Warning: Tech Support Rant

[DynamoNED]

Some of you who've read the Motherboard section of The Workbench may know I'm having an issue with an ASUS M4A785-M board I was using in my parents' new computer. When I originally called into tech support, the tech politely listened while I explained the issue and what I had done to test for certain problems. After a couple of quick tests, he concurred that I had a corrupted BIOS chip, transferred me to the department where I could get a replacement, but they were not available, so I left a message. (Thus far, it has not been returned.) All in all, a relatively pleasant tech support experience.

<rant>
Later, I called into support again because the tech never gave me a case number. Turns out one was never created, and no record of my previous call existed. However, this new guy, whose English was barely understandable, insisted that the issue was because I was not using a 600W+ power supply. Having already tested this problem with my 650W Corsair PSU (which is less than 6 months old) and still encountering the exact same problem, I knew this was not the issue. After I explained this to him 3 TIMES, he then insisted it was a memory issue, which I had also already tested with the last tech support guy. Long story short, after 95 minutes on the phone, he finally told me I would have to RMA the board for "unspecified technical problems." After I politely mentioned that all I really needed was a new BIOS chip, he claimed that they were not user-serviceable (despite being clearly removable and there being a section of the support site dedicated to replacing them). I asked for his supervisor, but he claimed it would be a 45 minute wait due to call volume. At this point, I just accepted the RMA number, because I didn't want to deal with the guy anymore. But at least he gave me a case number!

So, it appears I will have to RMA this motherboard, after all. This means at least another 2-3 weeks before I can finish this build for my parents. At this point, my mom just wants to "buy a computer from Wal-Mart that works" and that hurts me as a modder. So, to all you tech support people: I realize you have a script you are supposed to follow, but when the user tells you that they have already done these tests and they didn't fix the issue, listen to them. When you blatantly lie to the customer, it undercuts your credibility. When you assume that your customer is technologically-illiterate and he/she proves otherwise, stop treating them like they are.
</rant>

Thanks for your time & patience.

EDIT: I believe I forgot to mention that I checked with every reputable power supply calculator I could find, and even at max load, the system I'm building for my parents should never pull over 400W of power. Why I would need a 600W+ PSU is completely beyond me; the 520W Antec I'm using should be more than enough.

[Airbozo]

I feel your pain.

I deal with a lot of Supermicro boards and have seen some simple problems as well as "that absolutely cannot be the motherboard" issue (yes it was a motherboard issue). It turns out I know more about their products than any of their tech support people do. When I call in, I ask for one specific person and either wait or leave a message. I am actually testing their online support system now and one issue has drug on for almost a week now (I am recording all results to send to the VP).

I have a similar situation with Dell. Once they take my company name and contact info, they transfer me directly to the top tier support with no further questions. This is due to past experiences (that were recorded) and the amount of money we spend with them.

My past experience with ASUS has been very good. I have had 3 BIOS issues with my striker extreme and the last 2 times I just contacted the bios department directly. The last time they sent me _2_ chips. Just in case... ;)

[AmEv]

Too bad you don't remember the one guy's name.

[Drum Thumper]

Next time, request to speak to an American. Most companies will honor this request.

[Kayin]

You know, there are people who sell just bios chips preflashed for like 5-10 dollars. You may want to look one up.

I used to make them for anyone who wanted, but I don't have an unsocketable bios machine with me at the moment. If you have a spare machine, look up hotflashing if it's simply a corrupt image.

[dr.walrus]

Next time, request to speak to an American.

Yes, you should ask to speak to someone else, but an american? this tech is clearly an idiot who shouldn't be talking to people whose language he doesn't speak, his nationality is irrelevant!

[Luthien]

Ugh, Tech Support! The horror...the frustration...the wanting to smack them upside the head through the phone...

I understand that companies outsource to foreign countries to save money,but saving money seems to be their biggest priority. If the customers calling speak English, the tech support personnel should also speak English. I don't mean they should just kind of speak English; I mean really understand the language. I don't know how many times I've called tech support for various companies and for various reasons. I always get someone who doesn't really grasp the language or least that I cannot understand.

I'm not trying to say that everyone in the world should speak English. I just believe that if they are serving English speaking customers they should be able to both understand the customer and be understood by the customer.

