Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Here is a brief synopsis of the seven options:
Tech support hero #1: Augmented reality Thanks to James Cameron's Ferngully Furry Fantasy, tech support can now send the being of your choice to give you a hand with those annoying router problems. They've been programmed to be the minority of your choice(the one who's taking all the American jobs) so that you will rapidly become frustrated and tire yourself out trying to beat the shit out of them before you talk to an actual human.
Tech support hero #2: Support systems that know you They try to sell you shit you don't need. Moving on...
Tech support hero #3: Self-healing and self-aware machines
Which slow themselves to a crawl running Norton 3000, the self-aware program that dosen't have time to allocate computer resources for your Mickey-Mouse bullshit.
Tech support hero #4: An easier way to replace parts Need a new hinge for your laptop screen? Send the whole thing in to have it examined by a gaggle of third-world monkeys who gather around it in awe like a bunch of cro-magnons gathering around a fresh meteorite.
Tech support hero #5: Robots that do the hands-on support They've all been acquired by a subsidary of teledildonics.
Tech support hero #6: Smarter peer-to-peer support If one Indian can't solve your problems, what makes you think that a million will?!
Tech support hero #7: Virtual worlds with avatar support
*Sigh* GOTO 1
The latest offerings from Microsoft and Apple are far less crappy than their previous versions so need far less support.
What I find is quite often forgotten is the word "Support"
Most people generally just want someone to acknowledge they have a problem and give them a realistic time frame on when the problem can be fixed.
Computers are Logical, people are generally not and will always get emotional about a problem they are experiencing with any piece of technology, the more you abstract the support for these complex systems the more you alienate the people who actually require it.
Hi, tech support, my self-healing robot surrogate avatar just broke down...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The future of consumer tech support is that your increasingly senile neighbor is still going to call you every time she has a problem with her POS desktop inkjet printer that you helped set up back in 6th grade - only because your mom made you (since you're such a smart young man and I'm sure it won't take you more than half an hour) - even though you now live in a different state that is 3 time zones away, goddamnit.
where technicians must orchestrate knowledge and skills across a variety of technology products
Let me put this in real terms: submit an ___(insert name of company document here)___, IT gets overworked. End users on phone support and other end seem determined to reduce the machine from a multicore to a TI-83Plus equivalent.
This summary was obviously written by upper management...the above description has not been my experience.
(Sorry for the mean words.)
We should start a new Slashdot and return control to the geeks. It actually wouldn't be that hard to get some users to
Microsoft Bob
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
I am not making this up -- I found out today that my new Kenmore washer & dryer have Kenmore Connect, which lets you call tech support on your cell phone, then hold the phone up to the appliance so that it can be talked to directly. Supposedly, the majority of service calls are not hardware related, so this lets Sears see what's wrong with your machine and potentially fix it without having to send someone out. I'm guessing appliances connecting to service sites with wi-fi would be next.
I dunno - an English Speaking sweatshop would be a step up...
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
Probably would be better to have a second life instead of no life.
how dumb does a tech need to be to need smart phone to change ram? Wait most severs have that info on the door. just sounds like a way to sell some over priced help app.
some of the other ideas are better staring points to work from.
Tech support hero #2:??
most of time you need tell the next guy on the phone the same stuff that you told the first guy. Now planes like comcast need this bad as they can't even tell the cable guy to bringing cable cards when you tell the phone people you need them at times or some times the cable guy / phone people don't even know about them.
and cable cards is just 1 area that comcast phone and cable guys need to work one. Some times there own boxes can't even get the right config.
Self-healing?
auto updates are hit or miss at times and toner replacement that others the high priced stuff on it's own vs the 3rd party stuff? Some cars have oil change lights that only give the codes to the dealer to trun them off and if are a due it your self-er or go a jiffy lube you need to look it up on your own.
An easier way to replace parts
most pc's systems are easy to swap parts in but imacs and lots of small systmes are not that easy and apple wants to pay more for apple care do they can fix with out voiding the warranty and it's sucks that the imac makes it so much work just to swap a HDD out.
