What to do when you don't
know what to do:
Call Accent on Computers! 203-625-7575.
April 7, 2006
Where Did It All Go Wrong?
Dear Larry,
Thank goodness I can call you for help with my computer.
There doesn’t seem to be any computer company left that offers decent technical
support. What happened?
G. S.
Dear G. S.,
I’m probably going to get somebody mad at me after I spill the
beans about the state of technical support. But a sad state of affairs it is.
Ultimately, you get what you pay for, and, in some cases, you end up paying for
a real mess.
Stiff competition and low profit margins are the real
culprits. In an effort to eke out every last penny of profit, companies are
cutting back in every way possible. Not only has quality—or free—tech support
taken a beating, but gone are the days of getting any sort of printed
documentation. In fact, when you buy a computer, chances are you won’t even
receive CDs for the software that came on it.
It’s safe to assume that the better technical people in the
industry aren’t working in a company’s support division. I am constantly amazed
at how little they know. By and large, these are not people who are trained to
think independently; indeed, their low level of expertise doesn’t provide them
with the necessary skill set. Instead, companies supply them with scripts; tell
a tech person you have an XYZ problem, and you can be sure they’ll torture you
into trying every test imaginable, whether it has any real bearing on the
problem or not. And then if that doesn’t help, “please hold for a few minutes
while they research the problem” (i.e., ask their neighbor).
If it is a hardware-related problem, you can be sure that as
little as the manufacturer invests in quality support, it’ll want to spend even
less on sending out replacement parts. As a result, it may take hours and a
great deal of patience before a technician is prepared to say that a part has
actually failed. I wonder what it would be like if I had to call my car dealer
with similar questions: they might instruct me to open the hood and start
pulling out wires and parts!
Because companies pressure their technicians into addressing
as many calls as possible, you might also find that after a while, they’ll have
you run a program to restore your PC back to factory conditions. It’s shocking
to me how often this happens without the user fully understanding that it will
result in the loss of all of their data!
Ultimately, all of this aggravation helps my business. I’m
happy to say that my twenty-five+ years of experience in the industry has given
me the ability to actually solve problems the way they should be solved. Sure,
service like that does come with a price tag; then again, when was the last time
my car dealer gave me free routine maintenance?
This is Larry Schneider, logging off.
