I was depressed earlier today, but after reading this article I am less so. Yes, Amazon could become evil, but in the mean time, it's breaking up other evil, (to put it simplistically) and that's a good thing.
It might have started that way, and then first level support becomes a buffer between the great unwashed and the real competency, and then that real competency leaves the company, and all that's left is the script readers. (I am living that dream right now.) To users who can't cope with bad customer support, the product becomes shelfware. More competent users will band together and support each other. This actually hurts the situation because the company learns that they don't really need to provide competent second and third level support. All they have to do is provide the appearance of support, and the competent users will figure it out on their own.
These days, when I cut a ticket for system changes, I include the commands the admin is supposed to run and the files he's supposed to change, and the changes to make. It saves time. This isn't because IT is stupid, it's because I'm not really talking to an IT person. I'm talking to a farmer who hasn't been on the job more than three weeks. But he has the root password, and I don't.
My nephew has been in the Windows support business for years, and his advice is still limited to "turn it off and on again" and "reinstall the software", even when it's obvious from the beginning that neither of these actions would help in any way. I've helped his customers to find the *real* problem, which pisses him off to no end. As far as he knows, you're supposed to (a) "turn it off and on again", and (b) reinstall the software. If it's still got a problem, you did one of those two steps wrong.
There are other dynamics, but the point is, where IT folks are stupid, there are several processes that lead to them *being* stupid. There are other IT departments that are very sharp, but there has to be the right dynamic to allow it.
English is the second most common of the thirteen official languages spoken in India. English is common and understandable amongst the middle and upper class there. Having traveled to various parts of India myself on business, I found I could always make myself understood, and the business owners and office workers all spoke excellent English.
So why are the call center people so difficult to understand? I think it's that to be profitable, call centers can't pay very well, and since the employees are only there to follow scripts anyway, no great amount of education is necessary. So you literally get farmers and former taxi drivers who are given a headset and a big stack of scripts and turned loose on customers. Why companies have still not discovered that this makes them look bad and turns off customers amazes me.
Now (again from personal experience), some individuals rise above the pack, become good at their job, and become effective at customer support. The problem is, as soon as call center people learn a skill, they go on to better jobs. Keep in mind that for the US at least, when it's daylight here, it's night there, so anyone you're likely to call is working graveyard shift. There is a huge motivation to learn a skill and then go out and get a daytime job. So the good ones never stay, and they're replaced by a fresh crop of farmers. This is just the nature of the environment over there. I've had tech support brag to me that they're finally good enough to get off night shift, which means I will never hear from them again.
If you don't like or can't understand the customer service, for God's sake, buy from a different vendor next time.
You've pretty much summed up my misgivings, which is why I was conflicted. But there's been so much press about child molestation in the church, and they've taken so much flack for it -- justifiably so in my opinion -- that to not report child porn given the larger circumstances is absolutely inexcusable.
If they had a duty to report something, they should have reported it. If they decide not to, they will have to abide by the consequences of that decision, just like we must abide by the consequences of a decision to help cover up any crime.. What you suggest may be true, but it leads down a rat hole I think.
I was ambivalent about this at first, but on reflection I think this is a good thing. It helps break up the conspiracy of silence (due to not wanting to embarrass the order) that can shield a molester for years.
> It's like saying people in the cable system call center need a 4 year degrees in Telecommunication just to tell some one to reboot there modem
Yeah, ok, but the moment it's something that can't be solved by rebooting the modem, a procedure-oriented helpdesk person is often stuck. You get into a situation where a support person is condescendingly giving basic instructions that don't help over and over again to a user who may know more about the product than the support person. Like the corporate flunky who insisted that I reenter the corporate information into my Blackberry over and over and over again when I could *see* that the BB enterprise server was not answering a ping.
This kind of stuff gives us power users the impression that you service folks are morons. And often we're right.
> Natural progression. I worked at a first-world call center for a while and found that if you do anything but read the book word-for-word you'd get punished.
That's actually true. A friend of mine was fired for suggesting a solution to a user that actually worked, because he could see from the script that he was going to be required to give the user the wrong answer. Despite leaving a satisfied customer, he was written up for going off-script and terminated.
Dell corporate service is still provided out of Austin, TX. It's consumer service that's provided by a single cellular phone somewhere in Vichumbe, India. So if you're buying Dell servers, you're fine. If you bought a Dell home PC, I'm really sorry.
I've done troubleshooting online with a high degree of success. But maybe not the way you meant. If you mean on the vendor's website, I agree. But does anyone seriously do that? Forums are the thing. There's a lot of people out there who are smarter than I, and also smarter than anyone in the vendor's technical support. I rely heavily on the kindness of strangers, and try to pay it forward whenever possible.
