A Moment to Reflect...

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Ok, normally, when someone posts something that I want to comment to, I'll just comment to it and leave it at that.

This
"http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/02/23/no_support/"
Pissed me off, though.

Not so much you, "Matt" from "Alabama", but the article itself.

I've worked in a place like that, so I'm not going to deny that they exist. But I presently, I am, and I'm not afraid to say it, the "o" word.

Outsourced.

That's right, I don't work directly for the company that I work for. But I'll be damned if I'm not (pardon the redundancy), a DAMN good technician. As is my fiance, who sits down the row from me, and is downright gorgeous(wink). Unlike some of the people in this article, I actually OWN a computer, and have built a few in my lifetime. And, unlike the COMPANY in this article, my company has quite a capable and effective training staff. Those few people who pass by the HR department without knowing much about computers when they're hired know at LEAST enough to spot a dead power supply or corrupted .dll file when they see it. We have labs in our complex that actually have working versions of the computers our customers call in about. We KNOW how to fix the bastards, and we're going to.

To make a long story short, disregard this article. Yeah, places like that do exist. "Techs" like that do exist. But I'll be damned if any customer *I* talk to is going to feel like the sorry sods that call in to *THOSE* techs.

Thoughts? Ridiculing comments? Do you agree? No? Let me know.

Comments

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

I work in a facility that supports both our own customers and OEM customers for a number of very well known names. I was given six weeks of training prior to taking my first call, and I get another hour of related training a week.

Granted, not all technicians are created equal, and yes, there is some pressure to keep call times down, but let's face it, it's both a business and a call center.

But we still do a damn good job.

semi-cohesive thoughts.

[ex-prunesnp.livejournal.com]

First you say disregard the article, then you admit that place and techs like that do exist. That's why you can't disregard the article. You (and I) may be damned good techs. There are still a lot of shitty places out there that don't employ us.

I didn't agree with the management strategy described in the article. I did read it several months ao, and not today, but I did read it. But I do think there's a reason for its existence.

It's awfully hard to go to work every day and know that despite your best intention of serving the customer, the management philosophy of the company is completely against you. I've been there, done it, and got fired from it for telling too many custoemrs the truth.

[glennarbor.livejournal.com]

yeah I've seen links to that article a few times now and always cringe. It almost seems it was written by somebody with a grudge against somebody in tech support. I'd be curious what the effect would be if every legit tech all called in sick one day, I imagine the wheels of progress would come to a halt for that day at least.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

The day no computers got fixed.....

[tjernobyl.livejournal.com]

I've worked both, and must say that I'm helping the customers a heck of a lot better at an insourced shop. With less layers of management, the rules are lot more rational. My manager doesn't have to justify himself to another manager who justifies to a client who justifies to his manager... Straight line up, direct communication. Customer compliments end up meaning a lot more to us than artificial stats like handle time and call volume.

That's not to say that you can't run a kickass outsourced shop-- it's just that it's a heck of a lot more difficult.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Yeah, sometimes I don't agree with the rules, and every now and then some new statement comes out that makes me wonder what the hell the rule-makers are thinking,

But overall, I think we run a pretty tight ship. Honestly, I feel that anyone that calls in and gets our center is damn lucky.

[jwendl.livejournal.com]

There is a difference between the story and your rant. You are talking about working for an "in-house" technical support staff. Not an outsourcing company (read the whole article after watching the retarded salon ad).

I personally have worked 3 years as part of an "in-house" support team. I have also worked 1 year as part of a corporation who housed outsourced technical support ( http://www.decisionone.com/ )

Honestly I feel that the article was written about D1 (as we nick name it). Many people for that company are barely fluent in windows 98 and just know how to configure a browser. When I got hired at the company I was told that I would be the project manager for an account involving a VERY large router / switch company.

This was after the huge layoff of the previous job (120 employees in MN) and I was desparate for anything that resembled a job so I took D1's offer.

Two weeks into the job I find out it was just technical support. I did not mind although until I found out the way they did business. Any new accounts that came in (ie; new outsourced technical support) was offered ZERO training. That's right, we got no training on how to support something and if we were pushed into the queue we were forced to learn it.

