It goes like this - You try to do something with a piece of hardware. You do it right, but what you’ve done fails to work. So you email tech support with as clear an explanation of what you want from them as possible. You even try to steer them away from the expected response by stressing quite strongly that you did it right (sometimes going so far as to describe the steps you took)
What you get back is a reply some fake-friendly fuckface wanker who proceeds to patronisingly talk you through the process of doing what you already did. And ends with ‘hope this helps. Your case is now closed’.
It’s times like these you want to acquire lots of guns and decide now is the time to seek out and kill all the people who are accidentally still alive for some reason.
I work Tech Support for a software company. Our software requires some specific settings in IE7 to be tweaked a little for the software to work properly. Here is a conversation I have multiple times a day:
Them: I am missing menu items
Me: Sounds like you need to set up your IE7 settings. Let me send you[interupted]
Them: I already did that
Me: Please double check [waits for a bit]
Them: yep, I did that
[set up a live meeting where I can connect to their screen]
Me: See these settings. They have not been changed.
Them: [some variation of “oh, I missed a few” or usually it is somehow my fault or the software is bad]
The best ones are those that start with me talking about their browser settings and getting “Browser? What’s a browser?”
That being said it is very frustrating to get a canned reply especially when you took the time to detail what the problem is. I really like to get emails like that because it tells me the person took the time to do some trouble shooting and when I send them the solution will be able to implement it without royally screwing something up.
ME: Just hit F5 to refresh the page and your data will be there
HER: <Hits the “F” key, then the “5” key> — “It didn’t work. This application is a piece of crap. It never works right.”
ME: ???
I’ve been in tech support for some time, and understand your frustration. Some tech support folks are told to stick strictly to a script, some are given more leeway. But, you should understand our frustration as well. The vast majority of the people who call do not know technology as well as you do. Of the one who do, most don’t understan as much as they think. Below is they type of converstion I’ve had many times.
Me: Ok, so what do you see on your screen?
Customer: Nothing.
Me: Nothing? You don’t see anything on your screen. Your screen is blank?
Customer: Well, I’ve got my screensaver up.
Me: Screensaver. You mean the desktop? The main screen with all the shortcuts and icons
Customer: Yeah, that.
Me: So your screen isn’t blank…
The vast majority of stories you’ve heard tech support tell about their customers are true.
So we don’t hijack Lobsang’s thread I started one for the other side of the story over in MPSIMS
Back to the OP. Calling Comcast Support for help with, well anything, is some kind of fun. If I have to call I usually grab a drink and settle into a comfortable seat because I know I’m about to embark on at least a 30 min phone call
I wouldn’t doubt their general support department lacks, but I will say their business support personnel are usually on the ball. Quick, competent and friendly; the few times I’ve had to call into them, I didn’t have to wait through a long queue and their answers were spot-on.
I work the support desk once in a while for my company as well - however it is for enterprise level back up systems. When I have a dialogue similar to the above, I usually end things with ‘well I’m glad it was something simple and just a missed item. If it wasn’t a missed item, then my job would be a LOT more difficult’.
IMO, Helps to keep that in perspective. The fact that 90% of problems are ‘dumb’, that is.
Mate, your boss really needs to employ me. I seldom have this sort of issue because I have the way of communicating with them that I actually have a real problem.
And when they do behave like fsckwits, I can deal with it appropriately.
Oh man, I’m glad this happens to you too. This has happened several times with us, and it’s with people whose jobs revolve around the Internet (plebs that work for an SEO firm).
My major tech support rant is against Palm. In addition to the fact that their corporate position is not to care that the backups their product makes are often useless for restoring your calendar if it gets corrupted, my interactions with them ended with the rep sending me an email to a fraudulent phishing site pretending to be a 3rd party app to fix the problem. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say he did that out of ignorance, and not malice. He’d demonstrated quite a bit of ignorance right up to that point already. I reported it on the little customer sat survey, no response from Palm about it. They are on my “not another cent of my money” list.
Mod note: Amended the thread title. While it’s fine to fuck tech support in the privacy of a thread, doing so in the titles is too conspicuous. I get enough grief from the ad guys as it is for all the sex questions on the home page. Thanks for your cooperation.