On your comment on normal layman, I could not agree more. This is the real tragedy. Computers are not an end product, they are a tool to get work done. You should not have to be a sysadmin in order to use a PC to do work unrelated to computers. This is where support classically falls down and it's a real crime. I help users out for free who have been screwed by paid support, and then I suggest they never do business with that company again. I'm running out of companies to recommend.
You're absolutely correct regarding outsourcing. It doesn't *have* to suck, but the way the industry is managed now, it usually does. It may not even be the vendor's fault -- they can get suckered into a horrible deal just like anyone else can.
...calling a helpdesk is becoming more and more of an ordeal. We are actively discouraged from using them, so naturally other resources will be sought, and found.
So, you're saying that propaganda is a legitimate and moral tool? I'm thinking this won't end well.
At the very least, on the short term, making claims that are demonstrably untrue will be demonstrated untrue, hence damaging the case that might actually be true.
> You can make calls once you're booked in. The calls are collect, so hopefully the other side will take the calls. It's a good idea that people know where you were going, so they'll already know to accept the charges.
That is starting to have a familiar ring... "Hey Gramma? I'm in jail in Spain. I need $2000 bail money wired to me. Please, Gramma. I'm in jail! Yes, it is really me! They want me to get off the phone. Here's the wire transfer number. Please hurry!"
> Autotagging works in Facebook, because it's matching your friend list, which is probably the size of a small town. In real life, facial recognition has a huge false positive rate making it largely useless.
That's actually good news.
My Facebook friends list is more like a ghost town. I don't friend anyone I don't know personally. As a consequence, where others may have enough Facebook friends to fill a basketball stadium, I have about enough to field a team, if there aren't too many substitutions.
I find it fascinating the autotagging feature in Facebook, which manages to guess the subject right a surprising amount of the time. I can see where this could have uses elsewhere. Let's say, autotagging the output of government street CCTV. Imagine a page where your image pops up automatically every time software recognizes your face. Probably used first with celebrities and (opposing) politicians. There might come a day when you can buy a service, put in your child's name and get a dump of all the traffic cams that contain his image. And no, that won't be abused at all...
Slashdot Mirror
I was depressed earlier today, but after reading this article I am less so. Yes, Amazon could become evil, but in the mean time, it's breaking up other evil, (to put it simplistically) and that's a good thing.
In Leonard Hofstadter's voice "please don't ask that please don't ask that oh crap, you asked that. We'll never make it to the movie now."
It might have started that way, and then first level support becomes a buffer between the great unwashed and the real competency, and then that real competency leaves the company, and all that's left is the script readers. (I am living that dream right now.) To users who can't cope with bad customer support, the product becomes shelfware. More competent users will band together and support each other. This actually hurts the situation because the company learns that they don't really need to provide competent second and third level support. All they have to do is provide the appearance of support, and the competent users will figure it out on their own.
These days, when I cut a ticket for system changes, I include the commands the admin is supposed to run and the files he's supposed to change, and the changes to make. It saves time. This isn't because IT is stupid, it's because I'm not really talking to an IT person. I'm talking to a farmer who hasn't been on the job more than three weeks. But he has the root password, and I don't.
My nephew has been in the Windows support business for years, and his advice is still limited to "turn it off and on again" and "reinstall the software", even when it's obvious from the beginning that neither of these actions would help in any way. I've helped his customers to find the *real* problem, which pisses him off to no end. As far as he knows, you're supposed to (a) "turn it off and on again", and (b) reinstall the software. If it's still got a problem, you did one of those two steps wrong.
There are other dynamics, but the point is, where IT folks are stupid, there are several processes that lead to them *being* stupid. There are other IT departments that are very sharp, but there has to be the right dynamic to allow it.
It might have been, but no.
This:
> Why were you ambivalent about this? This is unequivocally good
Does not seem to match well with this:
> Censorship is obscene.
English is the second most common of the thirteen official languages spoken in India. English is common and understandable amongst the middle and upper class there. Having traveled to various parts of India myself on business, I found I could always make myself understood, and the business owners and office workers all spoke excellent English.
So why are the call center people so difficult to understand? I think it's that to be profitable, call centers can't pay very well, and since the employees are only there to follow scripts anyway, no great amount of education is necessary. So you literally get farmers and former taxi drivers who are given a headset and a big stack of scripts and turned loose on customers. Why companies have still not discovered that this makes them look bad and turns off customers amazes me.
Now (again from personal experience), some individuals rise above the pack, become good at their job, and become effective at customer support. The problem is, as soon as call center people learn a skill, they go on to better jobs. Keep in mind that for the US at least, when it's daylight here, it's night there, so anyone you're likely to call is working graveyard shift. There is a huge motivation to learn a skill and then go out and get a daytime job. So the good ones never stay, and they're replaced by a fresh crop of farmers. This is just the nature of the environment over there. I've had tech support brag to me that they're finally good enough to get off night shift, which means I will never hear from them again.
