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Tech Support Businesses on the Rise
prostoalex writes "People are relying on more technology that ever before, and tech support geek squads are on the rise, media reports. The USA Today article says Best Buy has hired 1,500 more technicians for its Geek Squad and CompUSA currently keeps its tech support ranks at 12,000. The article from Digital Connect magazine talks about Geeks On Call, a nationwide tech support franchise, which has more than 300 shops in 20 states. The USA Today article states the profit margins for the tech support teams generally run within 30%, while the Digital Connect magazine gives an estimate on prices charged to achieve the margins: "An initial diagnostics call, for example, could run $99. Cleanup jobs usually run one to two hours, and some franchisees say they charge between $149 and $165 for one hour and $265 to $275 for two hours.""
So, if you think it's going to take 3 hours to fix, just go out and buy a new computer.
Pulp Audio Weekly - Geek News and Reviews
..because the cup-holder on my computer will no longer come out. Good to know that help is available.
air and light and time and space
So this means they will have antoher 1,500 people whose only function is to tell you they have to send your laptop aways for 2 weeks to do a 15 minute harddrive swap???
Madre de Dios! Es El Pollo Diablo! -- Captain Blondebeard
Do yourself a favor and track down the Geek Squads price list. Holy Crap am I in the wrong business (law).
$29.00 to install RAM? Whats that take 5 mins? 60/5= 12, 12 x $29 = $348 an hour. Where do I sign up?
I feel bad for the roaming geeks like Best Buy's Geek Squad.
having to deal with people on the phone is tough. but when you have to go into their homes, that's scary. You lose the safe seperation from people's weirdness.
Although, I always told the joke that people would be a whole lot nicer if they saw me in person. it's easy to be an asshoel to a voice on the phone. But in person, it's a little harder.
Pretty Pictures!
Spyware attacks are on the rise.
Just as the War on Some Drugs can never be ended because it would "put too many people out of work", so do those opposing free minds and free markets viciously fight against any cracks in the Microsoft monocultural dike. After all, think of those poor buggy whip^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htech support workers. How can they expect to feed their children in the face of secure, stable and reliable systems? You free software people, why do you hate children and America?
Fuck Slashdot
The most hated words on a tech support phone call.. EVER. These same people are going to be very dissappointed when they show up - charge $90 bucks - just to get referred.
Which is what leads to people spend 300 or 400 bucks on an entirely new machine...
/. posts say this, but many many people have computers worth more than $300-400, if you're using that kind of low-end machine, you generally can't afford this kind of tech support anyways.
Half the
Add in the cost of re-installing all your programs, the cost of lost data, and the trouble of buying a new PC, and you're looking at over $1000 average. Add in the higher-value PCs or laptops, and you've got a significant investment.
This is why, in spite of low hardware costs, tech support is still going strong.
I know for a fact that one of the national big box stores mentioned doesn't have *any* of the thousands of on-site techs in their employment. They subcontract out everything to ComputerRepair.com, which is an interesting business idea in itself. I wrote a tech's perspective review of ComputerRepair.com here.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
In a previous life, the company I worked for sold both hardware and consulting services. The margin on hardware & shrink-wrapped software was about 3%. The margin on consulting, with the bloated managment overhead and massive cross-country travel costs was still over 30%.
Who would you rather compete against: Dell & eBay or Best Buy's repair desk?
This is no dofferent than with any other industry in the US. Skilled labor is expensive!
-MrLogic
Apparently that is the future economy of this country. We dont make anything any longer, so all that is left is 'services'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So before we jump on the "just buy a new computer" bandwagon, think about the time and hassle of moving that which makes your computer your computer, your DATA, to that new computer and transferring all of your settings, preferences, bookmarks, etc. Incorporate that time into the overall expense and you'll see that it's not such a great deal to just buy up that new emachines or dell or whatever...
Then factor in the SPOUSE HASSLE FACTOR...God forbid you move some file of your spouses from the old computer to the new one and she can't find it, or things look different on the new computer, etc...
How much does that cost vs. just fixing the problems with your current computer, let alone the environmental cost of recycling or disposing of the old computer. I know that nobody has ever thrown one of those into the dumpster...
