Orwellian Tech Support 853
alteran writes "Here's a very well-written piece on what goes on inside a tech-support call center. Makes working for Initech seem good. Sorry about the forced ad-viewing - it only last about 10 seconds, and the article is worth it."
You can't get parts from India... (Score:1, Interesting)
I guess we shouldn't be too scared of tech support being sent offshore... those aren't the knowlegable people anyway, so they're not exactly taking our job.
Similar to my experiences... (Score:5, Interesting)
And yeah, it was a grab-train-dump situation for the first week, and then you got tossed out on the floor.
I got let go, and no one ever told me why. But the training and experience I got there - supporting Netscape 1.2 and 2.0 - was invaluable in getting my foot in the door at other places. It was a hell of a meatgrinder for me, but I lived...
Nothing new here... Carry on. (Score:5, Interesting)
Worked in a call center (Score:5, Interesting)
Clueless? No surprise (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked doing tech support at an ISP some years ago. Once I gained more knowledge I moved on to bigger and better things. It cannot be easy to hold on to talented tech support persons for the relatively low pay they receive vs the stress of dealing with irate customers and the pressure of keeping call times down. Most probably move on like I did.
Re:Yeah... (Score:3, Interesting)
This call may be monitored... (Score:5, Interesting)
Very, very familiar. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you're a big fan of "root causes", well, the root cause of crappy tech support is the business model. The people who work there get paid per hour, but the actual company, or in this case "branch-of-other-company-via-internal-billing" gets paid per call that comes into the building. Therefore somebody who is needs three or four calls to fix a problem, rather than just one, is three or four more times as profitable to the company as one who calls once.
In this environment, the ideal setup is about 95% braindead scriptreaders who can cheaply solve the great majority of problems given a flowchart and three or four tries and a tiny handful of people who handle the real problems from the persistent clients. But if you're actually good, and you want to keep your job, you have to play by Management's playbook.
There's an optimal point somewhere where the cheapness of tech-support expenses is balanced against the cost of losing clients, and I promise you, some very smart people have worked out those numbers.
Seriously, that's why consumer net access is so cheap, in both senses of the word, these days.
Not all that enlightening (Score:5, Interesting)
The more calls you can handle, the fewer people you need (and all the associated overhead costs) and the more profit you make. It's really that simple.
Employees who actually take the time to help people get bad numbers and ultimately get canned, even if they're good at helping people. The successful employees figure out how to crank through their calls ASAP, as well as how to game the system so that they can sneak idle time without appearing to ignore calls in queue.
It's essentially the rules associated with factory work applied to answering the phone.
Re:Very, very familiar. (Score:3, Interesting)
I call bullshit (Score:1, Interesting)
burn out problems (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Worked in a call center (Score:4, Interesting)
It actually proved to be more costly to have a cheap work enviornment that wasn't a fun place to work.
And you wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
The high turnover rate of employment is cause of concern for me. However, it won't end until people realize that the job is horrible and shouldn't go after it because of the money. $8/hr to flip burgers at McDonalds or $9/hr to get screamed at, both by management and the caller, and have to worry how to get "customers" off the phone as quickly as possible, I'd take burger-flippin' any day. I may come home smelling like french fries, but a quick shower will fix that and that extra dollar just isn't worth it to me.
Amigori
HP email support is really good (Score:5, Interesting)
- Their technicians have responded within 24 hours (usually within 2 hours) to all my emails.
- They provided useful information without a load of sales pitch and other BS (minimal indemnification and warnings where prudent and necessary)
- The replies were in good English using complete sentences and proper technical document style and language.
- They told me up front they don't support linux (reasonable because there's so many distros and different ways to configure linux; I'd have expected REAL linux support if they were selling/endorsing a particular distro, of course), yet their techs went ahead and gave assistance with setting up the partitions for dual-booting anyway! (I wasn't just wiping the drive, but needed to re-size the partition so I could avoid having to reinstall, configure, and tweak all the WinXP stuff, and they were very helpful and responsive to my requests for information.)
The not so simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
Complain. Often, constantly, daily. Write letters, not email, call every day.
Tie up their support phone lines to the point where nothing gets done. Tie up their sales lines as well.
Demand to speak to the president of the company.
File complaints with every consumer group you can find.
Write to magazines, tell them how horrible the support is, tell them you hate the products.
If the company has 12,000 unresolved complaints filed with the BBB in a 2 month period, what do you think will happen to their customer service?
More important to them, what do you think will happen to their stock price?
Retail sales are just like this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Soon, manglement decided that since they couldn't get the onhand inventory to match, they would give several of us cordless phones and have us field the 'pricing and availability' calls to the store. This was running around the store and checking to see if the product was actually there, and actually 9.95 - on top of trying to help people who had decided to physically come to the store and perhaps buy something.
The best part was when you were telling someone about an expensive piece of hardware and some call comes in (we weren't allowed to ignore calls) for the price of a printer cable, or if we have the '20 CDs for 20 bucks' deal in.
I had one guy go off and scream at me, to which I responded, "Please go back there and talk to Rick. He's the boss. I am doing the job(S) he gave me. Tell him he's a fucking moron." He responded, "YOU'RE THE FUCKING MORON" and stormed out.
I tried to tell the boss what bad service this was causing, and he said, "You need to try harder." Grrr.
About three weeks later, the phones disappeared, and I was back to software. And hardware!
At this time, I didn't own a computer of any sort, as they were unattainable on my hourly rate. And here I am trying to sell them. Ugh. I gave up my fakery and lies. I became a 'troublemaker'. If I didn't know if software did a certain something, I would crack the box and read the manual (this was discouraged) even if it was for my own education. If someone wanted a telphone, fax machine, or sound card, I told them that the 'extended warranty' was a ripoff.
I became well versed in the Mac line we carried, and sold a lot of them because I liked them, and they were easy for the customer to demo themselves.
People seemed to like my honesty. And I learned more about selling, and sold more than lots of smarmy 'say-anythings' there, because I only sold the stuff I knew, and liked. Of course, I quit not long after for other reasons. After that, I was well on my way to knowing my stuff, and built my first computer out of Salvation Army parts.
Oh, lots of retail stories came out of that evil place...
The worst (Score:5, Interesting)
I work in the repair department at a large electronics store. One of my duties (other than actually repairing or upgrading computers) is "inspecting" equipment such as wireless routers to make sure that we aren't getting scammed. It burns me up when someone brings in their 3rd unit in as many days, saying, "wow, what's wrong with you guys? I've been on the phone with D-Link all day, and this is the third bad unit I've gotten". I just want to yell out, "no sir, you've been on the phone with an outsourced guy in Manilla who may or may not have ever even seen a picture of your product, and he says it's faulty because his only concern is getting you off the phone in less than fifteen minutes."