The phone did not ring, when you get off of one call you pick up the next one in the queue instantly and your head set chimes in with the next customer. So say for instance I am on a call for company A and I just finish it, a call for company B's product comes in and I have to read the script in front of me.

It was really amusing when I got the call to fix an adaptec raid controller.

Now just imagine going from an "in-house" tech support office (as a level 2 rep) to a tech support nightmare where you ended up the top dog, not just because you knew your crap, but because of the fact that no one else had a clue...

I must say it was really nice to flip my manager at D1 the birdy when I just got sick of the place and walked out. The article gives a LOT of good points about outsourced technical support. It sucks, the company housing the support makes money per call not per resolution. So it did not matter if I helped or not, only if I hung up in the right amount of time.

Now I do research at the University of Minnesota, and work underneath systems staff for the computer science department. In addition to this I assist in development for three open source projects. All I can say is that ANYone who works for a company similar to D1 should get out! You are better than that, and no matter what anyone says you can find better oppertunities than working for a slummy outsourcing company!

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't work inhouse.

I'm outsourced. I really don't work directly for the company I answer the phone for. (and I did read the whole article ;-p)

The first training class on the current account(the big one, anyway, our center has like..six I think?), got DAMN good training. No transition period with mentors holding their hands like the rest of them, but some fine training. And they're still getting fine training. I honestly think our training department is a model of how it should be. The client sends us test models all the time, our training staff visits homebase often, we get lots of updates. So by the time our trainees hit the floor, they've literally torn the systems the support down to the ground and rebuilt them. And they still work.

But yeah, I've worked for the other side of the coin too. Scripts, short/fast training, virtually no support for the phone reps. Being a supervisor at that OTHER place(which we'll call West) just meant you had two things to do while you were at work. Jack and shit. I hope to god I never have to go back there, but if I do, I'll probably get re-hired on as a full-blown "podium supervisor"(their version of account managers).

Incredibly long answer to your question.

[marence.livejournal.com]

The kind of place described in the article is why I'm getting out of the tech business. I spent 7 of the past ten years working as a "contract consultant", which is fancy phrasing for tech temp work. I worked for the places that couldn't keep employees,the equivalent of tech sweatshops, where Average Call Time was far more important than actually solving problems.
I have collected enough bad experiences, amusing anecdotes, and bosses who would never give me positive references to fill a book. One of my favorites was working at a prestegious law firm, where the phones were unmanned every Friday afternoon for an hour or two, while we discussed every call taken that exceeded 10 minutes. Our manager, an MBA who frankly admitted he knew nothing about computers ("that's why we hired you people, har har"), made us read the call resolution, and explain why we made him look bad by bringing down the ACT. During my first such meeting, I read the resolution and told how I had explained some Word features to a legal secretary so she understood the saving a template process, thus avoiding having to call every day when her templates disappeared. I was reprimanded, as I spent 25 minutes doing training on the phone, which was a no-no. It was far better for this poor woman to call every day for 5 minutes and be told it's ok, just set it up again tomorrow, than to spend time actually solving her rather easy problem. I was shortly 'promoted' to network assistance, which meant I worked 5 PM to 1 AM, and only dealt with occasional calls from Hong Kong and Belgium, and didn't ruin the ACT of the rest of the team.
I also was "placed" at a large insurance firm, doing 2nd level modem support for independent agents using the firm's prprietary software. This was a "phone farm" and we were the lucky ones. My co-workers & I, nearly all temps, spent the day in headsets, watching the lcd monitor to see the number of calls on hold and the average hold time. Here, the time spent on the call was of secondary importance to the hold time. How we could shorten the hold time was by having two lines going at once. If we saw AHT climbing, we would put our caler on hold, and answer another call, which we then put on hold. This took them out of the queue, thus reducing the trackable hold time for our section leader. The callers actually spent more time on hold, as we flip-flopped between callers, perfecting our sweet-voiced "Can you hold, please?"
Next assignment, same company - the worst yet, in terms of frustration for both myself and the callers. 2nd level support for company agents. These callers had been successfully "punted" to us by "customer service representatives" - not techs. Repeat, not techs. This was in the early heydays of "the script" and "the knowledgebase." The CSRs read the script, page by page, and typed in the problem. If the problem wasn't fixed within 8 minutes, they would be bumped to us. We had the cool cubes, with potted trees and window walls to look out into the landscaped campus. The 75% of the calls we took should have been solved by 1st level, but the CSRs were not hired for tech knowledge, but the willingness to work for minimum wage plus $1 and benefits. For example, a standard call was "my screen is black." The CSRs had already walked them through checking the cords, and bebooteing, then bing! 8 minutes, send it upstairs. We came to learn to immediately ask if the monitor was turned on. Yep, that wasn't in the script. And then there were the problems that were caused by the caller not using the proper terminology - if they called the computer "my hard drive" or "my CPU" (a common mistake), they were walked through the wrong script.

