Long pause. Maybe I should have given more of a friendly chat or something…
Really, was this really necessary? I tell myself maybe this is to confirm I am an actual owner of one of their machines or something, though I could have just found random numbers somewhere online I’m sure.
Uh oh.
This is like one of those customer service stories I hear from others, others whom, I must confess, I never quite believe.
Right. Because what I really wanted was an apology. And nothing else. No clarification, just an apology…
No. Way.
But I play along.
:p:p:p
What did I confirm exactly?
Where exactly is she going with this?!
Long, long, long pause.
Just. Wow.
As soon as she saw my initial summary, she just needed to say “It’s called Cyberlink, type that into Vista’s search feature and it should come up” or words to that effect.
I don’t blame “Rachael,” since she is either a machine and therefore incapable of being blamed for anything, or else is a human being being required to follow some really bizarre rules.
But by making these rules, what are these organizations actually trying to accomplish? It is clear they are not trying to accomplish the solution of actual problems.
I’ve had one of those conversations too (for a telco service signup, IIRC), and was similarly baffled. I guess it makes sense for AI to adopt the overpolite vernacular of an Indian call center employee, since they’re already so eerily robotic…
For what it’s worth, when I worked at Microsoft, I had a couple of conversations exactly like this with actual live people answering the phone on the internal IT helpdesk late-night shift. It was like talking to an eliza bot: “My DNS is not working.” “Thank you for informing me that your DNS is not working. <pause> I will now try to help you with the fact that your DNS is not working. <long pause while looking up the next line> Here are some steps to try to resolve the problem with DNS…”
It’s infuriating, and somehow it’s extra infuriating that they can be so aggressively annoying while being perfectly polite.
What do you mean? She was going to have me rummage around in the recovery partition (which is as far as I can tell inaccessible) or the recovery DVDs (which to my memory can’t be explored but only used to recover the system) to find a program which was right there already installed on my system.
I was the one who solved my own problem during the course of the call.
From what you explained, I’d bet that you contacted a call center in a foreign country with a worker who barely speaks English and has no clue about how anything works. They are given an extremely structured protocol to follow, including lots of apologies when necessary, in the hopes of stumbling through and maybe fixing something sometime, but mostly so that they can earn the couple of pennies the US company pays them to get through the incident and move onto the next.
Several years back I used to train people to do technical support for a variety of companies, and sometimes I’d have to travel to do it. My classes started out mostly with new hires with some computer experience in a city with a major university in a well educated state. Then it was anyone who ever touched a computer in a college town. Then it was pretty much anyone who had seen a computer and wanted a job in some medium sized town in a notoriously poorly educated state. Then it was anyone not killed by the horribly tainted water in a smaller town in the same poorly educated state who had ever used a phone. Then they sent me to Jamaica to try to get people there who maybe never saw a phone but could learn to copy and paste text from standard response paragraphs online to multiple people at once in a chat room. By then they were talking about trying to send me to India to get call center after call center going there supposedly handling tech calls. Of course they realized paying someone who knew something about the products to go to India was pointless and then fired me and most every English speaker.
It’s just corporate cost saving measures… If it’s something like support, where they don’t earn money directly, they’ll get monkeys to hammer on a keyboard if they think they can get away with it. I think the worst part is that progressively as the people I was supposed to train knew less and less about anything in general to start with, let alone computers, the more convinced they were that they had all the right answers already and didn’t need training… both management and agents.
Bingo. As an erstwhile Tech Support supervisor, that’s been my experience exactly. My wife works for a very well known maker of copy machines and printers, and she’s embarrassed to give out the support number. Right now, I only see two options if you want real, professional tech support:
[ol]
[li]Buy a super-expensive third-party “gold” Tech Support agreement.[/li][li]Buy super-expensive proprietary software that comes with a service warranty. You’ll probably be talking to either the people who wrote the damned thing, or they’ll be one removed from those people.[/li][/ol]
In the future, I imagine telling my grandchildren about the good ol’ days, when you’d call someone for tech support, and talk to a human who knew his ass from a hole in the ground.
By the way, I have to give props to a company called FogBugz, who seems to be the lonely exception in my experience. We used their call tracking software at my previous company, and their support was awesome. (And, no, I’m not associated with them).
