Is tech support broken?
Every year PC Magazine polls its readers about tech support and then issues a report. This year’s results are out and the magazine’s editor Lance Ulanoff says Tech Support is Broken. He reports some personal experiences and says:
In the end, I empathize with companies like Dell that are trying to support millions of users, with limited success. It’s a huge burden to guide people effectively to the best user experience. However, the solutions that Dell and others have turned to—scripted responses and outsourced help—is not really cutting it.
I avoid calling tech support like the plague but recently I had no option. My Verizon DSL connection was unusable. I won’t bore you with the details but first I did all the things that anyone can do – rebooting the modem, checking all the cables, etc, etc, etc. After several hours, I gritted my teeth and tried Verizon DSL help. I first talked to an Indian gentleman who was working from a script and just wasted my time. By constantly repeating the litany of things I had done that showed that the problem was not at my end, I bulled my way from one person to the next until about two hours later (there was a lot of sitting and listening to canned announcements) I finally got hold of someone actually in NJ where I live and who actually could do something useful. He ran a line test, found a problem, and submitted a trouble ticket. Shortly thereafter, my problem was fixed.
Because I could describe my problem accurately, had taken all obvious steps to fix it, and was persistent about finding a higher level technician, I got my problem solved. But heaven help the average non-technical person; he or she would still be talking to an Indian gentlemen reading from a script.
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Comments
It’s pretty much the same nightmare with SBC/AT&T. One particularly moronic part of their script calls for deleting all cookies, as if cookies would have a detrimental effect on establishing a connection. Please.
Like Verizon, once you can get by the script-readers in Bangalore, you stand a good chance of getting someone that actually knows something. But I have lots of sympathy for the typical user that is faced with this situation.
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It’s the Helpless Desk syndrome!
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