The Future of Tech Support

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Christina Tynan-Wood reports on 7 emerging technologies and strategies that could make tech support less of a living hell for those in need of a fix. Augmented reality, self-healing systems, robot surrogates, avatar support — most seem the stuff of science fiction, but many are much closer than we might expect. 'As products become more and more interconnected, support itself will break off from the current model and become a product of its own,' Tynan-Wood writes. 'The same model has already happened in corporate IT, where technicians must orchestrate knowledge and skills across a variety of technology products. Even as the techniques and technologies used by corporate IT will change in the coming years, the shift in consumer tech support to an integrated approach will pose new opportunities for today's techs.'"

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Re:Synopsis

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting anon since I'm not sure if my NDA expired yet.)

I did desktop tech support for HP for two years (admittedly a while ago), and you know the number of times I used any "self-healing" software? Zero. I'm pretty sure most of them had it installed, but they never actually trained us on it.

Besides, the only thing I've actually seen it do in the real world is cause error messages and suck resources.

Also, they started pushing us to sell things during support calls a few months before I moved on. I think I chose just about the right time.

Here are the real reasons that tech support systems fail:

1. Outsourcing. Now, right now I do web development as a freelancer, and it makes me (and my clients) a fair bit of money. But when you outsource such a huge function of a company (effectively, their entire customer face), the system needs to be so big that it can't possibly be effective. It was next to impossible for us to ever actually contact HP, beyond ordering parts. Case managers probably had more contact, but it's hard to say.
2. AHT. Most tech support outsourcers get paid by the call, so there's always a profit-driven motive to make calls as quick as possible. AHT (average handle time, or average call length) is the single most important metric in 99% of all call center outsourcers. If you don't make that metric, you get fired (unless you're really, really good at solving issues and have supervisors who don't necessarily support the whole AHT scheme, like mine). This inevitably leads to agents developing tricks to get you off the phone as quickly as possible if things aren't being fixed soon enough (at our HP outsourcer, there were a few things we could do: System Restore, QuickRestore, checkdisk... if it took more than three minutes, they could call back.)
3. Skill level. First level support techs are hired off the street. Call centers have such incredibly high turnover that they can't afford to only hire skilled workers, so they throw everyone who can save a file into a two week training class, and then let them loose on the floor with a script. The client companies would love to believe that 95% of issues are the same, but it's just not the case, especially for desktop support. To be effective, you need to know what you're doing, and 9/10 agents don't. Hell, 5/10 of those agents couldn't go beyond the script given to the by the company.

If you fixed those three issues, you'd probably see a marked increase in customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, few companies are actually interested, since there's no immediate profit to be made.

(As I mentioned before, this was a while ago; HP may be different now. I have no idea.)