Ocean is land, covered with water.
It may take 3 hours of hands-on time to fix a single computer, but five computers can usually be fixed in that same three hours. Much of the "fixing" time is just waiting for disks to be scanned for malware and for installs to run. "Windows is saving your settings" (Ugh.)
The real issue is support costs versus training costs. Businesses that pay $250/hour for someone to "fix their computers" (which is to say, clean up Windows errors) should be paying $100/hour for someone to train their people on how to avoid these problems.
It's not hard to avoid viruses and malware. You switch to a non-IE browser and don't run programs whose originator you don't know. That doesn't take too much training time, but it saves a timeclock full of support time if people practice those things.
Combined with some AV tool (and in my experience it doesn't matter which one), you're generally on target for hassle-free computer use.
sigs, as if you care.
I do this type of on-site work and this is the single most common response I get when a customer is trying to talk me down on price, or complain about the cost of his/her repair.
There's an element of truth to it, but generally, it's not nearly as good a solution as it appears.
For starters, most service calls end up being at least partially due to virii and spyware. If the customer buys a new machine, how long do you think it will take him/her to get it just as infected as the previous system was - if he/she does the same types of things he/she did before?
I've actually had customers do this! They ordered a new Dell or bought a new HP at Best Buy rather than "waste money fixing this 4 year old machine" - only to end up calling me 2 months later, asking me to clean up *both* computers.
You can hire a decent whore for that much. And, yes, I speak from experience.
I do this kind of tech support work, but not as a primary source of business. The regular personal customers I do have running Windows I early and often tell them about Firefox and AdAware, and other such things, but approximately half of them regularly ignore my constant warnings about Internet Explorer. There are a couple customers I used to regularly visit and clean spyware off their computers because they couldn't be bothered with remembering not to use IE or run their spyware scanner. Most of the business customers catch on fairly quick, as my time in there not improving their systems is a noticable financial drain on their bottom line (especially since mose of my clients are small, 1-5 person businesses).
Interstingly enough, about a quarter of the people I've dealt with on in-home jobs have bought Macs (on my recommendation, most of our business clients are Mac-only shops) and are a lot happier with it. Their kids tend to be pissed off because this or that P2P app doesn't run on MacOS, or they can't play this or that game, but generally the parents don't care, because the computer doesn't get screwed up nearly as easily and kids are built to complain. That, and game consoles generally make up the difference.
Why are "geek squads" rising? Because the quality of telephone tech support has gone down the toilet. People just don't want to talk to someone in Sri Lanka that they can't understand and can't understand them. People don't want to have to walk thru a script of things they've already tried just to make the tech's computer happy.
People want someone who can look at the computer, know what's wrong, and fix it. They don't want to click on X, Y and Z then get Q and try to explain to the person on the other end of the line what they are seeing.
Simply put, to speak to tech support on the phone, you need to be somewhat tech savvy yourself. Then if you're a tech like me, it's frustrating to be led thru all the things you've already tried. ("I've already cleared the printer queue. I've reinstalled the driver. I've replaced the cable. For the fifteenth time, the printer's internal test page doesn't print when I use the front panel buttons!!!")
In business especially, it's not worth the time to spend hours on a tech support call when a phone call to the local computer geek results in same-day service with minimal loss of productivity. Instead of tying up an employee on the phone, that employee can be doing non-computer productive work, which just may pay for the tech's time.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I went to Best Buy once, looking for a static strap, ad one of the guys behind the counter went into the back room to talk to a technician, and came out with the reccomendation that I buy a "Wireless static strap" because "That's what everyone here uses."
Sounded a little too good to be true, so I looked it up, and found, unsurprisingly, that while people actually DO make wireless static straps, they are, in fact, completely useless. (they rely on the Corona effect, which would maybe be useful if you got, I don't know, struck by lightning, but not for static). Something nice to know before you get them to install your RAM.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
...and resinstall all of the programs that you have from the original factory disks that are carefully organized on your bookshelf, right? Oh, and somehow copy all of your docs and emails over to the new PC. Oh, and restore all of your settings, preferences, backgrounds, sounds. Sounds like a 10-minute job to me.
