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
Skywing wrote: I find those speech recognition menus quite annoying. American Airlines has one that's just not good enough over a lower bitrate cell voice link in a crowded situation when you're trying to determine what's the deal with cancelled flights or whatnot along with everyone else in the plane. Always have to waste a minute for it to decide that it's going to punt to a real person. It would be nice if there was a way to bypass it. http://www.get2human.com/gethuman_list.asp Jay wrote: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. Perhaps my wording didn't convey my meaning. They don't care about doing it right nearly as much as they care about doing it cheap. This often means outsourced, which often means offshore. The same person diagnosing your IP routing issues may indeed be asking, "Would you like fries with that?" thirty seconds later. [1] They actually do outsourced offshore order-taking for fast food drive-through restaurants. Several big-name chains in fact. And they're quite good at it, the customer probably doesn't know. Whether the same people also answer the phones for $TELCO and $CABLECO, I don't know. 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. Yep. I suspect it's a culture of "What are we paying you for if you can't solve the problems?" aimed at the scripted call center people. Call center work is a miserable job. The people are thoroughly timed and scrutinized, graded on the number of calls they take per hour, time on the phone to each caller (less is better), etc. Automated metrics with the goal of pushing as many calls at as few people as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are penalized for escalating issues. 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. You remained a customer and signed up for for a higher tier of services at increased cost based on a conversation with a clueful person, and you were only able to reach that person after some persistence. How many others gave up before getting that far and went elsewhere? -- Jay Hennigan - CCIE #7880 - Network Engineering - [email protected] Impulse Internet Service - http://www.impulse.net/ Your local telephone and internet company - 805 884-6323 - WB6RDV
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