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Thread: Warning: Tech Support Rant

  1. #21
    AARGH dr.walrus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    Quote Originally Posted by Luthien View Post
    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.

  2. #22
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    @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.
    http://folding.extremeoverclocking.c...e.php?u=555808

    Quote Originally Posted by RogueOpportunist View Post
    In my experience the vast majority of "tech problems" are ID-10-T errors, usually caused by a nut loose on the keyboard.

  3. #23
    AARGH dr.walrus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    Quote Originally Posted by DynamoNED View Post
    @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

  4. #24
    The floppy drive is no longer obsolete. AmEv's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    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.
    Two years. They were great. Let's make the next ones even better!

    Tri.fecta

  5. #25
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    Quote Originally Posted by dr.walrus View Post
    The real problem with your paradigm? You're thinking of call centre agents as software. They're hardware
    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.)
    http://folding.extremeoverclocking.c...e.php?u=555808

    Quote Originally Posted by RogueOpportunist View Post
    In my experience the vast majority of "tech problems" are ID-10-T errors, usually caused by a nut loose on the keyboard.

  6. #26
    Meow Luthien's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    Quote Originally Posted by DynamoNED View Post
    @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.

  7. #27
    AARGH dr.walrus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    Quote Originally Posted by DynamoNED View Post
    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

  8. #28
    Measure once, curse twice nevermind1534's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    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.
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  9. #29
    Meow Luthien's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

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

  10. #30
    AARGH dr.walrus's Avatar
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    Default Re: Warning: Tech Support Rant

    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.....

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