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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: What to do when your ISP off-shores tech support
Joe Greco wrote: Sure. Blaming off-shore tech support is pretty easy stuff, but the reality is that the trouble is more along the line of appropriate training. But, the reason that US-based $TELCO and $CABLECO use off-shore tech support is that they don't want to pay for the training and supervision to do it right in-house. The same person diagnosing your IP routing issues may indeed be asking, "Would you like fries with that?" thirty seconds later. [1] And, for purposes of, "Would you like fries with that?", off-shore is good enough that most customers can't tell, nor do they care. It may often be better than a newbie local ten feet from you. It's the ultimate scripted application, a literal menu. People expect half-duplex-low-fi audio when talking to a tin speaker buried inside of a plastic clown. ;-) Some discussion suggested that the RR people were highly script-oriented And they are afraid to admit (or don't realize) that they are not capable of complicated problem solving. They're following a script, just like the fast food order-takers. Or maybe they don't have the authority to escalate it to someone with clue, even if/when they do realize they're over their heads. It appears that the TWC Business tier 1 people actually have a fair amount of technical training and clue, and resources to tap if that's not good enough. Further, he was bright enough to let me know that they had a "better than turbo" package available with a higher upstream speed, for only a little more, that'd make me a business customer, so I'd never have to deal with Road Runner again. Based on this one experience, we were more than happy to sign an annual contract and pay just $10/mo more, and have direct access to people who know what words like "DHCP" and "route" actually mean. So, regardless of geographic location, using scripted clueless order-takers without the ability to escalate for customer support is a bad thing. And, scripted clueless order-takers exist solely because they're cheap, not because they provide anything remotely resembling good service. Cheap, from a US-centric perspective, generally means offshore. The interesting thing about your experience is that your service problems resulted in an up-sell, but only because you were persistent enough to fight through the system. Furthermore, it took a person with clue to do the up-sell. How many customers and up-sell opportunities does RR lose because of their decision to go with cheap, scripted, clueless off-shore support? My point is that you not only need the language skills and a good phone Precisely. Or for better service have reasonably clueful people at level 1 so that they can quickly and expeditiously deal with the easy problems that could be scripted. The scripted part could (and often is) being done with IVR, no humans at all. But, please, if you do this, use DTMF menus and not that God-awful worthless "Tell-me" speech-guessing machine. And make sure that every menu has a "0-to-human-being" option.
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