Why is non-outsourced tech support so bad?

If I understand your question you are asking why in house tech support is poor. Then, again, if I understand your survey statement you are saying that telephone tech support of applications is poor. So, if I understand the post, you are asking two completely different questions.

The second one is easy. All you have to do is look around this site for the technical questions. You find that the people asking the questions don't provide enough information, they make assumptions about things that they don't understand, and they don't recognise the correct answer when it is provided. Telephone technical support is extremely difficult because the person posing the question usually expects the tech support person to understand things that aren't stated, then when they are asked to provide more information they often don't know how to procure that information.

The first part of the post, by my understanding of it, asks why in house tech support is poor. I and a few others here have made comments in other discussions on this topic. In an attempt to be concise I would summarise the reasons as follows:

Poor quality software and hardware.
Poor work ethic in the American culture.
Poor quality of business management at all levels.

I hope that I read your question(s) correctly. :-)

Does the survey differentiate between outsourced and non-outsourced tech support?

If it doesn't, then the title of the posting is misleading.

if you are asking about telephone support, which comes from call centers, the reason it is so bad is because you have management telling you to get off of the phone after 15 min of speaking with the customer. You will notice that after around the 15 min mark the agent will try to send you to Dell or Microsoft or IBM, anywhere to get you off of the phone due to their handle time.

Most corporations look at internal support as a COST centre vs. outsourced call centres work on for profit basis.

Most internal call centres are funded through admin or IT budgets, and try to be as lean as possible so as to not be overbudget at the end of the quarter. When companies strickly focus on the dollars service levels usually decline.

Now, outsourced call centres are a based on a profit model. Service Level Agreements ( SLA's ) have to be maintained, along with QA, and first call resolution.

Things won't change until companies begin to realize that inbound call centres are an integral part of any business, and have to be funded. It's all about CUSTOMER SERVICE......

Oh God, I love your response!!

I thought I was the only that thought that way!!

You are absolutely correct in your assessment!!

Ok not 100% sure I understand where you are going but here's my dimes worth.

Poor support is caused by a number of variables and its a cycle: (poor support, effects market share, effect budget back to reduced support dollars)

(Inhouse)
1* High Turnover - low budgets, Poor management & Micromanagement, Poor/lack of training, Low wages, poor/cheap/no benefits, low morale, overworked, no/lack support tools, increased volume and decrease time alloted per call. (just to name a few items)

2* low/little Budgets - upper management doesn't see the need for support - thus first budget cut is support.

3* Because of lack of support or poor support - product market share goes down - effects budget budget effects #1 - and the cycle starts again.

Ask Gateway what happened to them ... Dell is getting to the same place quickly and a new leader with better support will replace Dell (HP or Sony).

Outsourced -

1* Callers language normally not support tech's primary or first langauge (Communication), SLAs set wrong, support line handles numerous products/vendors, customer anti-outsourcing, low wages, lack/little training, time fixed call (must have call completed in x minutes), lack of administrative authority.

I was in charge of a inhouse support group - then budget started getting cut - until they outsourced it.

Was the director of support services - established a career path for employees that wished to migrate out, purcahsed call tracking tools, support portal and establish support database. First call resolution monthly between 89 and 93% (average of 10,000 calls a month).

Staff could get A+, MCSE, CNE, CNA (classes and tests)paid by company. Call rep would be in the center from 1 to 2 years max before moving on.

After 3 years management - started cutting budget - training - cert tests - study days - salaries - FTE's - then they outsourced.

The last time I heard they were looking to insource it - they lost market share - management woke up and its too late, Elvis had left the building a long time ago.

So you ask why - Support stinks - put the blame on Management - right at their door steps, and it doesn't matter if your talking Insourced or outsourced - bottomline - Management is the cause -

Our support team was great, and technically well educated, turnover was low (1 to 5% per year from promotions). Year budget was high - and so was productivity - but management started screwing around and cut the budget. We got lower education/experience staff (techie stuff), Very High turnover (around 30% to 50% in one year).

The Problem is Management - Management - Management - Cause and effect Management - but they will never accept that truth - they will blame everything but themselves!

This gives credence to the Dilbert Principle:

http://www.brainyencyclopedia.com/encyclopedia/t/th/the_dilbert_principle.html

It's the companies not the tech's check t mobile they have a contract to support the ipaq 6315 exclusively but are constantly sending people to HP for support .They don't even have the unit at hp's call center even if they wanted to help TMOBILE no training makes it hard on everyone

Any company providing tech support has the choice of highly paid knowledgable experts or cheap phone-minders who can look up common problems in a book or database and regurgitate the contents. My experience in IT is that even the more knowledgeable managers are reluctant to spend money on IT (or anything else, come to that) and a branch of IT that generates no revenue, i.e. tech support, consequently is very low on the list of priority spends so the cheapest personnel are employed for this vital task. Occasionally one finds a company whose tech support is exemplary; Evesham.com (a UK PC and associated services supplier) is an example where I have had superb support. "A company gets what it pays for" seems to be true in this area; so if you want to improve your customer relations, be prepared to invest more in tech support.

