Reply #5: It's all a numbers game ... [View All]

[RoyGBiv]

I've seen both sides of it, and I understand the pressures from both sides. It's a difficult equation to manage.

On the one hand, you have the company.

At my employer, a tech service call cost the company $50 base for every truck roll. The majority of these truck rolls were not required, which naturally service managers saw as wasted spending that was taken out of the same budget used for genuine problem and infrastructure upgrades. They are tasked at the beginning of a fiscal year with completing certain projects, and each wasted truck roll results in a limitation on their ability to do that, i.e. less ability to allocate overtime to get it done quickly all the way up to creating a need to cut costs by reducing personnel, using cheaper, lower quality parts to possibly not meeting a deadline at all.

The biggest problem from the company's end is that the people who call with a problem aren't like you or me at all. Those who report a problem with their service when the actual problem is they forgot to plug in the damn computer are a *majority* of tech service calls. (I'm exaggerating the specifics, but not the type.) The fact was, most Internet problems could be fixed by power cycling the modem. Most cable problems were due to customer-installed wiring, and most phone problems were due to customers not hanging up an extension.

On the other hand, you have the customer.

Most tech support personnel either don't know how to do their jobs effectively or don't care. (And I say that as a person who did this job and supervised others who did it. I can count on one hand after a freak accident that removes half my fingers how many genuinely competent people worked with me.) Many of these companies do skimp on infrastructure, which results in massive problems. They oversell nodes and create congestion of their own making. The place sales quotas on technicians upon which the latter's job depends, motivating them to be less interested in problem resolution than they are at selling new levels of service.

It's enough to make a customer want to scream.

I don't know the answer. I never figured it out while I was there. I just tried to do my job to the best of my ability, which was difficult on the best of days.