[dr.walrus]

I'm not trying to say that everyone in the world should speak English. I just believe that if they are serving English speaking customers they should be able to both understand the customer and be understood by the customer.

I've worked as a supervisor in a tech support call centre outsourced overseas and I agree 100%. This was the very first pre-requisite in our hiring policy, and I totally believe in it.

However, that made it even MORE annoying when customers asked to speak to someone 'in their own country'!

[Luthien]

I've worked as a supervisor in a tech support call centre outsourced overseas and I agree 100%. This was the very first pre-requisite in our hiring policy, and I totally believe in it.

However, that made it even MORE annoying when customers asked to speak to someone 'in their own country'!

I never specify which country I want someone to come from. I just want them to truly speak English. There are plenty of places where English is spoken.

[DynamoNED]

Ugh, Tech Support! The horror...the frustration...the wanting to smack them upside the head through the phone...

That is a quite succinct way of putting how I felt. It's pretty sad when the PEBKAC error is on the tech support end of the phone. (If you don't know what a PEBKAC error is, )(sds )

At this point, I think I'm just going to RMA the board because I'm sick of dealing with it. What I'm not sure about is whether to get another board to finish the build and just have a spare when the replacement comes, or wait the 2-3 weeks and finish the build then. Given my mother's frustration about not having a computer, I'm leaning toward the former.

On that note, anyone got a AM3 board they want to sell and can ship ASAP? Or should I just buy new off the 'Egg or Tiger?

[dr.walrus]

I never specify which country I want someone to come from. I just want them to truly speak English. There are plenty of places where English is spoken.

I was agreeing with you!

[Technochicken]

You prove the point of this comic:

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/customer_service

[Twigsoffury]

wish they would start going by amperage required, and not total peak watts



There are premium 550W power supplies that put out more amps then a flimsy 650/750W does.


Oh the answer to speaking to someone with a really bad accent? Bust out your craziest american accent.

yankee accents work extremely well.

They know what a hot dog is, But not a Hawot Daowg

[Luthien]

I was agreeing with you!Sorry, I know you were; I just wanted to point out that English is spoken in a lot of places.

[dr.walrus]

Sorry, I know you were; I just wanted to point out that English is spoken in a lot of places.
That was what annoyed me most - our international outsourcing amounted to Australia > NZ, and the language is spoken as the first language in both countries!

I once had a customer ask to speak to someone in the same country, and I asked that if I got on a plane to Aus and I called him back from there, whether that would be better. He wasn't happy at that suggestion!

[Luthien]

That's a pretty good one. What did the customer say?


Personally, I wouldn't care what country the person was from as long as we could understand each other. HughesNet is one of the worst about people who "speak English." I don't believe I've ever been able to get anywhere with them. In fact, I need to call them and have been putting it off because I know how bad it'll be.

[slaveofconvention]

Foreign tech support is often a problem, and one that isn't going to go away anytime soon - not while the savings are as substantial as they are. It's notable that some UK companies are now starting to make a point of having "UK Based call centres" as a selling point.

I'm now long past the point where, if I call in for any kind of help that isn't utterly essential, I'll hang up within 30 seconds of being put onto a foreign call centre. 30 seconds, in my opinion, is more than long enough for any vaguely competent person to convince me that they know what they're doing as opposed to reading a script off of a screen.

[dr.walrus]

That's a pretty good one. What did the customer say?

They called me a smart arse and asked to speak to a supervisor. I was supervising that shift so I had the pleasure of telling them that.

[dr.walrus]

Thing is, generally 'good call centre staff ' is an oxymoron. Staff turnover rates are so high, the industry is so competitive, and technical staff are normally there as a stopgap before they move to a non-call-centre environment. That's not saying there aren't good and bad agents, or that there aren't good or bad call centres, but it's a very, very difficult job in a very competitive market place, and near-impossible to do well.

Outsourcing is another big issue. Don't outsource, you get better knowledge, better communication, better training resources. You also get very, very limited capacity for variations in call volume, so when something major happens - a production flaw; a safety issue; maybe just a stupidly busy day, those people sit on hold for a long time. That just happens, no matter how much you stand up and shout at all your agents to finish their calls and clear their lines. Outsources are actually more accountable and more likely to work hard to reach targets (like queue time), because there's a greater incentive.