There are a number of reasons but they add up to a culture of dis-service. The two main culprits are in management:

a. the non-tech manager of IT - this person is a skilled manager who keeps screwing up as they do not understand enough of IT to comprehend the improtance of what they are told on IT matters.

b. the non-manager IT manager, this is an IT manager who is a good tech but has no management skills. These are worse than (a) as they constantly put up walls to getting things done. They are more interested in forcing the business to do things their way, than in supporting the business to meet its business needs. A classic example is the idea of 'forced' password changes every month or so; have a complex password policy and then force people to change it several times a year, push an IT solution and screw the people, so they can't remember the passwords and write them down; so who is at fault in having all these passwords written down. They are normal people not memory experts, let them choose a good one and use it for several months, much more secure. Same relates to hardware and software, screw the idea of what best fits the business needs, lets get the best technological gear.

In both cases you end up with a unit that sees the rest of the organisation as troublemaking obstacles that are damaging the IT owned assets. That's right forget that without them there is no IT unit and you are all out of work.

Add in the knowledge and training issues raised by others and you have a problem. Add in the decision to have first level tech support being done by non-tech people with good phone manner and anything outside the basics is impossible for them to fix. Add in the concept that an outside expert just HAS to be better and more professional than anyone internal. No wonder there is no service worth using.

Then on top of all this add in the fact that damn few tech support areas have a decent set of statements as to what the client support levels, requirements and guidelines are and even less have educated the clients on what to expect. thus the clients expectation far exceed what the tech area is required to deliver, thus making them look bad.

The major expenditure of the IT budget is for problem resolution (reactive. Most user have a very limited understanding of the systems they are using. As technology advances, the system change. Most user fit into one of the following catagories: do not want to learn or do not have time to learn.

A more sensible approach would be to invest in training the users and thus avoid many problems (proactive). IT professionals seldom understand exactly how the users need to use the technology. I believe having superusers that can support IT to resolve problems and refer true system problems to IT is an effective approach. IT is often asked to resolve things that are not really system related. This would eliminate calls that are outside of IT scope.

On the otherhand IT needs to loose the "it my system and it works the way I say it works" attitude or "its corporate policy". Superuser should express what is needed in terms of requirements, then allow IT to develop solutions. Most user express needs in terms of perceived solutions that are not seldom practical. "I need access to something so give me administrative rights." The people that are performing the work and the people that are providing the technology solution to support that work to communicate. The people that are using the technology need to understand how it is to be used.

Little internal recourse and major cost cutting.

ComputerRepair.com provides On-site tech support with an average break fix resolution cost of 54.32 per call all inclusive.

Tech support "sucks" for several reason, IMHO.

1)Most users don't know what the world they're talking about and generally rude on the phone. They expect technicians to understand their nonsensical rambling about IT and magically fix their problem. This is especially true with so-called "experts" they're worse than most non-techs because they'll jump down a tech's throat faster b/c "they have x years of experience". Plumbers don't have to deal with clients telling them how fix a toilet. But every ISP tech will have some jackass MCSE trying to tell them how to fix their bandwith saturation.

Personally, I will forcefully tell people to stop yammering and answer some simple questions. Yeah, it can be seem rude at first, but is saves the tech 10 minutes of listening to some irate loon yap about Apache and router handshakes when they called about not connecting to Sendmail. And in the end, the client usually alot less angry since the call took 15 minutes instead of 35 and the issue was fixed.

2) Techs really aren't that well trained in general. Most techs pick up stuff as they go along, there is little to no formal training. You learn more from screwing up and bungling than actually being taught. If EMTs and Nurses were trained in the same ad hoc way as Support Techs, we would all die in the emergency room. It IS the Peter Principle in this sense, your brightest technicians were are already talented to begin with since they're not going to learn too much on the job.

3) Management pressures. Basically, the typical support tech has to put up with not only angry incomptent clients who don't fully understand what they're using, but neurotic managers trying to meet some ridiculous quota. Your constantly monitor to finish calls fast, kiss the clients and management ass and do it with a smile. The Business departments and managers are only concerned about the bottom line and forget that their tech support staff are human beings.

4) They hours are long, longer than most other IT jobs I have actually worked in. Because irate lusers demand that some geek be in 24/7 to answer their printer questions on New Years eve so they can photocopy their butts, techs work long nasty hours that would make the average union organizer cringe. Hey want to work 45+ hours a week (day and night) and be on call over the weekends to answer questions listed in #1? Then tech support is for you.

5) Nobody in tech support, except for the masochist, actually want to do the job, because of the 4 reasons listed above. Tech Support is the LOWEST level of IT you can possible work in, besides data entry. Its boring, repetative and generally mundane. And you will have to deal with idiots telling how to do your job. Do it for more than a year, you will start to become cynical and indifferent. For the first few months at my job, I couldn't listen to phones at home.

This is particularly true if you have a college degree in any sort of science, business or engineering discipline. Your average first year EE student isn't going to last too long in tech support since its generally draining and unrewarding work. Most of the guys who got fired or quit at my office were the guys with college degrees in Comp Sci or Business. Why stick around for 3+ years of long hours and nonstop phone jockeying when you can work as a second level developer for a little more money and fewer hours? Or even better, why stay on the phones when you can get an MBA and make more money bossing around other techs?

Mind you, I actually work in a more relaxed tech support department, but the problems are always the same. Maybe I'm cynical but to answer why does tech support suck, think about what the job requires and have, for the most part, answered you own question.