I had a young woman come in the other day with some random Gateway desktop that looked like a CRT iMac knock-off (an all-in-one design where the mainboard and drives were installed in a section below the monitor). She plunks it down on my desk, and says, "The guy at Gateway's tech support says it needs a new video card." I took one look at this obviously completely integrated computer, and said (without thinking), "Are you sure he said that?" "Of course he said that," I thought immediately afterward, "he's tech support. He has no idea what that product even looks like. He doesn't know that the video is integrated." Just for grins I opened it up, on the off chance that there was some ghetto six-inch VGA cable that ran to an actual card. Interestingly, there actually was, but it ran from a proprietary pinout that allowed video to flow up to the monitor to a DB-15 connection on the motherboard, and power to flow down from the single AC jack that was located in the monitor . I showed the connection to the woman, then showed her a couple of video cards, and explained why they were wrong and what she could do (basically nothing, as she was outside of warranty). The funny part about the whole thing was that it looked like it was actually the CRT that was damaged, as it was exhibiting that "missing one part of the color spectrum" bit that is more often than not a CRT defect.
It's a shame, but I don't know of any consumer computer manufacturer that has what I would call "good" tech support anymore, with the exception of Apple (and then you only get 90 days unless you spring for Applecare).
No Popup if you have subscribed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was hard to blaim the lowly stream employees though, I knew they were graded heavily on call time (we were not), and I knew they were making crap wages. To them it was just a paycheck.
Nothin has changed. The company I used to work for lost Stream and outsourced to another company outside the US, which I hear is even worse (but cheaper).
Re:What's funny is... (Score:4, Interesting)
I will attempt to help back up the article with a resounding "yes, a call center is meant to take a lot of calls, not solve problems".
See, I work in a generic call center. We do our own support here for member accounts (non-technical) and we attempt to bring in farmed work from other businesses. When the management goes to talk to companies, they automatically reject anyone who says they want quality numbers. They come armed only with quantity. Average call times are to be under two and a half minutes and full time reps are required to take over 200 calls per day lest they be put on the chopping block.
There's two benefits to this approach: 1) management can claim a high quality call center to prosepective outsourcers based on the fact that we take a lot of calls and 2) H.R. can keep average salaries low by firing people who are not meeting quality standards and unrealistic quantity standards. Effectively, the only way to make these mutually exclusive goals is to remain as generic and unhelpful as possible. I was once told flat out by a caller that I'm "really good at saying nothing in as many words as possible". Trying to solve a person's problem inevitably leads to complexity which slows down call times which leads to a meeting with a manager.
Don't blame me though... I'm just a code monkey now, nobody listens to me.
I have a tale myself (Score:5, Interesting)
We also had to be crafty. Although some "premium" customers had dedicated phone numbers so that we could find out which ISP they were calling for, many of the individual ISP's calls were routed to a common toll free number, so we'd have no idea as to which of the hundreds of ISP's we do support for the caller is from. We answer the call generically ("Tech Support, how may I assist you?") and usually asked for the customer's e-mail address for an indication of which ISP they were with. The domain name would give away the ISP. Unfortunately, people often did not give the domain name, or had offsite e-mail accounts. Since we couldn't give away that we were not with "their ISP", I couldn't flat out ask. I'd have to narrow it down by area code, and then search between ISP's in that area to find out who they were with -- often taking 10-15 minutes.
I remember one time management signed a deal and gave the call center side a chance to prepare. It was a HUGE customer - larger than all of our other ISP's combined. One night, on my shift, they simply forwarded the tech support number over to us. We went from an average 3 minute call queue time to well over an hour. We did not have the staff to handle the calls, and had no information at all about the specifics of the ISP -- dialup numbers, e-mail servers, etc. It was days before we even had the correct info to give customers. In the meantime, we just had to go with it.
And finally, we had no training program at all, so the company tried to hire people from an outsourcer in the area who had already been through their hideous training program. We paid a dollar an hour more, so it was usually pretty easy to do. Unfortunately, we supported dialup customers, and the company we stole people from supported cable modems, so new hirees usually knew nothing of dialup.
I lasted about six months there surprisingly. When I started it was a small operation with only a dozen or so techs. By the time I left, they had on average 30-40 people per shift. We grew so fast that they had to temporarily build a room in the warehouse and put up folding tables to make room for the new call center people. I'm sure they are much bigger by now, but probably still working out of the warehouse.
luckily not all tech support is like this (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:2, Interesting)
You got a manual? So much stuff these days comes with a manual.
When I bought a 486 from Gateway2000 back in 1990 or so, it came with nearly 15 pounds of printed documentation.
Re:Orwellian? (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't just use the phrase and assume you know what it means. (I'm not referring to Cpt Albert, but the Orwell comment) Read the book Michael.
Tech Support managers that emphasize low call volume is where any industry should go to research bad examples of "Management"
Take a subjective topic like anything someone would call for technical support and try to apply "METRICS" to it to be able to grade employees. So it's my fault if the customer is a moron and I still want/try to help them? No thanks.
Re:Worked in a call center (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they started offering bonuses for "calls-per-hour". I wrote a dollar-sign on the little orange "Rls" (hangup) button on the phone because the more times I pressed that button, the more I got paid. I make a cha-ching sound each time I hit it. Got a big ol' bonus for it. They asked how I got so much faster and I told them it was because I stopped giving a shit. When told that wasn't what they were after, I reminded them that they were paying extra for it.
Favorite lines:
1) It's an operating system problem, call Microsoft
2) Those modems are known to be flaky, call US Robotics for a firmware upgrade
3) I can hear static on your phone line, call the phone company. You can't hear it? Yeah, it's typically on only one side of the line that's coming *from* your house, that's why you didn't know.
4) Yes, we are aware of a problem at that POP, there's a tech team there now, try it again in about 30 minutes.
Fun with Phones:
1) Call tech support yourself and solve many of your own problems in 3 seconds or less, receive bonus. (It helps to work the very early shift so there's a greater chance of ringing your own phone).
2) Your supervisor can see they you're on an "inside" call so make sure you call the 800 number.
3) If you call in and you don't get yourself, make sure you get your co-workers on board to solve each other's problems - CHA CHING!
4) This doesn't work because supervisors montitor calls.
5) But your phone can only be monitored by one other phone at a time so go to an empty cubicle across the building and let it monitor your phone. Place a piece of paper under the handset so the phone sits in the cradle without hanging up. Enjoy the show as your supervisor calls in the phone guy and they keep glancing over at you. Ask them what's wrong and watch them squirm.
----------
And in the end all they do is create more calls which they try frantically to take which creates even more calls - your never get ahead and you piss off all your customers.
The salon article talks about outsourced tech support but Earthlick was screwing itself with this attitude in-house.