If you don't like or can't understand the customer service, for God's sake, buy from a different vendor next time.
English isn't your first language, is it?
You've pretty much summed up my misgivings, which is why I was conflicted. But there's been so much press about child molestation in the church, and they've taken so much flack for it -- justifiably so in my opinion -- that to not report child porn given the larger circumstances is absolutely inexcusable.
If they had a duty to report something, they should have reported it. If they decide not to, they will have to abide by the consequences of that decision, just like we must abide by the consequences of a decision to help cover up any crime.. What you suggest may be true, but it leads down a rat hole I think.
I was ambivalent about this at first, but on reflection I think this is a good thing. It helps break up the conspiracy of silence (due to not wanting to embarrass the order) that can shield a molester for years.
> It's like saying people in the cable system call center need a 4 year degrees in Telecommunication just to tell some one to reboot there modem
Yeah, ok, but the moment it's something that can't be solved by rebooting the modem, a procedure-oriented helpdesk person is often stuck. You get into a situation where a support person is condescendingly giving basic instructions that don't help over and over again to a user who may know more about the product than the support person. Like the corporate flunky who insisted that I reenter the corporate information into my Blackberry over and over and over again when I could *see* that the BB enterprise server was not answering a ping.
This kind of stuff gives us power users the impression that you service folks are morons. And often we're right.
> People working in IT are stupid. Period. I work IT too so I should know.
Um, ok, no point in reading the rest, then.
I work in IT, and I like to think I'm not stupid. The problem is much more complex than mere individual stupidity.
> Natural progression. I worked at a first-world call center for a while and found that if you do anything but read the book word-for-word you'd get punished.
That's actually true. A friend of mine was fired for suggesting a solution to a user that actually worked, because he could see from the script that he was going to be required to give the user the wrong answer. Despite leaving a satisfied customer, he was written up for going off-script and terminated.
I don't completely disagree, but a few points...
Dell corporate service is still provided out of Austin, TX. It's consumer service that's provided by a single cellular phone somewhere in Vichumbe, India. So if you're buying Dell servers, you're fine. If you bought a Dell home PC, I'm really sorry.
I've done troubleshooting online with a high degree of success. But maybe not the way you meant. If you mean on the vendor's website, I agree. But does anyone seriously do that? Forums are the thing. There's a lot of people out there who are smarter than I, and also smarter than anyone in the vendor's technical support. I rely heavily on the kindness of strangers, and try to pay it forward whenever possible.
On your comment on normal layman, I could not agree more. This is the real tragedy. Computers are not an end product, they are a tool to get work done. You should not have to be a sysadmin in order to use a PC to do work unrelated to computers. This is where support classically falls down and it's a real crime. I help users out for free who have been screwed by paid support, and then I suggest they never do business with that company again. I'm running out of companies to recommend.
You're absolutely correct regarding outsourcing. It doesn't *have* to suck, but the way the industry is managed now, it usually does. It may not even be the vendor's fault -- they can get suckered into a horrible deal just like anyone else can.
Bingo.
So, you're saying that propaganda is a legitimate and moral tool? I'm thinking this won't end well.
At the very least, on the short term, making claims that are demonstrably untrue will be demonstrated untrue, hence damaging the case that might actually be true.
Good idea, but environmentalists will never ever go for it.
> So it doesn't work when you're breaking windows or spraypainting buildings?
I've read that this is considered peaceful demonstrating, these days.
> You can make calls once you're booked in. The calls are collect, so hopefully the other side will take the calls. It's a good idea that people know where you were going, so they'll already know to accept the charges.
That is starting to have a familiar ring... "Hey Gramma? I'm in jail in Spain. I need $2000 bail money wired to me. Please, Gramma. I'm in jail! Yes, it is really me! They want me to get off the phone. Here's the wire transfer number. Please hurry!"
Mod poster insightful.
"Look ma, I'm crapping on a cop car. Ow ow ow, don't taze me bro!"
> Autotagging works in Facebook, because it's matching your friend list, which is probably the size of a small town. In real life, facial recognition has a huge false positive rate making it largely useless.
That's actually good news.
My Facebook friends list is more like a ghost town. I don't friend anyone I don't know personally. As a consequence, where others may have enough Facebook friends to fill a basketball stadium, I have about enough to field a team, if there aren't too many substitutions.
I find it fascinating the autotagging feature in Facebook, which manages to guess the subject right a surprising amount of the time. I can see where this could have uses elsewhere. Let's say, autotagging the output of government street CCTV. Imagine a page where your image pops up automatically every time software recognizes your face. Probably used first with celebrities and (opposing) politicians. There might come a day when you can buy a service, put in your child's name and get a dump of all the traffic cams that contain his image. And no, that won't be abused at all...