> On Sunday 06 November 2005 05:51 pm, William Coulter wrote:
>> I have had similar experience with tech support myself. I was very pissed
>> off.
>>
>> William
>
> I have had more experiences like that than good from various tech support over
> the years. I cringe whenever I have to call tech support anymore.
I suspected things were getting worse... A couple weeks ago I had a conversation
that went something like this:
ME: The service is not starting up properly.
SUPPORT: How do you know it's not starting up?
ME: I ran a netstat to check for anything listening on 7980. I've also tried
telnet'ing to the port locally but got a "connection refused". So I ran a ps and
looked for the service and it's not even running. There's nothing in the logs
either, just a message saying that it's starting up.
SUPPORT: OK, I want you to open Internet Explorer.
ME: (puzzled) OK..
SUPPORT: Now type your server name, colon, 7980.
ME: There's nothing listening on that port.
SUPPORT: We're going to see if the service is up.
ME: It's not.
SUPPORT: Did you put an https in front of the servername?
Now for my rant...
It's not all their fault.
Used to be that system administrators learned a lot of tricks and would only contact
product support for obvious bugs or really tough problems. But in some places you're
expected to open a support call as early on in the process as possible. Can't get
your web server listening? Call tech support. Can't get sendmail to relay? Call tech
support.
Tech support has had to become remote administrators for many companies and it's a
huge drag on resources... So it gets outsourced. Or you hire non-techies to read a
troubleshooting flowchart. Sometimes you even penalize them if they go off-script
because those problems should be escalated. Going off script means that potential
quick fixes are skipped. Sure, it may work for a small support desk, but when your
customer base reaches into the hundreds of thousands it can be - believe it or not -
more efficient to stick to the script. This takes care of 80% of the non-technical
customers but has the downside of delaying the technical 10% (the missing 10% is for
those people who think they're technical but are not).
It's similar to a bureaucracy... It's annoying to navigate the red tape, but
bureaucracies are surprisingly efficient for the the run-of-the-mill cases. It's the
out-of-the-ordinary stuff that causes delays.
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