----------
Tech Support Nightmares (Score:3, Interesting)
We have Student ITS at our school, where we have to fix every little thing wrong with every crappy computer any student on campus sees fit to drop off. If I never see another stick of EDO RAM it'll be too soon
As disgusted as I am dealing with users, I'm more disgusted with this company and their "Mantra." I actually like to fix people's problems, and while formatting a computer can be so much fun, and relieve a lot of stress, dealing with the fallout wouldn't be worth "tricking" a user into it to get something done faster. Besides, I'm the one who has to sit through re-installing XP
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:5, Interesting)
At the very least, the consumer trying to get tech support loses. The support is supposedly lousy (and tech support in general is pretty lousy, so it has to be worse than that. There's also a weird cultural thing going on when people from India are suddenly acting like they're in the US and trying to speak with US accents, taking on fake favorite sports teams, etc. Is that really a good thing for India?
The economic picture is more fuzzy, but at the very least it's taking money away from US cities and sending it to India. That's not really in the interests of the United States, but it is in the interests of the Big Corps. The lipservice is of course that this all benefits the consumers, as if that makes up for everything. Gee, wow I can get the computer for $3 less because super-corp decided to outsource to India. Frankly I'm tired of all this malarchy about how everything benefits the consumer. Does extra cheap widgets from Super-Corp really make your life any better?
Re:Oversea tech support (Score:4, Interesting)
You can tell when they're reading off the script. The worst is whn they've been beaten down so throughly (i.e. "well trained") that they are completely unable to depart from the script. Of course that's viewing the situation charitably - the alternative is that they were that way to start with.
I refer to these people as "MeatBots".
New MeatBot TM ! It's a robot - made of meat!
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
If you've ever worked in tech support, this is 100% true, even the guy who doesn't help anyone but has the best call times gets promoted part.
I was a punter. (Score:2, Interesting)
The Metrics in use favored talk time, quality, then solve rate. Solving the problem was never the preferred resolution.
I spent 30 minutes on the phone with a highly foreign support rep who pronounced Ohio like 'Oreo'. My satisfaction with the entire call (not necessarily just the rep) was quite low. I will never buy another product from this company unless under some duress.
What I wonder is why technical support is such an administrative afterthough for a product. Good support seems paramount in ensuring a repeat customer. I've heard several customer services paradigms, as well as actual statistics, supporting the case that it's easier and less expensive to keep existing customers than to advertise and attract new ones.
Yes, I realize outsourcing is cheaper. Yes, I realize it's even cheaper to those to whom English is often a second language. However, I'd like to talk to some sort of peer while I'm on the phone, as I'd feel more comfortable with the support experience.
Since this is a hardware part that I will probably replace within 3 years for the better/faster/same priced combo, I am confident that purchase won't be made from the same company.
-m.
Bad experience with Qwest (Score:5, Interesting)
This story is absolutely true. I'm sure this will come as a shock to those who have dealt with Qwest, but I feel I must share my story...
<rant>
We recently dropped our long distance carrier from our phone line. The phone line is a shared ADSL line. The change goes through, and my DSL disappears. WTF?
I call my ISP, and they talk to my DSL provider (which is not Qwest). They determine within minutes that the circuit is open at Qwest's end, and that I need to call Qwest and get them to fix it.
Sighing heavily, I wait 45 minutes on hold to talk to Qwest DSL tech support. I describe my problem, and they ask if I have done anything to the line recently. Decent question to ask, so I tell them about dropping our LD carrier. He puts me on hold, then conferences me in with a DSL salesman. A DSL salesman! "We don't do have anything to do with someone else's DSL!" the salesman tells me. "You'll have to talk to your ISP again." They transfer me to repair, and repair says there is nothing wrong with my line. My phone line that is. "That's not the problem!" I say. "Well, it's not our problem."
So I call my ISP back, and they say the problem is still at Qwest's end. They can't provide DSL service over an open circuit. I still need to get Qwest on the phone. They tell me to have Qwest conference me in with them. Trying to be patient, I call Qwest again...
After another 45 minutes on hold, I get someone who is even more clueless than the previous person. I tell him my problem, and he wants to look me up in their DSL database. "But I am not a Qwest DSL customer!" I tell him. He looks me up anyway. "I can't find you in the database," he says. Really. I just told you that. Heasks what operating system I'm using. WTF? I ask him to conference in my ISP so that they can describe what's going on. Frequent repetitions of this request are met with a huge amount of resistance. "I can talk to someone here about your problem," he says. "Fine," I say, talk to someone else and put me on hold again.
"We don't support other provider's DSL," he returns with after 5 minutes on hold. "That's not the problem!" I plea. "It's not our problem," he says, and transfers me to repair, who claims they don't have anything to do with DSL. Angry, I hang up, and call my ISP back. "Help me please!"
A few days go by. My ISP and DSL provider escalate this help call within their own systems and get a Qwest person with a clue on the case. Within a few hours, they determine that Qwest miswired my line after we dropped our LD carrier. WTF? Within a few minutes of determining this, my DSL service is back on.
"It's not our problem." No one at Qwest even made the slightest effort to try to delve deeper into my problem, they just wanted to get me off the phone as quickly as possible. Today's tech support is getting more and more useless. If you don't have an inside person in the system, you don't stand a chance of getting your problem fixed these days.
</rant>
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:2, Interesting)
No -- what brings them the bad name is their inability to exhibit critical thinking skills and do anything beyond read from a script that's totally outside the realm of the experienced problem.
For example, I have a Netgear FVS318 (several, actually). It would randomly reboot itself, and when it came back up there would be no network connectivity (LAN and WAN were both hosed). The only solution was to reset it (paperclip in the back of the machine)
I call tech support, get India (the guy didn't have a "fake" American name even) and he suggests that I fix the problem by resetting the device. HELLO!!! DOOFUS!!! Did you listen? When I described the problem I said I had to reset it! What does resetting the device when I'm on the phone with you do that it didn't do the other 37 times I had the problem?
THAT is what gives Indians a bad name.
Re:Oversea tech support (Score:3, Interesting)
Many moons ago, I had a laptop with a failed floppy drive. I tried calling the tech support center, explained that I had failed hardware, and it was still under warranty. The person there said she would transfer me to the right department, would I please hold. Pretty soon I was disconnected.
Tried it again. Same result.
So the 3rd time, I said "I have some failed hardware, I need an estimate how much it would be to fix it."
This time I got through to a technician, and when he asked me what the problem was, I explained, and then mentioned as an aside, "Oh, and it's still under warranty!"
Maybe they were just having problems with their phone system... makes you wonder.
Re:Orwellian? (Score:4, Interesting)
Admittedly, "Orwellian" is most often applied directly the 1984, but not always or exclusively.
sPh
Re:I call bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is, as mentioed earlier, their busisness model. No one seems to have developed a resonable and equitable way to pay outsourcers, because the per call method simply does not work.
Usually the drive to run businesses this way comes from execs with profit sharing, they get their money and leave before the client is completely pissed, and their resumes look like waves of profitability!