Tech support is usually staffed with entry level folks due to the pay scale. The result is script-reading and repetition of the FAQ. They don't actually understand the problem, they just recognize a few of the words and look them up in the database.
[in the same way that HR does not evaluate resume's, just look for keywords].
Level 0 or level 1 filters most of the calls, escalating the most insistent or angry callers to level 2,3,4,5...higher numbers to imply greater intelligence, sometimes.
As others have said, support is an overhead cost to be minimized/outsourced in various ways. Cryptic documentation and beta software are valid reasons as well.
Looking at the flip side, the number of pseudo-technical users is increasing. The expectation is that a download or CD can be seamlessly installed is growing. Hardware is all plug-and-play, whether it's compatible or not. Drivers - what are those?
Why should I pay a geek to get it running properly, I can read the instructions as well as anyone. With falling system prices, I can get a modern PC for substantially less than $1,000.
All it takes is money to be an expert and I expect the tech support to educate me. How hard can it be?
The user-friendliness sells more systems, so product sales looks great on the balance sheet. Problem is that sales meets their quotas and obtains their commission/bonus while support (usually under another manager) sees nothing but expense.

The problem has always been that the tech rep does not read the entire complaint/message.

Low morale is a factor. With "cost-cutting measures", techs don't feel secure in their jobs, and when your company isn't loyal to you, it's hard to be loyal to your company.

The greed factor plays in as well. A few years ago IT was the "it" the new California gold rush. So tons of greedy people did what was necesary to get their certs, so they could land a cushy IT job and pull down the big $'s. Problem is, passing the cert. tests didn't make them competent. They just became certified idiots. They don't have a love for the technology, and they certainly don't have a core understanding of it.

Too much change also plays a role. It's hard to keep up with the product lifecycles nowdays. And much of what is being added/changed is bells and whistles instead of truly useful, enabling kinds of things.

I have found most of the answers here hit on the correct issues and then fill up with personal beefs afterword. Managment is always the problem in this type of issues. a) they never seem to find the time or effort to support the lower trained and underpaid side of the office. most time when a cust. service rep deals with a manager he's getting his butt chewed or fired. b) When a cust. service rep. shows a bad attitude from working at a "underpaid" position his attitude tends to be forced onto the user,(the I don't have time for this approach) thus the user is blamed and I have met very few trained users most are self taught thus providing a vast amount of errors witch are their fault at some level. c) software... well what can I say except that there is an abundance of "crapware" out there that was rushed out without proper testing. D) Inhouse traing, Everybody seems to have forgoten this little item, How can a servive rep help someone else on an item he has little experiance with? This is most common with software complaints. most issues are on a FAQ listing but if the issue gose beyond that the the problem gets passed off. (it's HP's or M$ issue) It seems to me once again that a vast amount of mismanagment is the big problem all the way around.

There are a variety of reasons, (as can be seen from the replies here). But the core reason is - people want everything for the lowest cost. Users want low cost software and don't want bother to learn how to use it. Management wants cheap user support and not to have to pay for training. Vendors don't want to pay for experienced developers and tech support people. Management wants managers that speak MBAeze and can put together nice looking statistics and could care less about technical competence. And 99% of the corporate world is more concerned with CYA and short-term cost reduction rather than doing their job well. Welcome to America!

Frankly, you want to see really lazy workers in the industrialized world, go visit France!! The idea that Americans are lazier than our far east competitors is total hogwash propped up by CEO and wall street types who want to convince Americnas to work even longer...

We're the only industrial nation (other than Japan and Russia) in which laborers work more than 45 hours per week on average. I would say that we are far from lazy. If anything, we are wage slaves driving ourselves in to early graves.

I am a 25-year IT vetran. I have worked on helpdesks, set up helpdesks and supervised helpdesks. The unresolves should be 5% at the first level; that is a 95% success rate. My helpdesks were just about 100% successful and I'll tell you why.

I, for one, am so tired of dealing with first level (and sometimes even second level) support personnel that cannot speak English and are trained only to read from manuals. These people don't have a clue as to how the equipment or software works. What's worse, they have no field experience and certainly no problem hanging up if the call becomes too difficult. I am trying not to deal with companies who outsource their support to other countries. If we all did that it might help.

The bottom line is this: when an IT dept./person calls support. They have already been through the first level and are fully-qualified to read the manual or knowledge base. For heaven's sake, we have already done this.

First level needs to be trained in the use of the product. Perhaps the "suits" need to get their support people out in the field to work with actual end-users to see how the product is installed, where the user-error lies, and learn where the problems of the product occur.

Until this is done, we will continue to see support deteriorate. Take ArcServe...they have lost their marketshare to Veritas, why? The two products are almost exactly alike, ArcServe is actually cheaper. Veritas has better support. The same is happening to Dell...they build a great box, but long hold times and intolerable first level support will begin to hurt them. Even though Dell builds an excellent box, I wouldn't use them if they were free.

Hardware and software manufacturers sit up and take notice!!!

Linda

The overwhelming consensus on this issue seems to be: The managers are at fault. They're incompetent, untrained, mean, manipulative, dishonorable, and short-sighted. Did I miss anything?

A lot of managers subscribe to this journal. There is a Republic for IT management and even one for CIOs. I doubt that TechRepublic would bother publishing them if no one was reading them.

So where are they? In 30 postings there are about three from managers, who for the most part think of themselves as mavericks and agree with the consensus. Why aren't the other 99 percent of the managers speaking up for themselves, explaining why they do what they do, to help us see their side of the story?

