ISP's Slapping Techs For Lending A Hand 331
Mike writes "Broadband Reports is running a story about how several large ISP's have reprimanded, even fired techs who offer support in BBR's forums in their free time. BellSouth is the latest ISP to forbid any official tech support representation. Instead of sculpting PR guidelines for techs to follow, they're
scaring them into submission."
Truly horrible (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Truly horrible (Score:4, Funny)
Of course they should be fired.
Can't have serviceminded employees. That would be good for company reputation.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
This is essentially what it's saying to the people in charge. Whether it's true or not is what they should be worried about.
It also a liability issue. What if a less-than-stellar tech goes online and starts spewing bad information - then people are angry at your company, and you've done nothing wrong.
As a former Prodigy Internet tech (it was acquired by Bell South...) I recall this was an issue for our call center. Tech support is practically a scripted job and while it attracts a variety of intelligent people, it gets plenty of random ones, too. We had plenty of people who would spin wild tales for people as to why they couldn't connect, and believe them themselves.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:3, Insightful)
If your support is that worthless, then forbidding your employees from helping others in their spare time won't help. The only way to fix that problem is to fix your official support.
What makes you think this isn't going to happen while the tech is on the job? If a tech does that then they deserve to be reprimanded. While reprimanding an employee for what they say while not on the job treads dangerously on First Amendment rights, employers can probably get away with it these days.
Regardless, techs should be reprimanded for doing things that are bad for the company, not things that merely could be.
"Liability" has become the ubiquitous excuse for far too many of the evils in the world today.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
When on the job, I can represent myself as a technical support representative from my company, and when I am not on the job I cannot make that claim. Its that simple.
I can still offer support, assistance and advice, but there is no way I'd support anything outside of my work structure and still represent myself as doing official work (i.e. claiming I'm a support rep).
I don't do this for my company's sake, I do it for mine -- its called CYA... coverying your ass.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:4, Insightful)
The quality of tech support was not in question, it is a matter of when an employee clocks out at the end of the day and acts as a private citizen X does the company get to govern his/her actions.
No one was saying these individuals were trying to act as agents of the company. All liability arguments are moot. This is simply a matter of control.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
For example: a licensed tech provides off-time support in a relatively unofficial capacity, which causes the user to do something that royally screws his connection/hardware/software/downloaded pr0n/etc. User calls official tech support and demands retribution, seeing as how one of the company's techs told user to do something that "broke his stuff."
I've been in this situation before, and it ain't pretty for anyone involved, no matter how good the tech's intentions were.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for kindness and helping others. But I also understand the corporate position of "no unofficial tech support by official tech supporters."
Re:Truly horrible (Score:5, Informative)
You know if I was the employer, I would do the same thing.
The Department of Labor Elaws [dol.gov] has some easy to understand interpretations of various FLSA previsions.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:2)
Re:Truly horrible (Score:5, Informative)
The two best fits in the whitecollar exemption are(from http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/whdfs1
"Administrative Exemption
Applicable to employees who perform office or non-manual work which is directly related to the management policies or general business operations of their employer or their employer's customers, or perform such functions in the administration of an educational establishment; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment in their work; who either assist a proprietor or executive, perform specialized or technical work, or execute special assignments; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption; and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above (40% in retail and service establishments).
Professional Exemption
Applicable to employees who perform work requiring advanced knowledge and education, work in an artistic field which is original and creative, work as a teacher, or work as a computer system analyst, programmer, software engineer, or similarly skilled worker in the computer software field; who regularly exercise discretion and judgment; who perform work which is intellectual and varied in character, the accomplishment of which cannot be standardized as to time; who receive a salary which meets the requirements of the exemption (except doctors, lawyers, teachers and certain computer occupations); and who do not devote more than 20% of their time to work other than that described above."
Now IANAL, but there is a great deal of room for interpretation in there. A front-line (or even higher up) tech support person most likely doesn't meet the adminsitrative exemption (beacuse they won't be seetting management policy) and possibly the professional exemption
The FLSA is a big complex mess designed to stop employers from screwing employees. Sometimes in the process they limit worker's choices too. People run into this same issue in other areas too. Volunteer firefights in many counties have to resign from their volunteering position if they take a within the Fire/Rescue department of that county (even if there is no overlap between jobs). The problem is that in general many "volunteered" hours to companies aren't voluntary.
Re:Waiver? (Score:2)
Re:Truly horrible (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, let's take a step back for a minute. First of all, this is DSL, not saving the whales. The terrorists haven't won just because these guys can't post.
The truth is, running a company is hard. Wouldn't you rather have your job for the "Holiday season" that some free webboard tech support?
Part of the problem here is that it can be dangerous to have your employees posting as a representative of your company without any standard of what can or cannot be communicated safely.
It appears from this article that that some companies are setting up a policy that forbids this sort action by their employees. In a large company, this can be necessary. How well do the managers know their employees? Are they just spouting off about how much they hate their employers? Are managers going to scour the web for these people's posts?
It's true, it would be nice if this were allowed to continue, but I certainly understand why for liability's sake most companies don't want to be involved. This certainly doesn't warrant front page slashdot news. I know we all hate corporations, but often times companies get big because their the best at what they do, or at least good at making money while doing it.
Some day you kids will go off to college, and then, you might even have to get a job at a corporation, too.
Jesus, people. This isn't microsoft sacrificing babies in the parking lot every morning.
Re:Truly horrible (Score:3, Interesting)
I worked as Tech Support for a while, and people from my division actually rotated duties including E-mail, phones, and newsgroup. It was a very good way to keep in touch with our user base. But unless there was official policy about how support was done, things got chaotic from time to time.
So we had guidelines for forum work. Is that so hard to figure out? Techs shouldn't be giving out "rogue advice" so to speak, they should keep in touch with their employers, but they also shouldn't be absolutely, expressly forbidden from helping people out when they get the chance!