I worked at a company w/ an oustource division, that hired an exec that had just finished pulling this stunt on another company. When i got their, our segment was unprofitable (as support should be), in 3 months we had our first $1 million month, followed by a 2$mil and then $4mil. Folowed by a pissed client, and exec jumping ship, and the downward spiral to loosing the client and the profits.
The exec? He moved on to his next job and showed off the exponential profit growth that this company had under his fine direction!
Worst tech support in the universe: UPS (Score:4, Interesting)
Their next step is ALWAYS to send you another CD-ROM of the software, even if you have two copies of the same version and neither gets you anywhere. This is their "get off the phone" move, because they don't offer a download or FTP site... Instead, you must ALWAYS have it shipped to you, even if it is going to cost your business a large amount of money.
Actual Quote from Manager: "Sir, we can't afford the bandwidth to allow people to download a 650 mb CD-ROM from our web-site! We'd go broke!"
Me: "I zipped the entire contents of the CD into a 12 mb file..."
Manager: "The size is irrlevant, I simply cannot offer you any further support until you install from the new CD-ROM we're sending you."
This might be my favorite Slashdot story every... There've been tech support hell-tales before, but this is an intellgent dissection of the problem. A dreadfully wondeful story.
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:3, Interesting)
Information can't be bought or sold. They still have it if you get it, so they don't lose anything except the ability to restrict what you think and say.
Copyright is the biggest scam since organized religion.
A Very Different Environment (Score:5, Interesting)
Our goals are reduced visits by field engineers who typically bill $$$$ to be onsite to solve what is frequently a simple problem. Our calls aren't timed, and we do pretty much whatever it takes to solve the problem. Today, we talked a customer thru configuring Zone Alarm correctly so they can use our product. Sure it took over half an hour, most of our calls do. But the important point is that the customer was happy when we were done.
I have been here 4 years now, and don't have the absolute gut level hatred of my job that I hear from many support people. I am posting this because I want you to know that not all support centers are awful dens of customer dissatisfaction. Some of us do actually do our jobs.
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:5, Interesting)
You've certainly identified the real culprit here. Even before corporations started setting up shop in India to hire people for lower wages (which are probably great wages in India), it was very typical for corporations to misuse, or not even use at all, the advanced skills many people have. It seems they are doing exactly the same thing in India.
There was a situation a few years ago when I lived in Dallas. There was a woman who I met who was wanting to learn more about Unix. Turns out she was being hired on an H-1B visa by Texas Instruments to be a Unix systems administrator. But she seemed to be a smart person so I asked her more about herself and found out she had a master's degree in CS, and the only experience she had with Unix is having logged in as a student user to a Linux machine a few times. So why would an American corporation hire someone obviously well qualified for more advanced work into a lower level job (run around and fix Sun desktops for engineers) she had no experience in? Obviously for cheaper wages (which, despite claims to the contrary, is easy to get away with using H-1B) is one of the reasons. But they probably could have her doing the more advanced work at the lower wages, too, so why not? Corporations also try to keep people down; maybe managers are afraid of being replaced by people that know more. But this has been a common practice for decades, to underutilize people's skills. It didn't change even with H-1B, and it won't change with outsourcing in India.
I can't blame any Indians (or Chinese, or Russians, or anyone else) for wanting to find better work for better pay than they have been getting before. The real blame goes to corporate executives who just try to screw people over, whether American or Indian ... all for profit. People in America are trying to recover their own jobs, and it's quite obvious the only way to do that is a change of government, since the corporations themselves are obviously not doing it (and aren't expected to, since their loyalty is strictly to their shareholders). The saddest part of this situation is that it will breed some hatred for India and Indians that is not due, and may take years to erase.
What I'd really like to see happen is that Indians get together and form all new companies that better respect people than the companies in America run by greedy fat cat scrooges, and end up not only putting everyone in India to work, but also end up coming to America and displacing these crappy companies we have here.
THE ANSWER GROUP SUCKS FAT COCK (Score:3, Interesting)
Apple's Tech Support (Score:3, Interesting)
However, she was very happy with the technical support people who she said were very helpful, and rather smart. She's very much into computers, and so knows bad tech support when she hears it (she introduced me to Linux, for example), and was very much pleased with Apple's tech support.
She tells me she almost enjoyed the fact that she got to call tech support, made her feel so much better about getting a Mac.
Re:What's funny is... (Score:4, Interesting)
We have been working hard on turning the situation around, with some success. My wife ran into a problem with her account a while back, and in light of this I decided that I would try to play customer rather than just getting the responsible engineer to fix it. The people I talked to were helpful, courteous, and didn't have a frickin' clue how to solve the problem. The standard response was "we changed something about your account, but it won't have any effect for a few hours. Check then, and call back if you're still having a problem."
I went through that three times before I just had a coworker fix it. Sounds an awful lot like the experiences described in the article.
Re:I call bullshit (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Very, very familiar. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Support is demanding and expensive (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. So it is not surprising that the support service for products that are generally sold by being the least-cost box available is a DISASTER. I bought a Gateway box for $399. With one exception, it has worked just fine. I suspect that if I ever make a call to tech support, Gateway ends up losing money. The one time I had a problem, their Web site actually had useful information that allowed me to recover gracefully -- much better information than I think I would have gotten from the call center.
Re:I remember when... (Score:3, Interesting)
Build a file com.txt
E40:0
F8 03 F8 02 E8 03 E8 02
q
run Debug com.txt, shake with one pentium math error and enjoy.
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry, no offense intended to Indians, but I have a difficult time understanding the accent. Some accents I just have trouble with. But that really isn't the issue for me. The issue is that phone tech support can only fill the role of a live FAQ list. Seriously, the bulk of tech support questions could be covered by a few beginner's computing courses and a small handy reference.
I'm sure the Indian call center staffers are intelligent and knowledgeable. The problem is that these big mail-order PC mega-corps dumped product at ultra-low prices and killed off the little local computer shops. Those places were actually the first line of tech support for these companies, and it didn't cost the mail-order companies one red cent. Plus walk-in or on-site was a more efficient way to solve problems, since the customer didn't have to sit there for hours and describe things to a support rep. My former customers (I no longer do PC repair) were more than happy to pay me money to fix a warrantied computer so they didn't have to call their vendor's tech support lines.
So, I have two views on this. I'd like to see some of these mail-order companies endure a harsh consumer backlash. On the other hand, I'm kind of glad to see consumers put the screws to these big mail-order companies, and force them to keep their support promises. Along with this, Indians have job opportunities that otherwise might not have existed.
I'm begging for a flaming here, but I'm not too worried about the Americans; When the average Indian can start a business in one day but paying $20 for a S&U Tax permit, and actually expect to make a living, then we can compare US jobs to Indians jobs.