Don't they want to become part of the professional community, help build a consensus on important issues, learn from the experiences of others, and anticipate future problems before they occur? No? Could it be that they think "fooling around on bulletin boards" is a total waste of "company time"? Something that can't possibly have a bearing on next quarter's P&L statement?

Silence speaks volumes.

Lets put the blame where it belongs - Bad leadership and managemnt.

Bollocks ! Outsourcing is merely a opportunity for capitalist pig scumbags to exploit poorly paid workers in other countries, whilst putting people over here out of work. Vermin !!!!

I deal with all the vendors. I support 5 different databases on 3 different platforms. Companies like Oracle and CA do a poor job at support. Their primary goal is to close the case regardless of if you are satisfied or not. They often throw ill-relevent busy work at you just to put the case in a status of "waiting on the customer", and they don't escalate cases fast enought, to a higher level of support, if they don't have the expertise. Companies like BMC and Microsoft do an excellent job of support. They take ownership of the problem and stay with you until you are satisfied. You quickly get to the right person to get the correct answer, Even if their software is not the direct cause. They are also focused on the real problem and don't waste your time. It's a management, corporate culture and training issue. Not on off-shore on-shore issue.

In my opinion the reason that Tech-support is so bad is due to the idea that all organization must turn a profit. Since the bottom-line is the all consuming aspect of any organization we focus more on making money than keeping client satisfied. The concept of customer service or support has been sacrificed on the alter of an ever increasing push for higher profits and lower over-head. As a result we have less qualified personnel manning the phones in an effort to resolve issues they know nothing about. By keeping a lower standard for support personnel they are able to pay less and charge more, thus they meet the requirements that satisfy the sacrifies to the all mighty buck at the expense of the client.

Tech support is not a glamorous field, it's never gonna attract the best people.

Ok...there's so much here.
I do all the Tech Support for a 100 user office. It's a Corporate Headquarters so the demand for great Tech Support is off the scale. Politics too.

I also do all the tech support for the Sales and Safety Reps on the road. This adds up to over 150 users and machines to administer. (plus Office gadgets of all types)
I've got 10 years experience doing this and I have been trained by 2 fantastic Fortune 100 Companies. This is what I've noticed:

By far the biggest problem is with Tech Support is bad management. This is not so much in the F100 Companies I've served, but in the other Companies I've served.
It cost time and money to invest in Customer Service Skills. (SO THEY THINK). And, Companies don't have much of that these days...especially in IT. (AGAIN..SO THEY THINK). But it ends up costing all of us more in the long run...

To make a long story short (my phone is ringing off the hook right now), Corp America is in desperate need of an attitude change. Give IT people 3 things and the problems end:

1) Supreme Customer Serivce Soft Skills. (teach an attitude)
2) Extreme Competence in Technical skill sets.
3) Support, Ecnouragement and bodacious COMRADERY between co-workers.

I.E...Corporate America needs to quit worrying about driving down the costs of IT (salaries included) and focus on driving up the morale and support of IT people. Again, this is more in attitude and not so much money. It costs them in the long run if they don't.
But this will take a fundamental shift in the of Corporate -attitude-.

It costs nothing to promote good will and take a little extra time to teach your troops something new each day. (both Technically and Soft Skills)
Only then will IT Support skyrocket into overdrive and produce the results Corporate Management is so desperately trying to attain through driving down "costs".

It "costs" more in the long run. I find that most IT people love people and their jobs. It's just that they are undertrained, overworked and undersupported. Knowing this, why do we even ask ourselves why Tech Support sucks so bad these days? We can't even breathe!!

I'd write more but 'Demand' calls!

Thanks!

Unfortunately, this trend of lousy support/service goes far beyond tech support. It seems that vendors of all kinds have given up on trying to provide quality service becaue they know we're at their mercy. It's truly sad.

Obviously, many of you whiners have never done phone support. Most end users are so ignorant of the OS and the applications involved in their work that they cause many of the problems they are calling in about. Add to that a profound inability to provide pertinent/relevant information and to follow directions, it is a wonder anything gets resolved in a timely manner. The added bonus of doing this type of work is the stress provided by having to work within a limited time frame and surly customers. I'm pretty burned out from this type of situation and hope never to have to do it again.

I have been on both ends of in-house support and do not like either one. As a user needing some solution, the non-listening tech support could invariably provide the wrong answer. As tech support, the user could invariably supply the wrong information.

It appeared then, as now, that proper training for support personnel to CARE about the individual problem and be allowed to have ample time to pull out the needed information is a critical factor.
Current business environment rules are to estimate the amount of time, and therefore cost, to correctly handle each problem and then reduce the target or goal time to about half of that.

The individual pride of work has been forced into get rid of the problem over solve the problem. A good work ethic in the hands-on community is punished as inefficient.

Having read some of the comments on management and some about the individual work ethic, both are correct yet neither one is correct. I worked 30 years in the mainframe user arena in management. My management would routinely call for cost reduction, cut training budgets, and bitch about poor quality of work performance.

The solution is CORPORATE america has lost the care value for other than the bottom line, an important feature, but the work force no longer is considered an intelligent group.

