I enjoy my job, but am posting in here because tech support is lulz.
I am infuriated by large corporations because of their shitty support. Those morons think they are saving money by outsourcing to India and writing shitty scripts, but they’re fucking themselves over in the long run by pissing off customers.
Of course, going off script is only good if you aren’t an idiot. One time I used the Comcast chat to ask why the auto pay set up kept erroring out on the last step. The guy was like, “hmmm, can I have your user name and password so I can check?”
I closed the chat window and just paid my bill manually that month, tried again in a few weeks and they fixed their bug with auto pay.
And I have an IT friend who tells me his horror stories. One time he had to help an old woman at the law firm he works at put a DVD into her DVD drive.
@Specs: lol, I wanted to be an arcade change guy when I was a kid. Not for like a real job, but just as something to do in high school. All the had was old ladies handing out change at the local arcade. Fucking weird. Grandma’s giving kids quarters so they could rip off heads in Mortal Kombat.
it’s shit like this that terrifies me. I’m about to finish school (network systems), and I still have like zero idea wtf I am gonna be doing in the real world. Sucks, cuz I’ve seen some actually decent jobs snatched up…buddy of mine got hired at Sears head office, another buddy got a job at RIM, and a guy I work with and have classes with got a job with VMWare just doing unix, which I love doing.
One of my programming buddies said he could get me a job at his place, but that would require me moving closer to Toronto, just to work IT.
However, from what I’m told, most jobs you kinda have to learn on the go.
Some of the new clients we onboard at are firm have it written in their contract that no part of their business can be outsourced to India. tech support, operational functions etc all better be done here in the US with a side of apple pie
oh thank god, people with a brain. your story gives me hope. never outsource certain core competencies, especially not infrastructure. its just common sense. as someone whose dealt with IT outsourced and IT in house, its a world of difference being able to walk up to somebody in the office when there’s a critical problem with production as opposed to trying in vain to reach somebody halfway across the world by opening up a support ticket, only to have to go through all the lower tier production bullshit before finally reaching someone who knows WTF they are doing.
idiotic companies think they’re saving money, but they’re just screwing themselves over in the long run. outsourcing should be used in certain cases for economies of scale but it should not replace your best talent for critical functions, and it shouldn’t be used for customer support. i think if CEOs actually tried using their own customer support they’d never move their customer support to india again and wouldn’t require them to use retarded brain dead scripts. here’s an idea, if you paid more and found people who aren’t complete morons, then they wouldn’t NEED a goddamn script.
/NERD RAGE
don’t be terrified, laugh about it, and enjoy the fact that you’ll have plenty of horror stories (and success stories!) to share once you join the working world
My favorite part is that US business has inflated the Indian economy so dramatically they we’re always looking for new countries to save a buck. China and Argentina are quite popular. Cost of living is going up so fast in India that we’ll be shutting down their support facilities before you know it.
lol qft. I can tell you in the 6 weeks of “training” for my tech support job we learned jack shit. 90% of the time was teaching us bullshit like “empathy statements” and the other 10 percent was actually learning the product. I said before that I had a lot of prior knowledge about the product but that actually worked AGAINST me since the scripts we so basic and useless, I was able to go off script and help people only to be bitched out by 5 different supervisors for going off script.
Basically don’t even call Directv customer support, because if your problem is any more advanced than replacing batteries or matching AV cords to the correct colors then you’re SOL, even if the person knows the answer to your problem, they can’t tell you.
yeah this thread has been eye opening, i had no idea that support is forced to stick to the script, that is such a fucking bad idea, its like they intentionally want to piss off customers. w t f. if they’re going to be dicks, they should just train everyone to hang up the phone when the customer calls, save everybody a lot of time AND money.
Oh yeah, that goddamn “script”. God, I hated that shit. The job was already monotonous as it is, and now you want me to talk like a goddamn robot? Fuck that noise. The upper heads should know better that EVERY call is different, and it sometimes takes a certain direction where the script won’t help you anymore, and you gotta use your own goddamn common sense to fix the issue, script be damned.
