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. - S -----Original Message----- From: Joe Greco [mailto:jgreco@ns.sol.net] Sent: Friday, December 26, 2008 11:17 PM To: Jay Hennigan Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: 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.
Jay, that's an interesting misstatement. It implies that they're going to be paying a lesser rate to do it right somewhere else, which typically does not seem to be what happens.
The same person diagnosing your IP routing issues may indeed be asking, "Would you like fries with that?" thirty seconds later. [1]
Does Bronco actually do that? :-)
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. ;-)
Right.
Some discussion suggested that the RR people were highly script-oriented and not necessarily capable of complicated problem solving.
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.
Don't-realize. The number of times I've been talked down to by people who don't have any clue what the "4" in "IPv4" means is depressingly high. I do not need to reboot my Windows PC to know that the DHCP answer my UNIX box is getting from the DHCP server, dumped in gory detail, is providing an IP address in a prefix that's not appearing in the global routing table now.
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.
That's definitely a problem.
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.
I did ask, and all the local people are, in fact, local. It's a matter of training and technical knowledge. None of them was really putting together the fact that the modem was sketchy for the service class we had.
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.
Plausible interpretation, but not really accurate. An upsell would normally be convincing someone to buy something that they would not otherwise have thought to be useful; is it really an "upsell" when you fail to advertise your new service offerings on your web site, and so leave your potential business customers with the impression that the only offerings you have are the same in-excess-of-T1 prices that you offered last time they talked to you? Come to think of it, I just looked and I still can't find any solid information about the plan we've got. I *think* it's some variation on the "teleworker" package. There's a "home business solution" pkg for $100/mo that includes 15M/2M broadband, but we're paying less than that...
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?
... or in this case, cheap, scripted, clueless in-house support ... The thing that is really unfortunate is that I had told the agent at the time we went to Turbo that I was primarily interested in upstream speed.
My point is that you not only need the language skills and a good phone connection, but also a reasonable process to deal with knowledgeable people. I understand the need to provide scripted support, but there should also be a reasonable path to determine that someone has an exceptional problem and isn't being well-served by the script.
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.
I don't know, I've seen some relatively impressive "speech-guessing machines." It is clear that the technology still needs some work, but Amtrak's "Julie" is fairly impressive and useful. ... JG -- Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net "We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN) With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.