1. Information Technology was derived from electronics and mathimatics. The electronic engineers and mathmaticians were initially behind it. As it evolved and became more accessible via GUI to the general public and with mass production of certifications lots of people saw an oportunity to make money in it thinking it was easy without having any relavent education. Business management who has had no clue about the complexity of what makes it "click" were hiring just anybody with minimal knowledge during the BOOM time.
2. Now we've got the fallout - very few know execaly what they are doing. To be a successful IT engineer one must have foundation in electronics, telecommunications and math.
Any certification is only good if one posseses the fundumentals.
3. Inidia and China hire engineers with solid engineering education for the IT industry and not quick-trained MCSE, CCNA, programmers, DBAs -teachers, shoe makers, pianists, economists, traders and so on - the list is too long.

Non-outsourced support may be poor for many reasons. But, what you have to quantify is what attributes to this perception. Then systemmatically address the problems.

In many cases, it is bad because the service is 'free'. With internal support groups not charging for the work, there's no measure of how much IT costs, how to be more efficient, etc.

There is help. Check out the IT Infrastructure Library, (ITIL) a set of best practices for IT, and Service Delivery processes.

Knowing your customer and knowing that he's paying your bills is something everyone has lost sight of.

Whether you have your own resource for IT or it's outsourced, the Majority lack the vision of the customer, the client or the end user. The reason you?re doing what you're doing is because of them.
Unfortunately most individuals today in our society have taken their lead from our honoured and respected business leaders. Profitability at whatever it takes. Business cycles are exactly that. But never mind the holistic, as long as someone is paying your bills at minimum expected deliverables, so be it. Of course the ones that please are also the ones that get it and in the long run, progress at a rapid rate.

Society and not your resource is responsible for the degradation of service levels across the board.

We just completed a migration of our desktop support to an outsourcing deal. The only justification was COST of our internal help desk. Other justifications such as "quality" improvement were kinda placed aside when our own help desk was rated independently as A- with "industry standard" being at a C. Our outsourced desktop support's goal was a C+. The last rating under outsourcing was a C- and falling. What is the COST of diminished productivity for our users?

Signed DoD

The answer to this question is simple: Level 1 support is always entry level. Actuarially speaking, there are SO MANY calls that can be answered by a mere "check to see if it's plugged in" type of response that mgmt decided long long ago to make the job req's for this: anyone with a pulse who can recite from a list of scripted responses.... period.

The real insult (something none of you reading this post may be aware of) is that the poor saps working the phone receive job ratings based on how quickly they can mark a call as resolved (even if the problem is NOT resolved); so they feverishly race to find the closest thing they can to match your call against in their list of "typical" problems. Then, they mark it as complete, close out your problem ticket, and move on to the next problem. Voila! Corporate reports that they have a strikingly high success / satisfaction rate... which, of course, is emphatically not true.

There is no way to deal with this. To get your problem resolved via tech support, you must go into the venture knowing that you will spend the first several minutes getting past all the "did you check to see if it's plugged in" line of questionning. Then, politely ask to be bucked up to the next level; then expect some days will go by before you get satisfaction.

There are business gurus who have been on the presentation circuit for decades telling these companies how to improve their tech support; but these gurus are still touring, because none of these companies have ever listened to how to give adequate tech support.

Sorry.... :-(

First as a former support person, I think one of the biggest reasons, aside from some already mentioned is that companies do not pay their support staff enough to attract individuals of quality with a good knowledge and problem solving skill set. Half the time it seems like you are talking to someone who is making minimum wage reading from a script who would be completely powerless if you took away their computer, (which is telling them what to do.)

More than once I knew more about the system these guys are supporting then they did. I don't blame the support persons themselves, I blame the Managment for either not paying enough to keep talented and knowledgeable fold or for not training properly the folks they have. Many times support is a second thought and thought as a cost center, not a profit center, so now one wants to pay for good support.

Luckily there are exceptions out there, but they seem few and far between.

As to the American work ethic...
It is really easy go based on antidotal evidence here. Some might say it's great and some might say it's horrible based on their experience. When you look at how much we produce in product and wealth per person compared to the rest of the world and the numbers of hours the average American work works, you see that the our work ethic is alive an well . While it may not be what it once was, and while you can find a slob who thinks that it's incontinent of the customer to actually expect service, I think as a whole, America is one of the hardest if not thee hardest working country out there.

The main reason I feel that it is so bad is because they do not get the proper training before the job and on the job for the software the company uses.

I think it is because outsourced tech support doesn't have a stake in the company. They are basically hired guns. As long as they get paid they don't care.

I came to this company when the IT department had totally disintegrated. tech support was so bad that the different departments depended on consultants to help them. They hired me to turn this around and the first thing I did is sit down with management to find out their goals. I also found out that they were trying to run the IT department as a profit center and that will never work. I sat down with them, put together a realistic budget and was able to hire the right type of staff. I then concentrated on Customer service, standardizing, documenting and upgrading the infrastructure and we have had a very good rating from all the departments for the last 2 years (I have been here about 2and 1/2 years). I believe that the problem is not necessarily with the tech support people but in how they are managed.

The USA is far from being particularly efficient. On the contrary both USA & UK productivity is exceeded by the French who work less than 37 hours per week by law.