Uninstall IE from 98? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nothing new here... BULL*$@# ! (Score:3, Interesting)
While MS may have pioneered this approach in the tech field, most companies should not be in a position to emulate this callous disregard. After all, MS has long enjoyed monopoly power but hardly anyone can talk of most (any?) PC makers having monopoly power. It seems like such lousy service is not something these PC makers should be able to get away with providing. On the other hand, MS can barely warm over Windows 95 again, throw in a few features, recommend business buyers NOT purchase the product, and foist it on consumers as "Windows Millenium Edition" (not to be confused with the millenium edition of Windows NT known as Windows 2000). Now THAT's monopoly power.
BTW, Neal Stephenson hit this nail on the head in his essay "In the Beginning was the command line" seen here [cryptonomicon.com]. In the essay, he predicted a future MS operating system would consist of logging on and just seeing one button to click. Voila, I give you "Luna" in XP (years later).
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Negative. This article is absolutely accurate.
I don't know if other outsource companies do this, but Stream uses the title "mentor" for its second-level people (the tech support guy's tech support).
I worked at Stream, and I can personally confirm that it is completely accurate in describing what life is like there. The metric for success is NOT "Did you solve problems for the customers today?" but rather "How many calls did you take today?" Nothing else matters. It was particularly bad in our group, because The Customer was really fastidious about checking over our shoulders. This meant that punters would be caught much quicker than average, but it also meant that we had two sets of almost mutually contradictory objectives: "Solve Problems!" and "Get off that phone NOW!!"
Perhaps the most revealing story I can tell is the one about the staff meeting where our manager's boss was meeting with our manager and every tech on our team. Our manager was standing behind the Boss when a tech asked a Yes-or-No question of the Boss. Our manager immediately started wagging his head "No" and frowning, as though he thought it was a stupid question. In the next instant, the Boss said "Yes" and proceeded to expand on that answer. Almost simultaneously, our manager switched from a frowning "No" to a smiling "Sure!", wagging his head up and down instead.
It was one of the most amazing brown-nosing performances I've ever witnessed.
I can't tell you how happy I am not to be trapped in that dead-end job anymore, but if I absolutely had no other choice, I'd do it again. There's a lot of pressure, but no one ever asks you to take work home or work extra hours.
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. And if your privacy concerns are so acute that you can't register for a website, you shouldn't be using the world wide web to get your news in the first place. Their weblogs are probably far more useful in tracking you than some stupid username.
In fact, when I worked for an online newspaper provider, I would generally have mine the logs when we needed more information on a user. Example: somebody posted a death threat to a reporter using our forums. His username pointed to a yahoo account, no use there. Luckily, I was able to trace his account's last login back to one of our reverse cache servers, and get his IP address from the logs. His local PD used this info to contact his ISP, and they tracked him down pretty good.
5 Reasons to Build Your Own Machine (Score:2, Interesting)
Other advantages of this approach:
(1) You can save a fair amount of money.
True, you can get a celeron-based machine for $300 from WalMart, but who knows what corners they're cutting? A lot of the quality of a computer is based on motherboard, type of memory, HDD speed, and other factors that are deemphasized by sellers who focus on CPU speed and HDD size.
(2) You can better customize your components to match your needs: gaming, digital video, entertainment center, whatever. You end up with a higher quality computer for less money.
(3) You don't have to deal with any tech support malarchy.
(4) When (not if) your computer breaks, you get to trouble shoot the problem yourself. In the process, you gain a betterunderstanding of your computer. It can be a great learning process. And, the problem-solving aspect can be fun.
(5) You don't have to replace an entire computer to upgrade it. Adding a new video card or more memory might be all you need. My computer is continually evolving.
The big problem is that, as far as I know, this approach is not feasible for laptops, only desktops. If you need a laptop, you might have to end up dealing with big sellers and their tech support.
Average call answer time (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The worst (Score:3, Interesting)
You get 1 year of actual warranty against defect. But if a user needs tech support, they get 90 days (unless the poster above is correct about it being one year if the problem is hardware related).
So your iBook has 1 year of warranty. But if for some weird-ass reason your software update isn't working properly, you only have 90 days of support from apple for that particular aspect (unless it happens to be something relating to a failure of your NIC, for example).
Tech support isn't something most
Re:Bad experience with Qwest (Score:2, Interesting)
A week later my service was pretty much non-existent. The script I had written to send Telus an e-mail every time the DNS server went down
First I got this fancy voice recognition system. It even had a name... Amy or something. Apparently it thinks "you've got to be kidding" means "transfer me to sales! I'd like to buy something!" Anyway, after convincing the computer that I'd like to talk to tech support, I spent TWO HOURS on hold being assured that there were some problems in Edmonton but Calgary was perfectly fine. Finally, the tech support guy told me that they were upgrading the wire centre in my area because they had more DSL accounts than it could handle. Calling back a week later gave pretty much the same result, except that on-hold times were a bit longer.
The third time I called I got a real live person (after a two hour wait). I guess "Amy" had a nervous breakdown. This call answerer listened to my rant then told me that the wire centre story was BS and that the problem was really Telus' systems couldn't handle the load from the Windows virus going around at the time. Her DSL at home was down too, and had been for the last couple of weeks and she lived in a completely different part of the city. I still don't know who was right, but the second story seems a lot more likely. So it seems the tech support guys weren't only incompetent, they were actively lying to me. I very nearly switched to Shaw (the only other viable alternative for high speed Internet) but not being a cable subscriber their DSL fee is rather high.
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:4, Interesting)
While I had one or two people in the group experienced with computers, some were paralegals or people who were laid off from manufacturing jobs. Their re-education was woefully inadequate, and I can only imagine how frustrating it must have been for the customers.
I should mention, however, that this was in '94, so I have no idea what the process or hiring pool is like these days.
Re:I remember when... (Score:2, Interesting)
All the people who tried to economize on His Billness's time would have left for the day, and callers would get tech support from Bill Gates.
This is the New Mexico era I'm talking about here.
Some outsourced support is Great! (Score:3, Interesting)
Not trying to flame, just to put a little balance into the picture. "Americanized" foreign call centers seem disingenuous to me, however, if outsourcing SOME support results in skilled support staff being affordable, I'm OK with that. It just seems that the dialogue about outsourcing needs to be balanced with by recognizing where it can be a good thing rather than automatically cry that the sky is falling.