Thing is, the service everyone wants is pretty much impossible to deliver. A local call centre, non-outsourced, with expert staff and plenty of overhead in capacity isn't just very expensive - there are major logistical problems too. Having that extra capacity means having lots of people just waiting to take calls - what;s referred to as a low 'occupancy' rate. The lower your occupancy rate, the slower you learn, so your staff quality lessons. And when you need someone to call you back when something is done? They're tying up an incoming line (their own), so blending calls (more industry jargon) statistically increases queue time as well.

Knowledge bases, scripted responses, that sort of thing are essential tools. You simply can't do the job without them. However, all too often they are used wildly inappropriately or as an excuse for improper staff training.

I hope this little rant helps explain that the frustrations you feel. Nothing I have just said doesn't mean that there are serious issues with outsourcing - there are massive problems, but frankly the biggest one is simply staff turnover. Typically, you'll be talking to someone who's been working on that project for under a year - and it's simply not good enough.

As for the language barrier, I'm in total agreement. My boss once turned down someone thirty seconds into a job interview when it was clear they didn't have good english skills. The candidate was apparently gobsmacked, the recruiter got an earful, and we all had a joke later that the guy's english was so bad he couldn't read the job advert properly!

</rant>

[Luthien]

Nice...
I used to manage a movie theater. I had a customer come up and ask to speak to the manager. I said I was the manager and asked how I could help. He asked me if I was the only manager there or if there was a male manager available...nope, sorry dude...stuck w/a female...What did he want? to know if it was okay to leave his car in the parking lot while he and a friend went to go eat. I had the pleasure of saying it was fine if he did but the theater was not responsible for anything that happened to the car...and no, I didn't do anything to his car.
(Note: I didn't actually say "sorry dude, you're stuck with a female" I believe it was something along the lines of "I'm sorry sir, but I am the manager on duty tonight. Can I help you?")
I may have been a mere female...but at least I speak English.

[dr.walrus]

He asked me if I was the only manager there or if there was a male manager available...nope, sorry dude...stuck w/a female...

I've had customers moan to me about that, and about our agents with asian accents, all of whose english was perfect. I don't have time for any of it, I basically told customers not to insult my agents on discriminative grounds or I would refuse to deal with them at all. Not once did any of them ever say another word.

That stuff really, really annoys me.

[DynamoNED]

@Technochicken: You have no idea how true that is.

@Twigsoffury: That's what I was thinking, too. The 520W Antec PSU I'm using on the build has a single +12V rail rated at 40A. If that isn't enough to drive an Phenom II X4 920 CPU, 4GB DDR2, and a motherboard w/an AMD 785G chipset, I'm not sure what is.

@slaveofconvention: That's a pretty good policy. Do you mind if I assimilate that into the collective...I mean, use that too?

@dr.walrus: Being a computer science grad & mathematician, I see it as a massive queueing theory problem. With any queue, you can optimize throughput (i.e. customers satisfactorily served) if you can do some pre-sorting. Of course, most systems do this through their initial phone support trees (press 1 for x), but the problem ultimately is that you can't quantify how easily a customer's problem can be resolved without first having them talk to a representative, at which point it's too late to pre-sort their problem. If there were some heuristic for determining the relative difficulty of a customer's problem before they reach a representative, it would allow for pre-sorting and allow them to be connected to the proper level of technical support. Of course, I'm making three assumptions (mathematicians are bad about that): That we are attempting to optimize the queue for the customer, that any type of pre-sorting optimization heuristic would be well implemented easily, and that the actual call centers work optimally and as intended (which you have easily shown they don't). One can dream though, right?

@Luthien: I generally agree that if you are working with English-speaking customers, your tech support reps should also speak English well, if not fluently. Also, I wince a little at your theater manager experience because 1) I live in a little one-horse town where that type of thing frequently happens and 2) I have been present when some of these events have happened, and I winced then too. Despite being male, it rankles me a bit that there are others of my gender who automatically assume those of the "fairer sex" are somehow less competent.

