Why isn't technical support working?

I agree with Jonathan. There needs to be more co-ordination within the IT community to address the security issues we must all manage.

I work for a large service provider (outsourcer) and it is becoming increasingly difficult to put a stake in the ground as to how well a network is protected.

There are a number of other issues that need to be considered as well - the major one in my opinion is that of simplicity and flexibility. With icreasing attempts to simplify often complex tasks, decisions on what is legitimate and what is not gets diluted. The flexibility to work from anywhere at anytime also means that certain risks have to be made.

To refer back to Jonathans ideas on co-operation, there needs to be some practicalway of co-ordinating or collecting information. This would need to be somewhat simple in the method as with the increasing difficulty of support, decreasing real budgets, there is not a lot of time left for "other activities" outside of the immediate problems.

The end users attitude os often "just fix it" but that is sometimes easier said than done when they are not directly paying for it.

A co-ordinated effort towards education and awareness may be the key to success. With the "many" sources of information in this area it becomes difficult just to keep up, let alone make inroads into tackling the issues properly.

I would certainly be interested in peoples ideas and suggestions.

1) sometimes a carefully crafted question can draw the interest of the person in the ISP you are trying to contact. Need to be carefull here you can turn peolpe off just as easy.
2) I was able to contact an ISP in South Africa not using their help line but going to their website and leaving a comment! The good folks there responded.

And without starting a raging debate here, keeping in mind the central topic, I would cite one thing as the reason that "help desking" is failing in nearly every industry. not just IT. I have seen it in hospitals, phone companies, financial institutions, vacuum cleaners, etc...

And that is...... OUTSOURCING.

It's time to demand that these companies that want to do business here in the USA; especially handling our money or finances, DO BUSINESS HERE. Quit outsourcing our customer service and helpdesks to Ubiziquistan or whatever other third-world hole you picked to save a buck.

If the increasing frequency and repetition of advertising on cable TV is any indication, we are numb, dumb, and apathetic all at the same time.

I personally don't care if the person helping me when I have a technical issue is green, purple, brown, gray, red, or orange..... but all I ask is.... TRY TO SPEAK MY LANGUAGE.... OKAY?

Until someone in politics has the "stones" to say, "quit outsourcing your helpdesks, tech support, and customer service"...it will not change... (where is FDR when you need him?)

If what your saying is your such poor managers, that you cannot control your costs well enough, to hire people to take carre of the people that made you all your money? How ridiculous does that sound?

Isn't it curious that if outsourcing or not outsourcing these vital services, is THE make or break issue of that company, then they have no business being in business anyway.

No one is going to be ABLE to work together with anyone, if they are spread out to 177 different countries all trying to save a one-hundreth of one cent per incident ticket.

Just my 3-1/2 cents.

Interesting commments so far: a Call Center rep who is already disgruntled (welcome to the IT nursery,) train the users, blame fixing on foreign support centers that don't speak english as a native language....

Mr. Yarden is correct in his assessment of IT support within the US, however there are other countries that have been built on the philosophy of "Fix the problem, not the blame," a philosophy that hasn't quite caught on in our borders just yet.

We will be able to give a unified IT support to the end users when we are no longer concerned with who causes the problem, and are empowered to fix the problem, regardless of where it originates. The solution will be more in the lines of standardization than cooperation.

This will not, however, correct problems with users who don't know their right mouse button from their scroll wheel.

I agree with Jonathan, tech support support standards would be really helpful. Not only for better communications between ISPs, but for a guideline in what priorities need to be on an ISP network. I run an ISP serving primarily dialup customers, 1500, the majority of whom are newer to intermediate user levels. We support them through computer education classes, informative e-mails and diagnosis of their systems infection with viruses, spyware and ddos attacks. Our support is provided through walk in questions from customers, over the phone and in extreme cases of infection, we have them bring their computers in and we clean them free because it actually saves us money and headache in the long run.

