unrelated ramble about (English) Tech Support
A few months ago I changed DSL providers. I went through the trouble of getting a new modem, as the other was ISP-branded and lacked in some of the required features.
I was supposed to be sent instructions about the new modem, but never was. I download the manual (having to download things related to setting up your internet connection... funny how that works) and go through the steps.
Blink, blink, bliiink~ sync fails.
I try a few alterations to the settings, all of which fail, and call up tech support. Maybe the line isn't active yet? Well, they tell me it is, and walk me through setting up the modem.
The fun part is how I was told to do it. First, set your box to your external IP. Next, try to access the modem's internal IP..
It was then that I gave up the idea of getting anything useful out of them. The modem only allows connections from IPs on it's own subnet, by default.
As it turns out, though, for this particular modem, you have to reset it for certain changes to take effect. Most setting don't need the reset, but it turns out this one did. To make it better, I only found this out from the an obscure PDF the next day. Tech never mentioned it at all. Ah well...
"An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program."
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.
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.
I just don't understand why companies are hiring people with certificates from vendors instead of people with computer science degrees from universities.
I do software development, *NIX administration and Oracle development and administration for my company. I just don't understand how the MCSE net admins can do their jobs without knowing how to write simple programs and without basic computer knowledge that the C.S. grads have. As a result, the MCSE's typically have poor troubleshooting skills and as a result, a lot of the Windows servers on our network have constant problems and outages. It's nearly impossible for me to get them to remedy problems with DNS zones because they don't understand DNS, they only understand what buttons to click on their GUI to do the basics. What's worse is that management just accepts these problems as normal.
Bzzzt. Completely wrong. What happened here is that volunteers (whose name I won't mention) SUED the parent company and won because they were working more than they should have for "free". Since then, the volunteer programs of nearly every large MMORPG have been shut down because it's cheaper to pay for crappy help than it is to litigate against volunteers who suddenly want to be paid. Good try though.
I wish you could get modded up some more.
Read CIO magazine, and they were all about offshoring for the longest time, even with no numbers. All the CIOs they interview are doing it, "just so they can have an answer for the CEO/CFO when he asks." The sad thing is, most of these people have been through the first outsourcing/insourcing craze, and just don't have the sack to tell their bosses that outsourcing/offshoring costs triple what you think it will in hidden costs and lost opportunities.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
It's natural to see techsupport folks are always the one complaining about the offshoring since they are the most vocal.
Developers and hardcore engineers typically don't talk as much. As a result management will be happy to cash out on the quiet group. Off shoring them positions else where. I am not saying there is no good developers offshore, I am just saying developers are the easiet social target for management to pick on. Human Resource 101.
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.