Why do tech support people treat customers like muppets.

please ignore, double post.

Most of them outsource their helpdesk function I know Telewest do to ICL as my brother works for them. The majority of the staff who man the helpdesk it's their first job in IT so while they may have done some MCP's they have no real world knowledge. Also a bone of contention with my brother is that they get in trouble if they take too long or try and fix something that is out of scope, but could be causing the issue

Originally Posted by Daimo

Tim, what you need to remember is that we can't see you, we don't know what your doing, you could be anyone. You have to go through set questions to eliminate issues that can give you your answer. You being IT literate get wound up, but how is that person on the phone meant to know you have experince when 95% of the people that call don't have an f-ing clue. HD people need to work out the issue for themselves, or at least get the right direction so they can pass it onto their appropriate team if he/she can't find the issue.


And being in IT, you should know that its the WORST job to have in IT, you get sh*t all day, and have to deal with it. You should be able to understand, so shame on you :P

The kind of language used should be a dead giveaway, though... I can't believe Tim would call support with something along the lines of "the internet connection thingy with the wire running to my computer ain't workin', what should I do?".

I understand exactly what he's saying, since I've had that same problem before. I'm not as IT literate as he is, nowhere near, but I know my way around these things and I've been out of cable service for a week because the ****s in the support line wouldn't even try to believe that I knew what I was saying.

Basically I've had 2 major network speed changes in about 3 months, both of them resulted in loss of connection while speaking to them. Since my provider is cable based, it looks like there's a "bootfile" somewhere in their servers that will set my modem's downstream and upstream speeds, based on MAC address.
The first time it happened they told me to wait a couple of hours while the "bootfile" "propagated"... oh yeah. Waited 12 hours, 2 phone calls later (to one of those really expensive numbers...) they decided they had to send me someone to check it out. I told them to check the damned bootfile, since it was the only thing that was changed, "I've checked, it's fine, will have to send a team." They tried to book me for next week, I told them if I'd be a week without internet they could come and collect the modem. Result, next day there was someone knocking at the door. Half hour later, guess what?, it was a corrupted bootfile.
Second time it happened, again phone support, told them imediately there would be a problem with my bootfile, nah, had to go through all the muppetry (although like Tim I was looking at the modem's log), and another booked support team to go and check it out. This time I lost it, told where to shove the team and PLEASE check the goddamn bootfile. No way, team it is, at least it only took them a day to show up. Wanna guess?... Yes, bootfile again.

[/rant]

sorry........ got carried away

Hmm I reconise this from last week....

Dan at 8:05AM: You either have a fibre break, a major trunking problem or our NTE has died.
BT at 17:35: There is a fibre break



Dan

[TSM]

Originally Posted by Sudoxe

Hmm I reconise this from last week....

Dan at 8:05AM: You either have a fibre break, a major trunking problem or our NTE has died.
BT at 17:35: There is a fibre break



Dan

Same here but worse.

TSM: I fell over and broke the fiber to the NTE.
BT next day send out tester to test and see if the fiber is broken: Its broken. (I knew that, i did it, you can see that its crushed). They took 2days to fix it because the flippin tester marked it as fixed when it was not.

[northwind]

Originally Posted by Daimo

Tim, what you need to remember is that we can't see you, we don't know what your doing, you could be anyone. You have to go through set questions to eliminate issues that can give you your answer.

And that's fair enough, but it doesn't sound like that's what's happened here. Obviously not all technical help people can be tarred with the same brush.

But some are really terrible. Here' s my ongoign thing... McAfee Spamkiller has started randomly blocking email with the reason "The address is in your Friends list". It's taken me 10 emails just to get the point across, I keep on getting responses telling me that they've looked at it and nothing's wrong at all. They've told me to uninstall and reinstall, already done that, the only response was "Well, do it again".

The guys I've dealt with are more like faith healers than qualified service staff, they know that if you power cycle things it might help, but they have no idea why. They know that sometimes if you reinstall that fixes things, but they seem to think it's just random, and if it doesn't work you should just keep tying til it does. This is what annoys people. No doubt eventually I'll get passed to a competent, qualified individual who'll fix it in a flash, but they won't even pass me to anyone who can help at this stage.

You want fun? Try the Dell help line!! If it's not on their prepared script they're flumaxed!

I knew exactly what the problem was but they insisted on the ruddy preamble!! Eventually after mucho argumento they agreed to send an engineer with a new motherboard. Had to claim nearly £60 worth of phone calls back from them!!

[northwind]

Oh no thank you, I've had enough of Dell's phone people.

Oh - as a consumer I can identify.

Fact is - any downtime is seriously bad news, you can't do anything, so you get desperate. You have a pile of work that isn't getting done, your own clients are calling you every hour or half hour for a progress report, you can't do anything cos you don't understand the systems that someone else has installed, and you're probably not allowed to touch them anyway, so your blood pressure rises as after waiting till next week you at last get through to IT and the call centre people ask you what seem to be silly and inane quezzies.

Yes they are only doing their job but a bit of context is no bad thing, but the user doesn't realise that they have X hundred similar queries, and won't listen either because by that time they're so mad, the person who really knows what they're talking about is fixing someone else's problem, and if only you'd get off the bloody phone and stop whining and wasting everyone's time then everyone could do their job without all the hassle that you're creating and yes your problem would be solved.

But in the meantine your work is getting even further behind, you think '35 years ago a man walked on the moon and you mean to tell me you can't fix a simple problem with this crappy computer that I'm supposed to use'..... and then your client calls again and bawls you out..... and it all happens again.

IT Support, don't you love it.

After 6 years, im hoping never ever ever ever to be dragged back into it.

Oh, thats not to mention the 24 on-call support most big companies do....

But when your calling us at 3am when we're asleep, its still ok to have a whinge!!!! (Maybe thats just solicitors)....