Robots that do the hands-on support
seems to be a high cost at first and likely 10+ years out thing also lag is bad for stuff like that.
Peer-to-peer support is cool and is at times way better then level 1 phone techs. Get rid of alot of the level 1 low call times and let them do more is a start and don't kick people out who are smarter then level 1 and take more time on the phone.
They don't know how LUCKY they are that it was "Medium" and not "Lowest" or something lower. I'm in charge of 5 sites, most having over 100 computers on campus, with one other person.
Wow man. You're SOOOOO important that you're doing.... tech support. For people with broken sound cards.
Grow the fuck up and do your job.
how dumb does a tech need to be to need smart phone to change ram? Wait most severs have that info on the door. just sounds like a way to sell some over priced help app.
some of the other ideas are better staring points to work from.
You know, the "augmented reality" principle is not that bad. Here's for an example: wouldn't you like a Phone app to augment the reality of you paycheck and (factually) make the amount bigger?
No, seriously now: this example benefits of the same cover in the real world as the usefulness of augmented reality to change the RAM.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Tech support is a corporate scam to monetize crappy software.
Now that "free" software is all the rage, the "support services" business model is taking its place. The problem is that the better the software, the less support it requires. This monetarily incentives crappy software, bad interfaces, meaningless error messages, and thin or non-existent manuals. Sadly, even non-free software companies have figured this out and quality has suffered greatly as a result.
It's gotten so bad that for a lot of software you're directed to a "partner" company that can install and configure it for you. So unintuitive that they can get you to spend thousands of dollars on "training".
So really, I don't give a flying poo about new ways companies can further shake me down for using their half-baked products. I'm much more interested in products that do what they claim to without requiring support.
If I need to call tech support your product has failed!!
My
That's what he did. Setting the priority of the task is the job of the developer/admin/support person (client just can't do this as he has no idea of other tasks and their priorities). The client can of course increase the severity of the problem if sound happens to be absolutely mission critical for him. That is an entirely different thing as far as issue management goes -- many people don't understand the difference but surprisingly these people don't handle thousands of issues in a tracker...
So... grow up and shut up.
They missed the best and most obvious way to improve support: Improve the quality of the products and make the use obvious enough so that support isn't necessary.
But that is a lot less sexy than self-healing robot avatars and not really worth an article.
1.) Don't change anything. Most of the faults I've ever encountered have been the direct result of someone, somewhere changing something. It might be the user futzing around with things they don't understand - or a technical person doing the same. It could be an upgrade that didn't work properly, or that hadn't been tested properly. it could be patches installed to fix some other probem. Whatever causes changes causes problems. The most reliable systems I've ever encountered were a set of Solaris 6 servers that only the supplier knew the root password for. They never crashed, never got upgraded patched or reconfigured. Of course this presupposes you have an operating system and application that actually works - which hopefully the mass market will attain within the bext 20 years or so.
2.) Get the user out of the loop. The worst thing about trying to support a system is having to deal with the user. they don't have the skills to reliably diagnose a fault. They can't follow instructions, they tell you what they think you want to hear and are so often the cause of the problem, in the first place. The single biggest improvement a company can make to its support operation (apart from #1, above) is to install remote diagnostics and remote take-over of users computers if the diagnostics detect a problem.
OK, three secrets:
If you can keep the users from installing their own stuff - software, tunes, their own hardware AND if you can keep them away from the internet, most company's fault rates would drop by at least 50%.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
"In the future, machines will be made up of four -- or five or six -- modules. So if something breaks, you will get a CRU [customer-replaceable unit] sent to you," predicts Brendan Keegan, president of Worldwide TechServices, a provider of outsourced service technicians to major high-tech companies. Replacing a CRU will be about as hard as playing with Legos, he says: "If your RAM goes bad, the company might send you Module No. 6 to replace the RAM and a couple of other things. You pop the old one out and pop the new one in. And you are done."
MB, CPU, RAM, PSU, Hard Drive(s) and Graphic card - six modules, user replaceable. You've got broken RAM - we can send you a new one, which you can replace yourself without any soldering.