I hear tech support can help with all that. What a vicious cycle!
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lampposts...for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang
quickly figures out that the real place to make money is the corporate market and not the home market. With most companies, they aren't behind you with a stop watch to count your time. Also, you normally can get several hours of time in during one stop. You don't have to go all over hell's half acre to make your money. Sure, you can make money that way but it's too much work.
Also, going into people's houses all the time weirds me out. We quit doing that about 4 years ago.
I read an article about Geeks on Call and, while it's an interesting idea, I don't see that they are going to have much success in the corporate market. According to the article, the techs are not supposed to talk to any of their customers on the phone - every problem results in a service call. That might work with joe homeowner but a business that spends several $k a month on your service will expect phone support....
As our applications inevitably migrate from our computers to the network, the network literally becomes the computer.
This new supercomputer gets faster as bandwidth increases. A completely optical network means bandwidth would approach the speed of light. My computer could use your hardware as seamlessly as mine.
Meanwhile Ray Kurzweils predictions of $1000 of hardware with the processing power of a human brain arising within our lifetimes is also quite conceivable.
These factors, combined with Metcalfe's Law (The power of the network increases exponentially by the number of computers connected to it) all point to an emergent, distributed, networked, increasingly "intelligent" global nervous system.
And we've got front row seats :)
Thoughts on the Emergence of Computing Intelligence
just what I wanted to do was to go into some strangers house and work on their windoze computer.
where do I sign up.
How do you guys operate when you are doing tech support jobs for family, friends, or strangers? How much do you charge? Do you have written-down procedures for removing spyware, installing an OS, etc.? How do you advertise? What materials do you use? Do you back people's data up for them?
Just a thought related to this article.
More like profesional apologizers.
.. and it's not their fault.
Technicians -- especially the good ones -- are not going to do well at this
It's the fault of the companies who prohibit their engineers and support people from giving out good, useable, technical information anymore.
It's the fault of the manufacturers, who often don't know what's in their products because it's sub-contracted through 90 different companies.
It's the fault of the marketers, who claim that everything works 100%, perfectly, without-a-doubt, with one hand behind your back.
It's the fault of the customers who look at a $299.99 PC and think that all of their problems will go away and no new ones will appear with the signing of a check.
It's the fault of the hiring agents who pay a person with 30 years of technical experience the same as someone who read an A+ manual.
It's the fault of the big box stores who would desperately prefer to move merchandise rather than repair something.
And it's the fault of the buying public who believe you can have all three: high-quality, free quality technicians, and low-cost.
I just know it ain't Barry White's fault.
But, please, please, more spyware, more shoddy workmanship! Everyone at the trough! Dig in. Face first, please.
If Nalgene water bottles are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nalgene water bottles.
- Learn how to care for your PC
- Pay $$$ to have someone take care of your PC
- Don't get a PC
A PC for under $300? You can't get something for (next to) nothing.Currently bidding on sig
I do part-time tech support / trainign in my off time from my fulltime job, as I'm sure many /. readers also do.
Geek Squad et al do a wonderful job marketing their services, and BestBuy slaps a "Authorized for Geek Squad Installation" sticker on practically anything that can be used near a computer. They thereby get the Joe and Janes of the world to pay steep charges for simple installation of gizmos and peripherals, virus removal etc.
And it's quite simply: Brilliant
I have made my pricing significantly lower than Geek Squad (the only real, read:advertising, competitor in my city), but high enough that in 3 hours of work, I can make more than a full day at my full time job.
All this and I have a steady flow of new customers. People fear technology: just ask the lady I'm teaching to scan her photos in, write word documents, send email, and use the web. $55/hr to teach stuff I can do in my sleep, and they think it's a bargain!
Fact of the matter: it is a bargain, compared to a community college course, or having Geek Squad do a house call to upgrade / get rid of malware / etc.
A lot of people like the little guy, too and would rather pay an independant guy... clip-on tie and black and white Beetle or not.