After several frustating experiences, I’ve decided to NEVER use any sort of e-mail support. It does no good to go step by step thru the things that you have tried, because the people on the other end will never read more than the first sentence and reply on that basis. And sometimes an answer is received that has absolutely no bearing on anything that has been asked. Last week I got a reply to an email I had sent Oregon Scientific that I’m sure was sent in reply to somebody else’s problem. And that was after waiting a week for the reply.
I then bit the bullet and called their voice line - and wonder of wonders, got right thru. It then took me about 90 seconds to describe the problem, and the help tecky had it all sorted out in less than a minute.
No more emailing!
I will accept the premise that not all e-mail support is bad. However, my experience with it is 100% in that direction.
I am currently 20 minutes away from an appt with helldesk to come by to “fix” the PC in the cube next to me that’s been restarting at random intervals. Their method: reimage the drive.
Did they look at the error logs? Not the ones in Windows. They made their own to determine if it was happening at set intervals. Note that I already said “Random”
They’re coming because the girl with the PC doesn’t think I know anything about computers. Never mind that I already fixed mine and 3 others on the floor (bad RAM is the cause). I’m going to let her twist in the wind, because I hate her.
For every 1 person who actually knows what they’re doing when they call tech support, there are 1,000 people who don’t. No offense, but when I’ve dealt with dozens and dozens of people in a row who won’t know what their browser is, will bark LEFT OR RIGHT CLICK? when I’ve said that I’ll say “click” for left click and “right click” for right click, will say, “I know that you shouldn’t have a lot of things running 'cause it slows the machine down, so I went into that Task Blaster thing and ended a lot of those .exe things and now my computer’s running funny. What’s wrong?”, or will interrupt my instructions with “I’ve alreadydonethatanditdoesn’twork!” but magically, when “just for fun”, I have them do it “again”… it works! :rolleyes:…
Then yes, it’ll sometimes take a few tries before I’ll take someone seriously that they know things*. When I can see they do, yes, it’s great because I can see he’s done troubleshooting steps or can follow what I say no problem. But for every 1,000 people who are total dipshits when they call in? At least half of them will say they’re “good with computers”.
Unlike the guy who liked to memorize IT terms and use them randomly. “Yeah, I’m not able to access the internal system here and I believe it’s an issue with the database tables and how they are interfacing with the SQL and HTML”… his account was locked out.
Sadly, email correspondence with big companies in general is a problem. If you can’t respond in 24 hours or less, why bother? I don’t understand why companies don’t invest more in this; corresponding via email and not having to wait while a customer fumbles around with where the Start menu is saves the company money. Yet, I’ve worked for huge companies and the attitude was that calls come first, emails get answered whenever there is time (read: after the company has already been called by the customer).
I work in support myself, and I can handle about twenty tickets in the time to handle one call, because I have written a lot of common responses that handle most issues or help to gather enough info to proceed. Most people choose to contact us by email, which means we don’t have to have a larger phone staff; there’s no way we could handle our current traffic if even 50% of people called instead of emailed (right now I’d guess it to be under 5%).
Wow, how timely. We’ve had Comcast for about 18 months - our new apartment won’t allow satellite dishes. No problems for the entire time, until my yearly subscription for Howard Stern On Demand was renewed without my permission. We can’t afford to buy a year worth, so I called to cancel it. Fine, no problem, it will be credited on your next bill.
A week later, We decide that we can afford to renew for a MONTH, so I call back and subscribe month-to month.
Next bill, I am charged for the month AND the year. Call them, the lady says, Hmmm… they noted that they were GOING to credit you, but didn’t. I’ll go ahead and credit it.
Next bill, same thing. My wife calls, and the guy says, “Well, it hasn’t been authorized for credit yet. That takes four to six weeks.” Wife : “Four to six weeks from the first call, the second call, or the third call?” CSR : Ummm… “The second call.” Wife : “Okay, I’ll just deduct the amount of the subscription when I pay, and wait for the credit.” CSR : “No, you have to pay ALL of it.” Wife : “I don’t HAVE to DO anything. I’m paying what we owe, not what you say we owe. When you credit us, it will balance out.”
Comcast is weird. I have had excellent ***** customer service from them, and craptastic service also. I suggest trying a few times until you get one of the CR reps who are decent.