IMHO the problem is that most UK & USA workers strongly resent the 8-7pm culture that is prevalent and encouraged by management. I am paid to do 37 hours work a week, but rarely do less than 50 and often more. Failure to 'go the extra mile' marks you out as a malcontent or trouble-maker. I'm sure Steve Jobs, Scott McNealey & Bill Gates (to name a few) all 'work' 70+ hrs a week and 'enjoy' it. They are NOT fielding calls from irate farmers in Utah or Pembrokeshire completely baffled by the lousy software or hardware these gents' companies have sold them.

The guys (& gals too) who *do* support the kit work 60+ hrs in miserable call centres, constantly overlooked and monitored, and do so for lousy wages. The old adage that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys is not always true, but if you do pay peanuts, don't be surprised if your workforce act like monkeys!

You talk about an 'honourable work ethic' (UK spelling, OK?), but how about 'honourable employers' ethics'? A fair day's work for a fair day's pay is as good a motto as you will ever see in this context.
The workers in the VW factory in Mexico don't work harder than their USA counterparts, they simply earn only about 20% of the pay. In business terms this is efficient. The chineese workers who make Nike & Gap products are lucky to see a few dollars a day - even more 'efficient'. There is no way USA or UK (or French come to that) workers will EVER compete - does that make us lazy?

Here are reasons why help desk support is not too good:
Items contributing to the problem.
1. Software that is too complicated for the average non-technical user to understand.
2. Too many hardware configurations for the average non-tech user to cope with.

What is wrong with help desk support:
1. Low pay and entry level job.
2. First level people don't know much beyond
what is in their scripts.
3. First level people being in other countries.
Accents make some calls difficult.

The problem will not go away unless software is more bullet proof and installs on more hardware without incident. It would be good if a cheaper, stripped down version, of some products were available. I own Microsoft office but only use 10-15% of the features in the differnt modules.

Don't forget the "Let me transfer you to ..., they should be able to help you." Then you hear the phone ring 5 or 6 times followed by a dead phone.

Your question actually implied that the out-sourced support are OK. Actually, it is not.

The real reason is that the IT solutions are over sold by IT professionals to unsuspecting customers. Let's consider an automobile, the number of parameters a driver has to know how to control, and their consequences of each input, e.g. pressind down on the brake paddle, are very obvious, understandable, immediately observable, and controllable. The execution of that action is simple and understandable, and consistent (same action everytime, on any car, truck, van.), and there is only one way to do it. That's a bit different from dealing with computers, e.g. changing the resolution of the monitor - it's a multi-step process, different on different os, and there may be multiple ways to do the same thing on the same machine. The results are not always observable, and certainly not immediate. The rationel behind such an action is not intuitive. The actions may not produce the result you expected. etc. etc. If the automobile takes a century for the general public to use well 50% of the time by 50% of the people, what chance we have to make the general public to use computers well in a few decades.

Therefore, we have the situation of a basic problem of a complicated piece of equipment which is not understood by its intended target audience, who is poorly equip to operate the equipment, you have a pending disaster.

A good driver with a nice car is still useless if the driver don't know where he/she is going, and what for, by what time, and which route to take. But thst's exactly what many computer users are. I have seen people using a spreadsheet software to prepare a balance sheet who has not idea what a balance sheet is for, the rules governing the operation, what care he/she should take to ensure the correctness of the information on the sheet, and why is he/she doing it. I have review a program written by an engineer to try to predict, using linear regression, with three data points - an obvious waste of time. Knowing how to make a software work does not make you an expert in the job you are doing - you need the subject matter expertise. But the IT profession, probably assume every user has the proper expertise, e.g. linear regression, and therefore did not warn the management of their customers or clients about the knowledge gap.

Let's face it, the computer and software is still too complicated for the general public. Computers and software are improving. The general public are getting more sophisticated. But the gap is still great. It will take a few more decades to bridge that gap. May be an automatic transmission will appear some day, so that we don't have to clutch and shift. Right now we still have to double clutch to shift gear. But we still don't know why we need to shift gear. We were just told that's what we need to do if we don't want to loose our last 10 hours of work.

On top of the basic problem of mismatched knowledge and skill requirements, there is that quality problem, and lack of standardization. When most program uses the same user interface to accomplish similar things, and all actions act as advertized everytime, and gives immediate feed back to the users about what's being done, what's not accomplished, and what are the results, in a consistent and standard manner, just like location of the brake paddle is at the same place on all cars, and do the same thing all the time, and you can see when it's working and when it's not, we will have some hope of solving this problem.

In addition to these problems, the internal service organization have another structural problem - mismatch responsibility with resources. Most of the internal servicing organization gets their resource (e.g. budget) from the corporation, and other branches of the corporation uses the resrouce. In most cases, the service costs are not charged back. Even when the service is charge, most organization would only charge the variable cost, not the startup and sunk costs. When an organization can use resources from elsewhere and not having to pay for the total cost, or not paying at all, it will use the free or cut-rate resources to the max. It may not be done concienciously, but the cost factor certainly do not weigh too much at decision time. In such a situation, the value generated from utilization of the resources will be suboptimal, may even be non-existent. Therefore, investing in these internal serviceing organization will not bring about high rate of return. Budget increment to enhance these internal services are therefore hard to justified. When you have a run away demand drain on a resouce with limited budget, you are asking for trouble. Therefore, there is no way an internal service center, without charging the total cost of the service, can provide service level demanded by it's customers.