I know, I know, why be reasonable when we can freak out and spread lots of FUD. I am on
Re:The not so simple solution (Score:5, Interesting)
basically the way it worked was you call me, i WANTED to help you, but the help you need would take 15+ minutes of my time. people who did not maintain an average call time of 10 minutes get let go. Now, i may try to be a nice guy and help as many people as i can, but having income and feeding my family is just a tad more important to me than your adsl connection. Now the script thats provided is designed to work in a certain amount of time, as well as the huge list of things we wont support. i had a choice, go with the not so helpful and make you call more often script, or go with my own learned knowledge of troubleshooting and get you working as best i can.
at the end of the month, buddy who doesnt know that much, but follows the script to the letter, pisses people off (but since he followed procedures, his ass is covered), wastes a bunch of callers' time.. well he gets an award at the end of the month cause his call times ae so low. I on the other hand who spent the month bending over backwards (helping you find that mac address to your router instead of having you call the manufacturer, then call us back and waste more of your time) well i get a warning letter that if my stats dont improve, i will be let go...
the people you talk to on the other end of the phone are people too, and its not their fault that they have to be so unhelpful. in alot of cases they arent ignorant unhelpful bastards, they're just told that customer satisfaction and first call resolution takes a back seat to call times and call volume handled.
i tried playing the game for a while, but i never felt right comming home knowing that i really didnt HELP many people at all. so i went back to trying to help as much as possible, but found it impossible to maintain a low call time average while actually doing something for the customer. in the end i was let go because i "did not fit the company's bussiness profile" even though i did recieve several citations when an extreemely satisfied customer would write in praising my professionalism.
bitch and whine all you want, you're still not gonna be heard.. and that guy you talked to once a long time ago who went above and beyond? well go down to the ei office and you might meet up with him again.
Re:You can't get parts from India... (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you heard about these "Consultants" that will hire Indian(and other) programmers for your projects? These guys will get you a job regardless of your skill or experience. If you are an Indian recently graduated (in US or wherever), they will FABRICATE a resume according to the skills of the job required. I've seen people put "4 years exp in
That is why although consultants will take anything from 20-40% of the programmers salary they treat them like SHIT. While they wait for a job its not uncommon to see the consultants "helping" out by making 5-6 guys stay in a 2 room apartment. They search for ANY job and turn up one day and say "Ok you have an interview for a job about J2EE tomorrow, read all u can about it". One girl recently got thrown out in two weeks from AmEx. She had "eight years of experience".
My cousin however, came here on a dependant Visa, got a job through a consultant(who got her an H1B),worked on 34K $ for a year or two by making sure she knew all that was required by the job. (She does not know what a Mac is or even Sun or AMD)
I have yet to see ONE case where an H1B programmer was genuinely needed. Theres only one aim for companies when they hire H1B's : all for profit.
For the record: I am Indian. And I will be desperate enough for a job when I graduate to go through a consultant.
But I too do not like the hatred developing towards Indians in the US tech community. I would like to get hired because I am much better than an average American programmer, not because I work cheap. But I will work cheap if the job is really to my liking !
Indian companies(ie based in India) have never done anything innovative in CS although many Indians have done well in American Universities and companies.(just start photoshop and see the credits for example). I do not think there will be innovation from Indian unless the local market develops. Most companies in India doing good work are branches of US/Western companies.(Intel, STMIcro, TI, MS
How about an updater? (Score:4, Interesting)
I work with a guy whose answer to any problem he can't or doesn't want to solve is to tell the user to go to Windows Update and install all the updates and call back when they are done. I've heard him do this even on problems where an email has been sent out with the exact instructions on how to resolve an easily resolvable known issue. It's brilliant though, because it usually takes the user so long to do that chances are when they call back he's either gone or doesn't answer the phone and someone else has to deal with it. And who is going to argue that patching security flaws is a bad thing, even if it doesn't solve their problems.
Tech Support for some large company (true story) (Score:5, Interesting)
The training was decent, when the instructor was able to speak over the people in the back of the class talking. Usually that was only when the people in the back of the class were sleeping. We were told to try and keep a 7-minute average call time, which was impossible because the databases to search for registered customers were slow as hell (especially since they ran off the software developed by the company we were supporting...HINT HINT). If a customer wasn't in the database, we had to add them, which was even slower. Then we had to search on the intranet's knowledge base (KB), which, by the way, was slow, until we found the problem. We were told specifically not to say anything that wasn't in the KB and that if we were smart, the only words coming out of our mouths would either be from a script from training or a script from the KB. This included denying knowledge of pending lawsuits against said company for fraud, much less denying knowledge of the Attorney General looking into unethical business practices, etc. Thankfully, I was fired on the third day because I opened up a DOS prompt to ping a user. Sure, I had to save a file called dos.bat onto the desktop that contained the line "cmd" in it to get to the prompt, but even so, I was never told that going to a DOS prompt was an offense punishable by termination.
I wasn't sad to go, though. So many calls were related to the previously mentioned class action suit against the company or the problem that inspired the lawsuit that I wanted to wash my hands each time I finished a call. The official policy was that if the user hadn't purchased an extended warranty (possibly needed 2-3 if they had purchased their product long enough in the past), then they would have to send in their product and pay a $100 repair fee because a faulty part in the product finally failed completely and, even though the company was aware that many products were shipped with said faulty products, they still charged the customers. They also did not recall the products or even acknowledge that there was any kind of specific problem. We were simply told to alert the user that they needed to send the machine in and our repair center would take care of the rest.
Excellent luck with Applecare (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all, the wait times are typically 2-5 minutes. I wish I could turn off the background music so that I could just leave it on speakerphone until it gets transferred, but 2-5 minutes a couple times a year strikes me as okay.
Secondly, the TS specialists seem to know their stuff. They seem to have been well trained. I've been getting people in Austin... anyone know whether they are Apple empolyees or whether it is outsourced? I'd guess they are Apple employees, but I don't know for sure.
In any case, I called them twice recently. The first call was because the email application started croaking a lot (once or twice a day). The technical support specialist was very knowledgeable, spent quite a bit of time with me discussing what it might be, etc. He actually listened to my theory that it was related to the junk-mail rules engine, pointed out how I could reset the rules engine, and that in fact seemed to solve the problem. It's nice when tech support will actually listen to your theories :-)
The other call was because my laptop hard drive started making bad noises. I felt like they might have made me go through more steps than absolutely necessary (OS reinstall, disk-erase/OS reinstall) than absolutely necessary, but the trouble shooting they wanted me to do was not unreasonable. Also, they (after some persuading) were willing to send me a drive and let me replace it, rather than have to send them the laptop for a week (it's my everything-including-work computer, so it's tough to let it go for even a day, nevermind a week).
All in all, I've never felt like they wasted my time, the stuff they ask me to try makes sense, and ultimately I've had my problems solved with a reasonable minimum of fuss.
Applecare is not exactly cheap, but given that I tend to keep my Macs for 4-5 years, it's not an outrageous expense. I think other computer manufacturers could win some points with their customers by being more like Apple.
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked at a call center that lost a contract to stream. The computer maker knew we were better than stream, in fact their own call QA person said we scored better than any other center, including internal centers that delt with high end business customers. But it's all about money. In our case, we could get under 12 minute calls, but weren't extracting enough $35 non-supported help fees.
Sounds like a business plan to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Hey, it's better than selling pet food on the Internet.