I'm too lazy to enter a sig. Hey wait a second! You tricked me!
The deductibility of the expense of the car, isn't some magic that makes it free. It just means that, as with the cost of the phones and the paper and all the other stuff a businss uses, the dollars spent on those things are not profit, and thus are not taxed.
Don't bother to RTFA, it's basically a press release for Geek Squad :) I've been doing this type of work for 3+ years. I find that most customers are paying for the convenience factor. 2-3 hours billable to resolve the issue fast is far less costly to them than distracting themselves from their primary job for ?? hours or days to resolve it themselves. By analogy, I can do my own accounting, but paying my accountant 1 hour to do a project correctly is less expensive than taking me away from working 2-3 billable hours for my customers.
Does that have anything to do with how many Corona's it takes to reach the floor?
-- Chop
I have a friend of a friend who got hired there, you couldn't pay me to trust him to touch any computer I had to deal with. Geek Squad is overpriced and seems to have stupid hiring practices. A friend of mine applied there and didn't even get an interview but he's one of the best technicians I've ever met and has great customer service skills.
I do tech support professionally on a college campus and freelance for anyone recommended to me by friends. I hate freelancing because tech support crap is almost always boring and I already do it all day long, but it's hard to turn down extra income. I started out charging $20 an hour, now I'm up to $50 (for on-site calls). I always feel really guilty charging that much though (unless it's a nasty spyware infection). This one time I worked on this guys computer that had had the wireless card disabled - I literally just had to click "enable" and I was done. It took 5 minutes to drive to his house, 5 minutes to get situated with the computer booted up and all that, and then I was done. I told him because it took such a short amount of time I would only charge him $10, he was cool and joked that he pays the kid down the street more to mow his lawn and ended up paying me $30. I still felt bad - clearly I'm not cut out for this kind of work.
Right now I'm working on a PC in exchange for free food, mostly because it's a new customer and I know she is a good cook, but also because all I have to do is swap a CD-ROM drive and troubleshoot a Wacom tablet. I feel like an ass charging for simple things like that.
You have to be fucking kidding me. No, really. Think again: replaced software engineers who have tons of experience are forced to find themselves in basically level 1 tech suppor role. Travelling to customers' sites in a funny car is not what I consider to be a career. A marketing equivalent of Geek Squad is telling a VP of marketing department to work a a local Gap.
I agree that technical support is on the rise, but I would highly argue against making a career through an at-home service. What the fuck are you? A maid?. If you really want to make a good buck on support, try getting into B2B environments and work with integrators, high level support of enterprise software, etc. Help desk support is "help desk" no matter where it is located and how it is done.
If you have people skills and like technology, why not switch to pre-sales engineering? Pays better and you don't have to have "Geek" in the name of your company.
Ok, so where to begin? I work for GeekSquad as a Double Agent.(I do the In-Home Stuff) Obviously there are more desirable jobs out there, but givin my location I do pretty well. You can make fun of it, talk about how you feel that it's wrong to charge so much, pretend that no one needs it, but the truth is that demand is enormous. It's not like we are targeting these individuals, they come to us. All we do is offer this service based on lifestyle questions and then we let them decide. On top of that BestBuy is totally non-commission. We could care less if you buy it or not, on a personal level that is, so we don't rip people off. If it sounds too costly to you, or if you feel that it wouldn't be beneficial, then don't buy it. Simple. Now, lets compare GeekSquad to everything else. I have fixed thousands of computers. Our focus is to restore as little as possible. Time/cost is always a factor here though, especially when on-site. The customers time is very important in this decision too. Personally, I have yet to restore a single system on-site, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't. Thats with Hundreds of Service calls under my belt. Obviously each Agent will be different. It isn't a perfect world afterall. These agents are generally left as instore techs until weeded out. We charge a FlatRate. "It will Cost X amount. Would you like an agent to come out?" If im there for 10 hours the price will stay the same. Compare $159-229 to $50/h when your there for 10 hours. Obviously that doesn't happen very often, but that is how we handle it. Averagely each call is about 3 hours. Our goal is to be in and out asap but we will be there as long as it takes. Can the hourly people say that? Anyway... What im getting at is that GeekSquad offers the best solution. It's the struggling local people who will rip you off not Geeksquad. We have Branding, people know who we are! They come to us in such masses that sheer quantity outweighs trying to milk each individual Service Call. To top that, GeekSquad Agents do not receive the revenue but are PAID by the hour. An individual Agent is available 40 hours a week. Plus we are backed by an organization that isn't going away any time soon. Geeksquad is truely the best option for any consumer. Our mission is to take care of the customers needs, not to sell them things, for the sake of money, that they don't need. We call this Organic Growth. We grow through our existing Customer Base in this way. They will come back and see us again because they received a high-Quality level of service. People love that! Obviously, there will be some jaded consumers. It happens but the majority of shoppers @ BestBuy will have a much better experience then they would anywhere else. Lol, all that and I bet most people will never even read it. :P
...for charging people $35/hr to fix elementary problems. Until I read about places like Geek Squad who send you a cookie-cutter tech with only limited troubleshooting skills, yet charge $150/hr or more!