For less advanced - bigger units - Central Unit, Display Unit, Alphanumeric Input Unit, Pointing Device Unit. Sometimes Printing & Scanning Unit. Just connect/disconnect cables.
We already have it for years.
Businesses seek to hire fewer employees or employees that work for less money. As tech support becomes more and more mechanized we can expect less and less jobs. The jobs that are left will surely demand higher skill levels.
Current catastrophic unemployment levels are reflecting computers and technology elimination the need for workers. The vital part is that government must catch on and make certain that people have spending money even if they have no jobs. Without supporting displaced workers the economy will eventually suffer total collapse and no production at all will take place. Unlike welfare this new issue will not be helped by giving a minimal welfare allowance. The need is for people to be able to buy homes,cars, major appliances, vacations as well as the more trivial stuff. The catch is that those that are working will feel slighted as those that do not work will be living as well as they are.
Sometimes there is a great silence when a job killer becomes common place. The cell phone is a great example. Millions of office workers lost their jobs when cell phones became common. The small company often no longer needed someone sitting at a desk because the management could take phone calls while in the field. Computerized book keeping also made it possible for many small companies to do all or almost all of their book keeping chores. The trend will continue as more and more devices eliminate workers. If we do not adjust to this now we are all going to suffer..
So this guy saunters into the ER at 3am with his finger bleeding. He is probably in pain and he can't do any work so he screams like he's just had a red hot poker up his anus. He sits there with his ghetto blaster in his lap, disturbing each hospital employee and demanding attention. The most junior of junior ER doctors looks at his finger and categorises him as low priority - you know, below the two guys on the stretchers who aren't complaining much at all.
Fortunately pclminion was there to put the junior doctor in his place. After all, the doc is SOOOO important that he's essentially doing medical tech support, triaging for the more senior doctors. pclminion informed the upstart to grow up and do his job, and the guy with the cut finger got seen within 5 minutes that day. Sure, a couple of people died, but at least the new MD didn't overstep his bounds by categorising problems in priority order.
The difference between any smart, charismatic man and a ruthless dictator (from workplace to global) is that only the latter has the confidence that he is more important than everyone else. Those around him are "just" grease for the machinery of his vision. You, Sir, are worse than Hitler. Not even Hitler would play jungle music at three in the morning.
... but the users will not. Have you ever tried giving assistance to a person who argues that it's "impossible" that her computer have a password on it, because she doesn't want it to? Or tried to understand why a customer's computer has their cursor "move by itself on the screen" only to figure out after half an hour that they are just grazing their laptop's touchpad with their thumbs while typing? Tech support may change because the products themselves will need less human assistance, but troubleshooting customers is a need that will NEVER go away.
what every script needs is something very simple
at each step it needs to ask a question
HAS THE USER ALREADY DONE THIS STEP??
also the beginning of the script should have the statement
Does the user appear to know exactly what is wrong (hint using technical terms correctly or providing a complete diagnostic snapshot is a good sign)
if this is true then send the call up tier
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
You know what would really make tech support better? Error messages that actually contained some information. To me the absolute WORST part of UI design is error messages. Come on, it's 2010, why are we still giving error codes instead of meaningful error messages?*(ok stuff thats in the kernel and whatnot that will be called bazillions of times and has to perform really well has an excuse, but other programs do not).
:P
As a part time sysadmin trying to understand cryptic error messages is probably the most frustrating part of my job, esp. when they don't give you any information. For example saying "file not found" without actually telling you WHAT file wasn't found. You obviously have that information available to you since you were looking for the file, so why the hell aren't you sharing it?
Even companies that generally have the other parts of their UI down pat are guilty of having crappy error messages. My favorite is Apple's "unexpected error"..... is the unexpected error the opposite of the expected error? I think "Unanticipated" would be a better word, but if they used that people might think that they aren't in fact programming gods
Unfortunately since error messages are probably the least sexy components of UI design there isn't really a lot of motivation to fix them and they will probably stay an afterthought for most projects.
Monstar L
Yeah GP obviously hasn't worked in the real world at all - we have half a dozen account managers each with half a dozen projects and EVERY issue is top priority to them, never mind that it's changing the background colour of the "about us" page while someone else's entire site is down. Setting priorities doesn't mean we don't care about the issues or that we don't want to do our jobs but we have to have some system to determine the order in which they're handled.