Re:Similar to my experiences... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I work for Stream in Ontario, Canada, very large desktop contract, and they lie like crazy to you during training. But I'm not all that surprised. It's a decent job to have as a part-timer, and they (thankfully) don't care all that much about Average Handle Time (average time / call) here, especially if you can get a good CSAT (customer satisfaction survey) rating at the end of the day.
I figure it depends on the company that does the outsourcing and the company that's outsourcing to them. In our contract, we try as much as we can to keep people at our site and away from the India site... I've had more angry customers because of something they've done wrong than from any other cause.
Another thing was a bit after we were bought by Solectron, we started having MASSIVE turnover and were horribly, horribly understaffed (and the fact that this was happening in the middle of August when the Blaster worm had just started didn't help). That's fixed itself since then (and perhaps because there's rumours we might be "divested" from Solectron), but it does show that mergers are almost never good for the people actually doing the work (and by extension their customers).
A Call Center by Any Other Name... (Score:2, Interesting)
Our employment video showed a happy cheerful place where people were genuinely interested in a new credit card, or some entertainment club, or identity theft protection. Every person had their own cubical, with computer and phone, and the entire call center looked like some upscale human resources department.
My call center was dirty. Dirty isnt really a strong enough word to describe it, but lets just say that people got excited when they had the little moist towelettes to wipe down the keyboards, which had years of god only knows what encrusted on the keys. The fabric on the chairs were stained horribly, like someone's pet had gotten loose and had some fun.
You would go in around 9:00, put on the headset, and log into the computer, which were running Windows 98 with some specialized dialer software. A name would flash on screen. The instant that name popped up, the person had already said "Hello" at least once. Meaning, no time to attempt to figure out pronunciation... "Hello, Mr. Fhqwhgads please."
Assuming that you are close enough to the proper pronucniation that they dont slam the phone down in disgust, you must seek permission to continue. This is required by law. How is this circumvented? The magic word is "okay".
Never, ever, ever, ever ask a question without phrasing it so that the last word is "okay". That is one of the fundamentals. "I'm calling from *******, and i know you're probably busy, but i just want to take a quick moment of your time, okay?" If they dont say "no" or something similar immediatly following that, then you have legal permission to continue. You start your schpeil. The trick is to say it as quickly as possible, outline benefits, and explain to this person who is already way over their head in debt why they want a new credit card just because of the balance transfers. The script itself is like a choose your own adventure. For early interrupts, there are a series of retorts for you to choose from. You must respond to early interrupts. Once you have outlined benefits, you use a line similar to "i know this is a great deal that can really help you out, so after a quick confirmation and approval, we can have this card out to you in a few weeks, okay?" If they say they are not interested here, you must use no less than 2 second efforts, which outline other benefits that you didnt mention before. Long before you actually get to go through with the second efforts, the "customer" has already hung up, but this is of no concern to the managers, who walk around the room listing in on each "Tele-Service Representitive"'s calls.
The managers are the ones who can convince Neil Armstrong that he never walked on the moon. They speak fast, and they speak clear. Using a form of mind control that is perfected from years of being a telemarketer, when most people normally get 6 sales a day, these guys made 12. They throw around the word "okay" like nobody's business, because they know that the mind's first instinct when it hears "okay?" is to respond with "okay."
Being a telemarketer wasnt about finding people who actually need a service, and making it available to them. The right person for the deal is whoever you are talking to, and its your job to make them realize that.
It was a stressful job, and one that i hope ill never have to go back to again. Getting an ulcer by age 18 should say something about a job. Besides, being a male prostitute would be far less dirty. Maybe the moral of this story is that the concept of the telephone is out dated. I can type faster than i talk anyway...
Re:Nothing new here... BULL*$@# ! (Score:3, Interesting)
I wish more new users knew to reject the formatter, but most don't and then they wonder where their e-mail is at. Responding that users should know better is almost as bad as the formatter telling them that reformatting will fix everything.
Re:Historical context (Score:3, Interesting)
When manufacturing jobs went abroad, everybody said - fine, we'll be a service based industry. But service jobs are leaving too. So, please tell me, what else is there? I do hope that someday that "better job" you describe will make itself evident.
There is an arrogant view (just below the surface in your post) that Americans are smarter than foreigner and therefore we'll always be one step ahead in terms of skills and jobs. As a foreigner (now living in the US) I don't buy it. There is no reason that every single service job in the US can't be moved to India (or wherever). It just will take a little time to implement.
Programming job market isn't bad (Score:3, Interesting)
Right. Just like any GOOD programmer today, whose job is in danger of being outsourced, can learn SOME skill that hasn't been filled by millions of people from third world nations. It will always be that way, and it's why only the more underskilled have to worry about job loss on a protracted basis.
This isn't meant to be a personal attack, but could you please, in your wisdom, tell us what a guy is supposed to do when his whole industry moves to India or China?
And please don't just say retrain.
Hey, no offense taken, and I don't mean the following as an attack either, but...sorry, retrain or become better at what you (by which I mean a general audience 'you') actually do. And the whole industry isn't moving. Companies are hiring skilled college grads, and nearly every job I'm looking at requires programming experience. And they're not based in Bangalore, either. Much of the problem is that a lot of programmers here only know how to program, and more and more this level of programming is being outsourced.
I would say your problem is NOT Indians - it's skilled Americans in other fields who can program just as well. People similar to me who program better - I'm an adequate, not great, coder, but I will soon have a Ph.D. in chemistry. These days, programming is good for accenting a skill set, but isn't sufficient alone. In other words, the people in demand are scientists who program well, finance people who program well, etc. But it's not people who are expert at standard CS group theory algorithms and the like, because it's expected that a programmer can pick that up if they need it. My advice to people majoring in CS is this: double major in finance or a phyisical/life science. You will have to beat companies, American companies, away with a stick.
Oh yeah, did the 'retrain and get a better job' theory work for all those poor souls who lost their manufacturing jobs in the 70's 80's and 90's? Using this as an example, personally I'm afraid for my future.
I'm glad you bring that up. And are all those "poor souls" currently unemployed? No. They're not. Because they, for the most part, successfully retrained. And certainly our economy is better for it.
Also, don't be afraid for your future if you're competent. For what it's worth, the times during which a person would enter the work force and perform a single job for 40 years are long dead. Technical fields change so fast that, if you don't keep up, you're an irrelevant dinosaur. And I mean that inclusively - if *I* don't keep up with my field, I will likewise become a relic. That's the way it is these days, and that excitement and novelty is why we choose the fields we do, I expect.
Let's put it this way. Lots of people bitch and moan about outsourcing, but what's the alternative? Make sure that menial labor is done in the US? Make sure that we can't compete with other countries? I mean, when you put this in historical context, it's ridiculous. Labor markets evolve. We have to deal with it, or become unemployed. Hate to be harsh, but that's the way it is.
Re:The not so simple solution (Score:2, Interesting)
Not merely "letting". Customers are actively making it horrible.