Ah yes, I remember when my supervisors would say “But you forgot to ask the customer if he wanted anything else at the end of the call”. Bitch, the LAST thing I needed to hear was listen to these motherfuckers rant for another 30 minutes. Be very well on your way, thank you very much.
Hah hah, Indian tech support… I remember when people would tell me right off the bat “DON’T TRANSFER ME TO INDIA!”. Literally, they begged the shit outta me. They keep saying that they can’t understand them (due to their accent and whatever), they speak too fast, that they can’t keep up with their indications, etc…
I doubt the scene would have been given a second thought by most viewers, but that part in the first Transformers live-action movie where the guy calls the call center in India was so funny to me because it really IS accurate.
yeah man when got that big lecture in training that ATT had moved back their call centers because of complaints from the customers about the language barrier and we was supposed to be happy our overlords moved back to the call centers to the us but they still have some open in india,vietnam, and mexico city. The US centers close at a certain time so thecalls get transferred over to other countries still. They tell us not to tell them what times to call if they don’t want to talk to someone international or let them know they can request a u.s agent. as far as the scripts I always thought it was because of the higher ups did some kinda of research and always trying to find ways to make people not call back and the calls short. Oh yeah don’t get me start of FCR
i work at the front desk of a hotel in boston. they just left me by myself for 4 hours during the busiest day of the week, and im on day 5 of a brutal cold to boot.
There are differences from where I work versus other call centers. I don’t get drilled by my managers for call scripts, but there are guidelines for troubleshooting a call. There are certain things that we’re not allowed to say, like known issues are called “bugs” or “glitches”, but you can NEVER tell a customer that we know about the issue.
I took liberties with stating software engineers are just collecting checks, but in my case there was a serious lack of judgment. We had one of the latest versions of our software go out to distribution, without any kind of quality control or testing, pushed out by our software engineers. So a week later we come to find out that certain installs are bricking servers, and offices with hundreds of gigabytes of patient information have been toasted and lost to the ether, and I’m staring down the barrel end of that gun when they call in, but I can never tell them that it’s bricking their software.
By comparison this call center is definitely well run, for the most part, from some of the other stories the management isn’t nearly as bad. The one thing I do have issue with, and when I’m offered a permanent position I will be having a discussion with my manager about, is that the job was billed to me as an electronics component repair technician. I was specifically asked during the interview process about my skills with a soldering iron and circuit board repair on the component level which doesn’t have jack shit to do with answering the phones.
I have a degree in Electrical Engineering Technology, and I studied my ass off for it. Unfortunately, tech support is just close enough to quality me because of my computer skills. The few things keeping me there are the decent pay, the people who work there are all intelligent (it’s an unspoken rule if you’re stupid you won’t have a job for very long), and that there is a lab where actual engineers work on the large hardware units instead of answering phone calls, so I’ll stick it out for the time being.
I originally intended for the thread to be a general job rant thread, just threw the customer support part on the end for my two cents.
It’s interesting to read about how these other call centers work. At my last job, I was often frustrated with our call center (I was a programmer).
It wasn’t so much a problem with the people in the call center. Most of them weren’t super technically savvy, but they were well trained enough to help troubleshoot with people, no scripts involved really (although it was obligatory to instruct callers to clear their cache). It was mostly annoying because our call center had the ability to write up new bugs in our bug tracking system, and the manager often instructed her department to write up bugs without checking if they were pre-existing, and assign them directly to programmers without them passing through our QA department. Then they would call the programmers, and insist they drop what they were doing to work on the thing they just assigned you. Pretty frustrating to piss away 2 hours researching some under documented bug to realize its either user error, or already a known bug.
But yeah, that was just the manager. I think managers often are the ones that make dealing with other departments such a pain. I’ll bet it was some managers decision to push new code without it being tested (@Quicksilver3007)