Its hard to keep up with all the maintenance that new technologies and associated preditors require on the network. I'd be interested in participating with any test groups Jonathan might create as part of a study and will follow this topic. Feel free to e-mail me.
Regards,
Genell Grow
Technology & Education Director
Columbia Learning Center, St. Helens, Oregon

I agree with Mr. Yarden. There is nothing better than working together as a team to accomplish a common goal.

Whether you work for an ISP or a small or large business, if you are an IT pro then you should be able to work together to stamp out problems.

Who has the time to get it started? It's a great opportunity for someone to start up an organization where IT professionals can directly contact each other.

First i like to excuse me for my poor english, as i am a native Dutchman.

I was not allways a IT man. It more or less grown on me and finally i took the step and became an IT professional.
In my whole carreer i noticed and enjoyed international working with national en international fellow job en equally skilled coworkers in healthcare and research.
International organisation coordinates this and stimulate data en knowledge exchange.
But not so in IT, Every bit of knowledge is costly and expencive, needs to be taken by courses or time consuming meetings and such.
While whe, as IT professionals, have the tool "pur sang" to exchange knowledge and establish the best of the best global wide, whe hide in bastions of poor profit, competition en self interest.
These bastions are the subject of the war against that what the idea of internet represent.
The It world became an in it self turned, paranoid scared developers paradise, in wich we dear not turn to each other to move forward.
Look at Windows, 280 mb update on a install size of poorly 300 mb original cd content and 3 weeks later allready two very needed security updates to close the gaps.
Not so in the powerful and steady growing open source OS Linux. And this is beceause it is not a bastion, and therefore it is not attacked as such.
Whe live in one world with no internet boundery's.
I would say, Open up, don't be afraid and join knowledge, effords and energy and move forward.
IF there is a serious centra meetingpoint on where all is discussed without beeing affraid of loosing one or two customers, the whole IT world wil dow well.
So , yes make a kind of UN for IT and get things done.
Ren? Spruit

I'd like to agree with you, but I believe your solution is far too simple.

In my humble opinion, the problem of technical support not working has four parts that need to be "fixed." First, the end user is not trained, and simply does not understand relatively simple procedures (simple from an IT standpoint). More advanced users, such as programmers, are even worse because they don't believe that their system is causing the problem that they are calling about.

Second, first line help desk staff are understaffed and not properly trained, and by the time they get the training they move on. I cannot tell you the number of times I've received a ticket from our front line staff that simply says "the Internet is slow." I don't have a customer name location or other symptoms. I'm sorry I probably cannot fix a problem like this - there simply is not enough information.

Third, communication within many organizations can be as bad as communiations between ISPs and customers. I had a problem with another ISP a few months ago. I called the support departement of the ISP right at a shift change, and the day shift had no idea of a problem that graveyard had been working on. In this case I was fortunate that in a past life I worked with a vice president of this ISP and made a call that received immediate attention.

Forth, management that I've worked for often does not understand the complexity of the modern IT environment. As large as Microsoft and Cisco are, this is not a one Operating System/ one Infrastructure Internet. I work for an organization that has mainframes, various flavors of Unix, Windows, AS400's etc. Applications are written in JAVA, C, .NET and others. This is alot to understand and put together, and most managers cannot find the time to digest all of this.

All of the above and more needs to be addressed before technical support can gain the reputation and respect that it deserves.

The Internet has become the major battleground for businesses and ISPs. Increasing profits while cutting labor costs has become the prime objective. Tech support calls are now being submitted to automated systems that don't work right half the time.

Legislation was enacted to attempt to address one of the biggest technical support issues at hand. SPAM/UCE and end user privacy. It's not working because businesses and ISPs are actually capitalizing off the daily proliferations of viruses, worms, trojans and the like. What the heck... don't expect these guys to cut themselves out of this kind of action any time soon without another act of Congress intervening in some way or form.

It's managers who are afraid of IT, or don't understand or support IT initiatives are the biggest reasons for the lack of technical support. These managers have allowed for excessive budget cuts to be made in IT departments for systems, manpower and training. As a result, there are not enough technicians available to handle the increasing workloads, and existing IT staffers are not getting the quality of training that they need in order for them to continue doing their jobs effectively.