The trouble with the situation is that the management of the internal service organization are really impotent in solving this problem. They don't have the clout. Giving them the budget to do so will not help either - it just make the situation worse.

Total cost recovery is not the solution either. It create a monopoly, who will charge whatever they want, and become inefficient. Making them compete with external service providers will kill the internal service organization, unless they have the power, like the external service organization, to refuse doing business with an internal organization, which gets too ugly.

These problems are not unique to the internal IT shops. But the IT shop face additional problem. Organization can use only so much paper. If you provide paper to them free, they will misuse them, but will reach a point when using paper up cost them too much. There doesn't seems to be a limit in use of IT resouces. I haven't seen a case of that yet. Moreover, IT is still too complicated for the general management, and therefore the excuse: "IT made me do it" is easily accepted by higher management. Managers will not try to better utilize IT unless their job depends on it.

So, the trouble of internal IT service organization, hence the trouble with services they provide, is structural. Good IT management can help, but only to a point. IT professionals need better technology to make IT simple. General management has to understand computers and software better to know what they can do. Users need more subject matter expertise to know how to do the sophisticated stuff in their field. Organizations has to change the way they look at internal services, and organize their organizational structure, as well as their costing and budgeting practices, to reduce the problem they have.

Whil I have not read every reply I think this question has taken an interesting Work Ethic, work class philosophy flavor I want to go answer the question in another way.

Tech support is based on the depth and bredth of technical skill and knowledge. I believe most in-house organizations tend to have more depth of knowledge and skill their working technologies while most outsourced Tech Support have a greater breadth of skill and knowledge in their commercial technology.

Business is currently driven to open standards and common applications so a set of general applications support many common yet specific business needs. This broadens the the applications an end users uses beyond the skill and knowledge that in house tech support can provide but most out sourced tech support may not have the depth of knowledge or skill to support a product in a specific environment.

The basic way to solve this problem is to give both tech support organization time to develop but the sheer number of applications being developed and sheer number beig sold prohibits that allocation of time.

We don't get the help we want or many times the help we need. We get what we get. Life is hard.

It seems as though there is a lot of good support in the US, however when it is outsourced to India and other areas - the only motivation seems to be the supposed bottom line dollar for some companies. Many companies figure that paying a good tech in the US isn't worth the extra money when in fact it helps generate sales. So along comes the inexpensive help desks with poor scripts and techs that can't think outside the box without a script.

Call the problem - comapnies inability to see the big picture and not just immediate $$$,

On the open market, most companies (and individuals) including mine will not pay for good tech support until they absolutely can't do anything else.

It's not pro-active, it's not long term smart, but it does compete with our competators.

If any company reasonably raises the cost of a printer or OS to include great tech support they will go out of business in a hurry- or else only develop into a niche market. It's not the companies driving this- it's the consumers.

It would make a HUGE difference if the people who did this work really cared about the work they are doing. I should know, I do it, and I DO care about helping my customers and it matters a lot. Our past few generations have become so plugged into their MP3 players abd Cell Phones, they have forgotten the art of conversation.
SKILLS without a willingnes to be of service to others is a shallow fishing line in a very deep lake,

In too many call centers, first-level tech support is provided by low-wage script readers (telemarketers get paid more). The only training they receive is in reading the script. They cannot deviate from the script to help the customer, regardless of their personal knowledge or experience, but must pass the call up to level 2 support after the customer coughs up the big bucks.

As near as I can see, the primary cause for this is the focus on the corporate equivalent of instant gratification--this quarter's dividend--instead of long-term return. What brought this on? The bean-counters that are now running these companies are trying to keep the stockholders with the most money (and therefore the most power) happy. Who are they? Our retirement funds...

Need I say more?

I've worked on an helpdesk where we where proud of the service we gave, calls where owned by the call logger, and we ensured that when a call was allocated to another technician/3rd party, that we followed up progress and ensured that the caller was kept notified.
The team I worked with was replaced by a centralised service (call centre). The SLA's that the new call centre worked to where far more relaxed than our old standards, the new people on the call centre where thrown together, managed by someone that knew more about statistics and SLA's than actual customer service.
The net result was of course, angry users.
The problem is the narrow minded Directors/Finance managers that cannot see any further than the bottom line. In a business it's possible to improve the training of users within an organisation, so that calls to the helpdesk/call centre are reduced and productivity of the business increases.
Where this cannot be done, ie where the users are the general public, producing software that has 100 more functions than the last version only alienates the user. Not only that, but because of the size of the software, much larger teams have to work on it, more errors, more testing etc. With a larger team, there as to be more control measures, more managers and hence more communication layers that people have to trawl through to get a problem resolved.
What's also needed is software that is simple & intuitive to use, structured so that the novice can easily find what they need (including help files not written by a programmer!!), but also configurable so that more advanced users can access the extra functionality.
There is a problem in today?s society; it's the "It's not my problem" attitude, where everyone is quick to blame someone else, to look for the easy way out. People need to take responsibility for their actions, be proud of the good work they do. Sometimes it's easier to get rid of people's jobs to save money; it's far harder to help people change, to ensure that they feel they are valued.
Glad I got that off my chest, now how do I change the world?

If you sell software or hardware to a million customers they will use it a million different ways. If you think you have an off the cuff answer to every problem those million customers will have you're crazy.