Re: Incredibly long answer to your question.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

While your response has some very valid points, I also have to throw in that I've heard it referred to as the "modem" and the "vcr"(concurrently with the monitor = TV).

[mattdoesntcare.livejournal.com]

I share your feelings, I consider myself to be the best tech at our center, and granted I came off sounding like I didnt care about the VMI guy I wrote about I knew that his son's system would be reimaged ina couple of days and that all would be well.

It does anger me to see people who don't give a shit but living in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states I don't expect a high quality of employees. Our training is crap because the only people that know computers are people my age, and people my age either are in school and don't care to add in being a full time trainer to their responsibilities or they are school dropouts which doesnt bode well for their ability to train.

I found the article humorous because I know people like this, I also found it disturbing because I know ALOT of people like this. Being a full time student and full time worker usually resorts in me using all my leftover energy to make sure that I do my job right and treat the cust with respect, I'm usually too spent to help my fellow techs, though I do on days that I feel a little more awake.

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

Ah, good ole Alabama.

I used to live there. Not far from you. Dothan, in fact.

I know man. I know.

[mattdoesntcare.livejournal.com]

Mmm Dothan, how I wasted my weekends going to see Hadji and the Turbans and the many other bands that would come and go from the scene...

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

gaahhh hadji..

I knew their uhm trombone player i think? i might have known more of the band but I don't remember at this point..

[inahandbasket]

Oy Vey.
I work at a desk that's half outsourced (but onsite) consultants, and half inhouse employees.

We (the consultants) used to be individually picked by the inhouse manager, and we had a KICKASS team. re: 90%+ of calls were resolved on first contact when our quota was like 70%. And these are technical calls too, not just BS password resets. (Well, some of both.

The company decided to cut costs and their time, and sent the whole contract to one company instead of picking individual consultants. Most of us consultants jumped ship to this new company (it was the major dip in tech 1.5 years ago, no jobs and we had one) and became employees of this new company. The company also brought in some of its own people. These people were "top performers" in the company.
They knew jack shit.
One of them, I kid you not, came up to me a month into his/her employment and asked me, "So what's Ethernet?"
Our call stats divebombed, they brought in more incompetents, and those of us who know what we're doing are carrying the whole damned team now. And we're slowly finding other jobs.

Moral:
Outsourced can be done very, VERY well if the manager in charge isn't an idiot. Outsourcing can also be the pit of hell if you aren't careful about it. I've learned this from firsthand experience, and hope to put that knowledge into practice as soon as I can find someone to pay me to be smart about helpdesk design.

[naggy.livejournal.com]

I worked at an outsourced help desk for a year and a half. I now work as a subcontractor for the State, and in effect, I'm still outsourced.

The key to any help desk is how much their management cares. Despite what some people here has said, it doesn't matter whether it's in house or outsourced; what matters is how good the immediate supervisor is (and how much they care), and how much the company that's outsourcing the support cares.

This is just like real life: if a buyer does not spend the time to research who they are buying from, then they stand to get hosed. If a buyer chooses to take the lowest cost solution or the first solution that comes along, without weighing what they get for their money, then they're going to get hosed (and everyone along with them).

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

"what matters is how good the immediate supervisor is (and how much they care),"

I care. I want these poor sods calling in to be able to use their computers again. And my team knows it.

Well, they did till I got knocked back on the phone by a shift change. Ah well, temporary setback. Gimme a year tops, I'll run that place >=D