[dr.walrus]

@dr.walrus: Being a computer science grad & mathematician, I see it as a massive queueing theory problem. With any queue, you can optimize throughput (i.e. customers satisfactorily served) if you can do some pre-sorting. Of course, most systems do this through their initial phone support trees (press 1 for x), but the problem ultimately is that you can't quantify how easily a customer's problem can be resolved without first having them talk to a representative, at which point it's too late to pre-sort their problem. If there were some heuristic for determining the relative difficulty of a customer's problem before they reach a representative, it would allow for pre-sorting and allow them to be connected to the proper level of technical support. Of course, I'm making three assumptions (mathematicians are bad about that): That we are attempting to optimize the queue for the customer, that any type of pre-sorting optimization heuristic would be well implemented easily, and that the actual call centers work optimally and as intended (which you have easily shown they don't). One can dream though, right?

lol, as someone 3 months away from finishing my CompSci degree, I agree. There are, like you say, some issues that really limit what pre-sorting does and does not do. Other than those you have listed, I will point out some other issues.

Your sorting paradigm relies on specialised agents to deal with specific issues. This is broadly a correct assumption and in many ways works well. However, it comes with a range of problems - customer queries are usually broader, the more specialised a team is, the harder it is to scale up volume with an unpredictable call load (already a horrible problem to start with), and a lack of redundancy.

Also, with many, many specialised teams, noone knows who to transfer you through to, and makes those menus impenetrable. (For those who are interested, they're caller IVRs, integrated voice response). As such, customers end up being bounced around from department to department with no help at all.

What ends up happening? You form several, very-well defined teams or departments, and give them shared tools at the boundaries of their concerns. Within those departments, supervisors should be given the flexibility to allow agents to specialise.

The real problem with your paradigm? You're thinking of call centre agents as software. They're hardware :glasses:

[AmEv]

Oh, it's probably not a defective BIOS chip.

What I need you to do is go to the Start menu, type CMD, hit enter, type "Format C:", and do a reinstall.


AHAHAHAHAHAHA.... No.

[DynamoNED]

The real problem with your paradigm? You're thinking of call centre agents as software. They're hardware :glasses:

To butcher an old aphorism, if you have been trained to use a very specialized hammer, suddenly everything looks like a very specialized nail. <sarcasm>Besides, if you can implement it in hardware, you can always reverse-engineer the software, right?</sarcasm> (For some reason, I always had the urge to punch those Electrical Engineering guys in the face when they said that.)

[Luthien]

@Luthien: I generally agree that if you are working with English-speaking customers, your tech support reps should also speak English well, if not fluently. Also, I wince a little at your theater manager experience because 1) I live in a little one-horse town where that type of thing frequently happens and 2) I have been present when some of these events have happened, and I winced then too. Despite being male, it rankles me a bit that there are others of my gender who automatically assume those of the "fairer sex" are somehow less competent.

Thanks! It's always nice to hear a man say others should not assume a woman is less competent. The theater incident did happen in a fairly small town. It happened years ago, but it's one of those things I still remember.

[dr.walrus]

To butcher an old aphorism, if you have been trained to use a very specialized hammer, suddenly everything looks like a very specialized nail. <sarcasm>Besides, if you can implement it in hardware, you can always reverse-engineer the software, right?</sarcasm> (For some reason, I always had the urge to punch those Electrical Engineering guys in the face when they said that.)
I wish you could scale hardware like you can software - the truth is, with software we're spoilt by good compilers and general-purpose architecture, and most requests are dealt with relatively well by x86.

If only staff were logical units of flesh that could be instantly reconstructed to specification according to my call queue!

Yeah that sounded weird

[nevermind1534]

As bad as the problem with my Foxconn motherboard was, I can at least say that their tech support/RMA people didn't treat me like an idiot, and recognized that there was a problem. I didn't care that they were all asian (and after the first RMA, I got multiple misspellings of my last name), as long as they were able to help me with my problem, plus, they were in the US. When I got my first replacement, I called them after hours, but the person answering the phone took down my name, RMA no., etc. and called me back the next morning. The same day, I had an email with a prepaid UPS label to send the board back to them.

For each RMA, I just told them the problem, and they replaced the board with no further questions or harassment.

[Luthien]

No further questions and no harassment? I don't think that's ever happened to me.

[dr.walrus]

I once had ATI replace two graphics cards I bought with an upgraded model due to discrepancies on their website - let's just say that it's not about what you know, it's about what you know about the law.....