Re: Complain. Often, constantly, daily. Write letters, not email, call every day.
Letters and phone calls are as easy to ignore as emails, and less likely to be seen in the first place.
Re: "Tie up their support phone lines to the point where nothing gets done."
Yes, because your chance to rave fruitlessly at yet another phone lackey is so much more important than the other guy's chance to actually get his problem solved. Fuck the next guy on hold, you need the illusion of being in control, and you need it now, dammit!
Re: "Tie up their sales lines as well"
Sit on hold for 15+ minutes to talk to someone who'll transfer me to tech in 15 seconds? Yeah, that's stickin' it to The Man all right.
Re: "Demand to speak to the president of the company."
(laughs hysterically for five minutes)
No matter how many times I hear it, it's still funny when someone thinks they're going to accomplish something with a ludicrous demand like that. Why not save time and just say, "Hello. I am an egotistical cretin with an overblown sense of my own importance. Please feel free to marginalize and ignore me."?
Re: "File complaints with every consumer group you can find."
At last, a tactic with a somewhat reasonable chance at eventual success. I knew you'd hit on one eventually.
Re: "Write to magazines, tell them how horrible the support is, tell them you hate the products."
A given magazine typically publishes one, perhaps two, such letters in a month. Better make yours really good, unless you're blowing the editor or something.
Re: "If the company has 12,000 unresolved complaints filed with the BBB in a 2 month period, what do you think will happen to their customer service?"
Here's what will happen: They'll find a few scapegoats, make a haphazard round or two of random firings, pick a new (and equally meaningless) internal slogan, shuffle around departmental responsibilities a trifling amount, and then congratulate themselves on their l337 consumer-relations skillz. In other words, nothing.
Re: "More important to them, what do you think will happen to their stock price?"
Still nothing. Investors care about how much scratch the company makes, not how long its customers spend on hold. And very few of them see a connection between the two.
Re:Violation of copyright laws (Score:4, Interesting)
Is Ken Lay in jail for stealing tens of billions of dollars? Doesn't seem so. How about Rush Limbaugh, who sent his maid out to buy drugs by the thousands? Not a chance.
However, Slashdot pulls a post about Scientology's OT3 "Xenu is an alien" theology, even though they broke no laws.
Ah, I read today that John Ashcroft (Attorney General, anointed by Judge Clarence Thomas) is going to keep prosecuting Scott Ritter, chief American weapons inspector for Iraq, for something involving that faked kiddie porn charge that was leveled against the ex-Marine after he told everyone that Bush was lying about WMD's. Pure vengeance, pure evil, pure abuse of law to punish those who speak truth to corrupt power.
Here I see that RIAA has hired thugs to wear black windbreakers with the letters "RIAA" emblazoned across the back. They are raiding flea markets and "busting" people. The first recorded use of corporate private law enforcement on the streets.
With all this, who cares about breaking the law about "intellectual property". It's an article, it's on the Internet, it's free. That's how the Internet works. That is how file transfer technology works. Deal.
Stupid laws, and rich bastards who can break any law they like with impunity weaken respect for the law. Enron didn't care. Thousands of CEOs who are looting the nation don't care. Why should we?
The only ethics anyone with cash cares about is: if I can get away with it, screw legal. Obedience is for suckers without lawyers.
Why should we care either?
Tech support, not wat it used to be (Score:2, Interesting)
Slowly and gradually, things started getting worse and worse. I was gradual enough that we didnt actually notice it at first... basically the frog in boiling water. They started getting tighter and tighter on calltimes, slowly lowering the maximum time. The reason we were given was that before we were running more like a help desk than a tech support call center. I personally didnt see much of a difference, both set up to help people with thier problems. We of course didnt support everything, no 3rd party hardware or software. But they slowly started limiting our scope of support.
Then Ted Waitt stepped down and Jeff Weitzen was named CEO. Talk about going to hell in a hand basket. I dont think it was personally Weitzen's fault, but I could be wrong. All of a sudden we werent a call center, we were a cost center, as we cost money to operate instead of generating revenue for the company. They set up pay support lines for the more obscure stuff and stuff we normally didnt handle. They gave everyone scripts to follow. A lot of us had been there 2-3 years at that point and knew these systems inside and out and could fix problems faster than tier flowsheets allowd us. However, if we didnt follow these guidelines we were punished. Written up, yelled at, etc. By this time I was working laptops, and we had a max call time of about 7 and a half minutes. I think standard desktop support was at about 12 or 13, cant quite remember. I was also working with home networking (anyone remember hpna cards?) so I had a little repreive.
They came up with the great idea of lets have tech support sell people stuff when they finish thier calls. I thought that was a totally bogus idea as before if they needed something like more memory or a bigger hard drive we would just transfer them over to the sales dept. for a quick and easy commisioned sale. Now they were expecting us to sell stuff to people that didnt need it. We didnt get commision, but we had numbers to hit. Now as most of you know, Tech support people dont always make good sales people. I was only able to sell extended warranties when the 1 year (used to be 3 year) warranties were over, and the occasional memory upgrade and hard drive, if it was justified that they really could use one. My manager would get on to me about more sales. I told him that I felt cheap and dirty making sales, as these people trusted us much more than sales, as sales people are there to make a sale and nothing more, but we were there to help them. He said, exactly. They are more open to sales from you because they arent expecting a sale from you. You should be pushing everything you can at them. Well of course that didnt go over very well with me, but at the same time they did a restructuring of the que's
With the que restructure, I now sat idle for hours at a time as I was one of about 12 people in all of gateway (at least in the US) that was still on the home networking que. (The rest were smart enough to get out... at about the time that Gateway outsourced thier IT department) So, I wouldnt take any other calls unless the other ques were hopelessly backed up, but that was rare as if you didnt have wicked fast calltimes you
Re:Today only, free access courtesy of Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
We also had the "bullshit" guy who'd curse his customers but could fix anything. I once heard him trying to get a guy to hit his F8 key at the right time to go into safe mode saying "dude, hit the F8 key!! Bang on that sucker like your beating off on a picture of Pamela Anderson". The guy got into safe mode.
He got fired about 6 months later when they started recording his calls. They got one of him talking to another guy there about which female managers they'd like to have sex with. Heck of a way to go.
Re:Keep this in mind... (Score:2, Interesting)
Turns out that Promise stores array information on the disks themselves, so if you plug them back in order (disk0 on raid ide0, etc.) it boots the array just fine. My scream of joy nearly blew the roof off (after spending 3 days getting LVM working with SuSE 8.2 and the pti_st.o Promise Driver... fucking SuSE installer...
Needless to say, I'm continually dumbfounded by the inclusion of RAID 0... <sigh>
Mmm... 0+1, 4 disks to get reliable fast performance that I could have gotten by buying Seagate Cheetah's and SCSI... for the same price. yeah.