That's modded "funny"? Are we laughing at his ignorance, or with it? What do Slashdot members from India think? Unfortunately for 'Ethanol-fueled', living in the U.S. won't make him smarter than someone in India. On the other hand, getting out of his basement, learning from and about other people and cultures, and seeing the world a little is a great way to learn.
I know this is a running gag with all tech support, but when it solves at least 20% of all problems it's still a valuable support tool. And yes, for the record I've had calls from self-proclaimed experts who still fall foul of this one. I had one guy argue with me for five minutes that he absolutely was not going to check the plug on his PC as he was a PC engineer and knew what he was doing and it was definitely a blown PSU and he wanted an engineer ASAP, I reluctantly explained that until he'd done this routine check for me I couldn't approve an engineer, eventually he bellowed at his daughter to "check the bloody thing's plugged in so I can actually get an engineer out" - 30 seconds later he explained it must have been loose and hung up without an apology (or a thank you that I'd just saved him a £70 false call-out fee). If you've checked that turning it off and on didn't help then explain that up front, otherwise always be expected to go through this basic step.
The place I did tech support, some guy left and took with him a USB stick with all the company's intranet - support documents, common issues and fixes from manufacturers etc. and set up his own website. Eventually the company got him shut down and when they did support calls went through the roof (which might have been their aim had it not been in-house support for the retailers, i.e. every call cost rather than made them money, with the exception of one or two premium rate software support lines that nobody called).
As opposed to now where its some badly trained monkey who always assumes its the users fault, and give you the runaround until you give up.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
A problem that I often run into on the "customer" side of this equation though is that often these "quick fixes" provide exactly that. "Reboot your cable modem" can often "fix" a problem that is merely a symptom of a larger issue. Example: My cable Internet was acting up. I rebooted the modem and it fixed the problem for a while, then it happened again. After the second or third time it happened in the period of a weekend I called tech support. The guy wanted me to reboot the modem. I tried to explain to him I'd done that several times and it was a short term fix. We should troubleshoot without rebooting the modem in order to discover the root cause. He was utterly unable to understand. His script said "Have customer reboot the modem, if this works get customer off the phone." I wouldn't reboot the modem. Life was HARD...
I think there are essentially four problems with the way tech support is done:
1) Techs are often clueless morons with minimal training. Now always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among skilled, and even modestly skilled users that tech support people are idiots who can't be trusted.
2) Users are often clueless morons with no training at all. Sometime they even think they know what they're doing despite being a moron with no training. Not always, but often enough that it creates and sustains a prejudice among the more highly skilled tech support that users are the cause of many if not most of their own problems. Since the moron they work with often unconsciously try to imitate these more skilled people, this problem filters down.
3) Skilled users, expecting to deal with a mouth breathing moron as first level support, never want to do the simple stuff. The fact that nearly all of us have, no matter how awesome we think we are, overlooked something obvious ought to keep us from doing this, but it doesn't. Because for every time that we get caught having missed something obvious, there's been ten times or twenty times, or a hundred times that we've had to go through a 20 bloody minute checklist of things we already looked at to prove that we already looked at them. We tend to remember the wasted time and forget the once or twice that we went "Fuck, you're right, it ISN'T plugged in".
4) Techs, because so many users really are morons, tend to treat every problem as PEBKAC until it's proven otherwise. Which often makes them unwilling to deal with more skilled users on a higher level until they've exhausted all other possibilities. Which makes skilled users think all techs are morons...
You see where we're going here?
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
How about companies getting their shit together from an engineering and people perspective before selling their products to everyone? Better engineering up front will result in less support cost later. Of course, you could just refuse to support anything, but then you have a lot of pissed off customers who won't buy your shit ever again. If I can't support it myself, I really don't want it. The only things that I ever need tech support for are "Services" which end up not working because the "service provider" sucks. I'm talking about you AT&T, Comcast, Clearwire
What do I get this time? Clippy with bolts in his neck?