So I’m having a problem with a virtual machine at work (don’t worry about what that is or what problems I’m having, that’s irrelevant) so I open a trouble ticket as a good employee should.
So then I get the following email the next day:
I did contact the service desk. You even thanked me for it. What the FUCK are you asking me to do here?
And on top that, it doesn’t allow me to assign a priority or even say how many people the issue affects like the previous system did.
We went from a decent working system to this useless outsourced bullshit.
My company had lain off their IT a couple of weeks ago. Within two days, the new outsourced IT department sent out an update that bricked all the Windows 7 boxes.
Have you received the survey asking how well you would rate how they handled the ticket? The Service Desk has learned mostly not to send me that survey, because I tell them.
The standard process here is as follows -
[ul][li]Encounter a problem.[/li][li]Search thru the service ticket website for something that makes some reference, however vague, to anything related to what I need done.[/li][li]Open the ticket.[/li][li]Get back an email that the ticket has been closed because it is not the right form.[/li][li]Call the Help Desk.[/li][li]The Help Desk tells that they are all busy, and ask me for a name and callback number.[/li][li]I give my name and callback number.[/li][li]Wait twenty minutes.[/li][li]Help Desk calls me back, and puts me on hold.[/li][li]Somebody with a rudimentary grasp of English eventually picks up.[/li][li]The Help Desk tells me to go to the Help Desk chat room.[/li][li]Go to the Help Desk chat room, type out a description of what I need in excruciating detail. [/li][li]Establish the session.[/li][li]Help Desk drone asks me what the problem is.[/li][li]Cut and paste the excruciatingly detailed description.[/li][li]Help Desk drone goes silent for five minutes or so.[/li][li]HDD comes back and tells me to submit the problem using the same form that was already rejected.[/li][li]I tell HDD that that form was already rejected.[/li][li]Five more minutes of silence.[/li][li]HDD tells me to submit another request with a different form, and assign it to such-and-such a group.[/li][li]HDD closes the session.[/li][li]I fill out the form, and assign it to the requested group.[/li][li]Two hours later, get back an email that it was rejected because it was assigned to the wrong group.[/li][li]Give up in disgust and email everyone in my group asking who can help.[/li][li]Get back an email from somebody saying “Talk to Bill, he can fix it.”[/li][li]Call Bill.[/li][li]Bill fixes it.[/li][li]Get back the survey asking “On a scale of 1 to 5, how was your experience with the Help Desk?” [/li][li]Fill out the survey and put in the Comments that nobody did jack squat to fix anything.[/li][li]Get back an automated response saying “Thank you for your feedback! We at the Service Desk are always looking to improve your customer experience…”[/li][li]Lather, rinse, repeat.[/ul][/li]
Regards,
Shodan
They want you to contact a live person, I think, probably because whoever read your ticket doesn’t understand your issue. Does your help desk have phone support?
Signed, Survivor of A Decade of Outsourced Support
I used to do IT Support but fortunately I got better. I am glad that our IT department is all in house and we don’t need to rely on outsourcing or anything. Dealing with technology issues is frustrating enough without having to pile on added issues with an outside-the-company support system.
My favorite is when my internet service goes out and when I call Comct I get the message "For better serice please contact us at Comct.com - Goodbye!" click
I agree that it sounds like they want you to talk to someone. And as for the outsourced support, remember that was your employer’s decision. If you don’t like it, tell management. They will probably do nothing but if enough people complain, they might. (My employer hired a separate US-based company to handle helpdesk support for our most critical applications.)
BTW, as for this, the incident number you provided (assuming it’s real) looks just like the ones generated by ServiceNow, which is one of the major providers of that sort of software. We implemented ServiceNow recently and our implementation definitely allows the end user to specify urgency (low, medium, high) and impact (from just degraded for one user up to down for multiple users). So if your company’s implementation doesn’t allow you to specify those, that’s wrong and they could certainly have included those options.
I have SNOW (Service Now) at my work. I make every single ticket I create “critical” because I think it is. And if they leave it up to the customer, then that’s what they get. I’m also part of the IT department and a cybersecurity auditor, so they pretty much call me right away
The one that kills me, and I’ve suffered it to different degrees both as part of outsourcing, as a subcontractor, and in-house, is when the IT people are closed off from necessary accesses or treated on a “need to know” basis. For those who haven’t put up with this last piece of crap, “need to know” means “any request for information will be treated as if you’d just raped a puppy in the floor of the UN’s assembly.”
Guys, if you want me to be able to solve your problems - I need to be able to look at them!
I once had a support call with a guy who turned out to be “the guy who deals with the New Spanish Masters because his mom is from Valladolid” and he mentioned that people would refuse him Remote Access. WTF? :smack::smack::smack::smack:
