adventures in tech support (good read)

[imported_pak9rabid]

Man, my friend just im'd me a convo he had with with his manager at an outsource tech support company. This may help explain why big isp's provide such poor tech support:

Manager : what is the status of this call
Employee: messed up cant get her to route
Manager : transfer to 2350 if it doesn't end in the next 2 min
Employee: k
Manager : did you transfer this call yet
Manager : put them on hold
Manager : right now
Employee: hold up onnnnee sec, shes rebooting, if this didnt work ill xfer
Manager : man i told you to end that call a long time ago
Manager : put her on hold
Manager : i'll end it for you
Employee: dood, just a sec, literally
Manager : no
Employee: its dialing
Manager : PUT HER ON HOLD NOW
Manager : next time you better end the call when i say end it

(taken directly from the AIM conversation window with names edited out)

What a world we live in where you get yelled/threatened at by your manager for trying to help a customer, especially in a company that gets paid for helping out other isps' customers. If I were an isp that had someone else handling my tech support, i would be FURIOUS to find out that this is the kind of treatment my customers are getting.

I mean seriously, what is the point of technical support? To give customers the runaround after x minutes have gone by? Call me old-fashioned, but i always thought it was to fix the customer's problem.

 

[Garion]

It is very possible that the manager knew that the call wasn't being solved in a given amount of time and wanted to escalate it to a higher level tech (No offense if you were the original tech!) so that it could be resolved in a timely manner. People in call centers, especially managers have their pay (mostly in bonuses) closely tied to customer satisfaction and time-to-resolve is a very key factor. It's possible this manager was just trying to CYA (rather, CYB - Cover Your Bonus) and get the situation dealt with). There might also be some kind of service level agreements with the ISP - If the call can't be answered in X minutes by the first tier tech support it must be escalated. You might have been at X+5 minutes which looks bad in the reports.

- G

 

[imported_pak9rabid]

no offense taken, as i said, this was a friend of mine. I realize that mgmt has their own agenda to fulfill, but I mean hell. The only reason that company is in business is because they're there to help people with problems. I don't know. Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that if you're advertising yourself as a company that takes care of others' customers, that's what should be going on. some problems (especially when dealing with routing issues) can take a long time to troubleshoot. It seems to me that instead of transferring calls to another person who is not familiar with the issue at hand, it should be handled by the original tech. Not only will this help reduce the call time, but above all, the customer isn't going to be as frustrated due to being put on hold while the call is waiting for another available tech to become available.

 

[Garion]

In most cases, the people answering the initial calls are simple tech support monkeys who are trained to read the FAQ and follow certain troubleshooting scripts. (Again, no offense, but this is just life that I've seen. Outsourcers are not known for their stellar and genius-IQ tier 1 techs). When things go beyond the standard scripts or the standard answers don't work, it gets escalated so the customer keeps happy and they don't have to flail around and piss off the customer.

Most standard troubleshooting procedures are designed to be executed in X minutes - When it gets more complex, they want the support monkey spending their time on a customer they can better serve from their standard answer base and let the tier 2 guy deal with the "tough" question.

- G