I often am the last resort in handling technical problem escalations. I see a number of problems: 1. tech support people are measured on how much time is spent on each call, so they try to provide a quick answer and hang up; 2. starting salaries are low, so less inexperienced people take these jobs; 3. training is inadequate - tech support reps don't know the product well enough and also don't know what questions to ask and what logs to request; many applications are becoming more complex - we are now dealing with many more factors, including user interface, database, program logic, communications software, etc., in addition to connectivity hardware and services; 5. some support reps don't think out of the box enough - often, a customer has difficulty describing the problem, states the problem incorrectly, or describes a symptom that could be caused by a number of different problems - again, with some experience, the support rep could dig deeper by asking the right questions and possibly arrive at the real cause. In the end, the problem is due to inexperience, since an experienced support person would know what questions to ask and be able to handle the problem on the first or second call.

In a nutshell, modern accounting principles define everything as either an expense or an income source. All income source line items are to be maximized (and all the people involved with them to be rewarded) and all expense line items to be minimized (and everyone involved therein to be marginalized!).

The top guy at every company has that attitude, and rewards and punishes everyone in the company based on those principles because of what it does to the share price, on which his pay and bonus are based. We've seen lately to what lengths CEO's will go to inflate their bonus!

Because Tech Support is an expense item, Management has the attitude from the CEO down to the Help Desk Manager, that absolute minimums be spent on it. Thus, minimum staffing. Minimum pay scales within the IT sector. Interchangable parts (the techs); minimal training; minimal support; minimal everything!

IT Support and Help Desk activities are by definition, a BAD THING. The results are predictible.

Mr. Been There and Done That

Maybe the Help desk techs just suck. LMAO.

But all joking aside, the problems/issues helpdesk can fix is restricted by the policies of the company. Most help desk users do not have access to log on as admin, no remote support yet (although with XP thats changing fast), time limit (current help desk I have to deal with has 8 mins to fix the issue, otherwise it forwards the call to second level), and of course competence. Just my 2 cents.

If I were hiring I would stipulate non-smoking as a pre-requisite to any job application.

Skyrocketing health insurance costs, the life insurance industry figured out years ago that smokers die earlier and cost more to support... so their rates are higher for smokers. The loss of productivity due to time off for smoking related illnesses and lost productive time due to "smoke breaks" all sap the bottom line. It's interesting that some politically correct workplaces even stipulate a "fragrance free" environment, all the while allowing hordes of their workers to stream back into the office after a coffee break... their clothes stinking of residual tobacco smoke... what a joke.

If people want to commit tobacco-assisted suicide, they wouldn't be doing it on my watch.

Richard

In 1980 the average American CEO earned about 40 times the lowest paid worker...

In 1990 they earned over 85 times as much...

In 2000 they earned about 535 times as much...

Where is the incentive to provide "service"?

The reason tech support is so bad - I have worked in that area for a number of years. Management is the biggest part of the problem. In some cases a call can not always be completed in 10 min. for a first time resolution - if you meet that congrats you were luck with the calls you recieved. Calls received are luck of the draw for time length. There are now many novice users as well as improperly trained techs handling the calls.

Not all Americans have a good work ethic - in many cases it is politics as to whether or not a tech gets a key position not on their knowledge and experience. When this happens it lessens the quality of the support. In some case as one person stated already the long "line" of options to get to a live person is difficult and then when you do they don't knwo what they are doing. Many "techs" I have talked to on the phone are quick to try and transfer you to another department they do not listen - Listening is a key that many tech do not or have not learned.

Tech support is a department that does not make a company money so companies make techs get off the line before anything is fixed or not.. thus customer satisfaction drops through the floor and management will not fix the problem by getting qualified people into the department to fix customer issues.

It breaks down to management not want to spend money and cut into their pocketbooks. Too bad if you have good tech suport you can make larger profits because people will buy your products because of their tech support people are knowledgeable..

As a supervisor in a non-outsourced call center I can tell you what I've experenced. Our technical support people are some of the most qualified people in the technology industry. One of the biggest problems we face daily is one of attitude and work ethic. I read someones comment stating we have the strongest work force in the world in this country. We also have the worst work ethic going. Reminds me of the old joke about the manager telling an employee "I wish I had 10 employees just like you.......Instead of the 30 I have now" We've reached the point in our country where we believe we "deserve" the world and everything in it and that unless we're paid what we "believe" we're worth we don't have to give a days work for a days pay. Workers are tardy when our system demands we have certain numbers to meet our customers needs at certain times. The word commitment isn't in many of their vocabularies. As to attitude.....if they spoke to their spouses and families the way the talk to our customers their loved ones would walk out the door. Customer SERVICE is not the norm. (Now please let me insert this: This doesn't apply to all of them. Some of our agents are extremely professional, courteous and interested in servicing our customers.) If they're being monitored and they know it, they clean up their acts. Leave them on their own and many revert back to old habits very quickly.

Please understand, I'm not saying these people are bad people or that they should be removed from their positions or anything like it but, just making observations about my experience. I worked my way up through our call center to my current position so I know how hard it is, day after day, week after week to sit on a phone and "solve the worlds problems". It's a hard job at times. A bad attitude can make it a harder job. We need to get back to the point where servicing our customers is the number one priority and when giving 100% to our jobs it hugely important. All the technical savvy in the world is useless without those two components.

Thanks for listening to my humble opinion.
Regards.