Nowawadays my guilt is gone. I can't vouch for other people, but _I_ know _I'm_ a good tech. I don't need to know much about your software or hardware to be of use. 15 years of experience with PCs and good critical thinking skills give me everything I need to solve my customers' problems in less time than the "pros," and usually with better results. Even with my 1 hour minimum, I'm still saving Grandma 300% over what one of these places would charge her, and I'm doing a better job than them to boot.
Realize that you have an immense body of context and experience, which lets you think of replacing an optical drive or repairing a broken Office install as "simple." By the same token, the master mechanic can put your car on a lift in his garage and declare that your engine swap will be a piece of cake -- he's done it dozens of times before! But to you, the engine swap is an almost insurmountable task.
Your skill, and hence your labor, has a high market value. Even at $50/hr, you're selling your labor at a discount! You should be proud of yourself for offering a superior service at a very competitive price.
Well, the first thing I'd do is call your local competitors up on the phone, pretending to be a customer, and see what they're charging and how they bill. When I did that, I found out a few creative little "twists" to how some firms bill for system repairs. For example, some places claim to charge "flat repair rates" - but actually end up being more costly than firms billing by the hour plus parts. Sometimes, they do such things as billing fixed prices for every piece of the PC they have to remove and replace during a repair job. So if you have, say, an HP Pavilion that needs a RAM upgrade - they might charge $40 "flat rate for power supply removal/installation" because it had to come out to get to the memory slots!
It's good to know such things before going into the business, so at the very least, you can properly inform some people who falsely believe competitor X is far cheaper than you....
I currently charge $60/hr. with a 1 hour minimum, and additional time billed in 20 minute increments. I don't charge any extra travel or trip charges. Most of my competitors bill upwards of $79/hr. and do include some type of travel charge. I live in a major city though... your findings may vary based on location.
The people who think these rates are "extremely high" really don't have a good concept of the costs of doing business. For starters, a basic Yellow Pages ad will easily cost you upwards of $400 per month. If you don't have one of these, you aren't going to really be competing effectively at all in the marketplace. (When "Average Joe" needs his PC fixed, he looks in his phone book to find someone - more often than not.)
Of course, if you're only doing this part-time, maybe you only plan on "word of mouth" referrals or flyers in mailboxes or whatever. That's fine too, but don't forget your costs for gas, oil changes, tires, and other vehicle maintenance for driving around to these calls. Also, you'll need to keep some sort of basic inventory of parts with you. I always try to keep at least 2 256MB PC-133 memory sticks, 2 PC-2700 256MB memory sticks, a DVD writer, a CD writer, a spare AMD Athlon XP motherboard and CPU, an extra ATX power supply, a 3.5" floppy drive, and spare PS/2 keyboard and mouse, along with a Linksys wi-fi router and a spare cable modem. (I was surprised how often I ran into problems with internet connectivity that ended up being the fault of a defective cable modem. It's not a HUGE issue, but I saw it a good 3 or 4 times. It was worth keeping a spare with me for troubleshooting purposes, at least.)