In related news (*wink*) (Score:5, Funny)
Re:In related news (*wink*) (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Attention: Ekrout is a known troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Instead of trying to drag this guy down-- who, even if nothing else, is really entertaining-- why don't you try posting something insightful or funny yourself?
Thats the reason I was fired (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh well..
Bandwidth costs money... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:2, Informative)
Kyle
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:4, Insightful)
Generally speaking, most places dislike their employees generating business from their customers or doing business on their time.
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:3, Insightful)
it's very typical, and what we need to do is call the kettle black.. we all need to start publically humiliating CEO's, CFO's and espically CTO's at companies that do this kind of crap... call up and leave messages to these "leader" as to how stupid they are, be sure to spread the word about any company that does this, you'd be really suprised how a little of warning via word of mouth is more effective than $2,000,000.00 in advertising.
Basically.... WARN everyone you know about companies like what you worked for. fill them in, and let them know that XYZ isp is not what you want to use...
Hell I know cable guys that reccomend to people "can you get DSL?? I'd switch to that first and avoid cablemodem service unless you have no other choice. hell I also know cable guys that reccomend to their friends and relatives to get a dish instead of cable service in their town.
the way to flush these "morons with money" (tm) is to spread the word to everyone you know... it will put them out of business.
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:4, Interesting)
Not that this is a bad idea or anything, but after living in the country, I can tell you the majority of those calls are, in fact, the ISP's/Telco's fault. Most all dial-up boxes are purposely misconfigured by the ISP to ensure they drop the connection at the sound of a pin drop. I've been told so by the person at said ISP who has had an opportunity to view the config of these boxes.
Oh well. It's cheaper to drop dial-up customers than to keep them, for a lot of ISPs. I wish I could find an ISP that costs twice as much but actually puts some effort in.
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen connections improve by replacing the phone jack in the wall. Moisture builds up and the contacts become corroded. It's not some lame excuse tech support made up to get you off the phone - it might not be the answer to your problem, but it's a known issue that can't be ruled out yet.
How do you explain it when a thousand other customers can all connect just fine, and you're the only one having problems, but you're connecting to the exact same equipment as everyone else is? Is that the ISP's fault?
You can dial your friend's ISP and get better speeds, so you assume your ISP is to blame. Take your computer to a friend's house, and plug into his phone line. Your connection speed vastly improves. Whose fault is it now?
And then there's 56k. First of all, did you know it's impossible to make a 56k connection if there's more than one conversion between analog and digital anywhere on the connection? Your analog line is converted to a digital signal at your phone company's central office - that's one conversion. If it converts back to analog at the other end, 56k is impossible.
Secondly, there are four protocols for 56k: X2, k56flex, v.90, and v.92. v.92 is pretty new and not widely supported, so I'm not familiar with it, and it's basically just an improvement over v.90. The other three, however, are all quite different. Now, everybody supports v.90, but that wasn't the case a few years ago. USR supports X2, Diamond and Lucent support k56flex. When v.90 came out, all the modem manufacturers released firmware updates to make X2 or k56flex modems support v.90 as well. However, early implementations of v.90 were astoundingly buggy. ISPs were applying firmware patches to their terminal servers as well. Picture this: X2 modems connect to the ISP at 56k. k56flex modems connect to the ISP at 33.6 (they drop down to v.34), because the ISP doesn't support v.90. The ISP updates to support v.90. The customers update to support v.90. X2 modems try to connect with v.90 and fail half the time. Enter an init string to make them use X2 instead, and they work fine again. k56flex users can now connect with v.90, and maybe they have better success. The ISP does another update, and now all those X2 modems can connect properly with v.90, so that's great - but now some k56flex modems can't connect at all anymore. Enter an init string to force them to drop down to v.34 (and the particular init string required to do this is different for each manufacturer, and they're usually cryptic, like "+MS=11,1"). Now they can get online, and go download a firmware update, and now v.90 works again (after changing the init string to re-enable v.90). A new firmware patch for the terminal servers is released, and the ISP tests it - it fixes a lot of problems. They roll it out, and it works great, until a modem manufacturer releases a firmware update that isn't compatible with the ISP's new firmware. So, the ISP splits their modem pool, and gives different dialup numbers to people with different brands of modems.
I don't do dialup support anymore, so I can't say how much of this is still an issue. I would imagine most of these kinds of incompatibilities have been resolved, now that v.90 has had a few years to mature. Still, don't assume the ISP is always responsible for your problems.
Re:Thats the reason I was fired (Score:2)
Many would say too strict.
It's a simple case of liability (Score:5, Insightful)
You've probably seen plenty of usenet posts with long
Re:It's a simple case of liability (Score:3, Insightful)
The Samaritan Effect (Score:5, Informative)
The techs working undercover on Broadband Reports helped me out and since then, two years, I haven't had a single issue.
This raises the interesting prospect of if they weren't available I would have cancelled and taken my business elsewhere. Where I am located there are multiple companies and solutions available, so I am lucky.
99.9% of the techs on the boards do it for their own gratification. I call it the Samaritan Effect. It's what online support used to be back in the days of the BBS and message networks. Personal handholding on issues that others could learn from.
Each time a tech takes the time to answer a question, solve a problem or offer advice it lightens the load on the overworked phone staff.
The techs enjoy it because they find, gasp, satisfaction that they are making a difference in their jobs. Most of those folks are not customer facing getting their orders from ticket systems, etc. It provides them a chance to make a difference.
Yes, there are negative implications on doing this, but for the most part it works. Providers should read the Cluetrain Manifesto [searls.com] for more exposure to what they should be doing.
Re:The Samaritan Effect (Score:2, Insightful)
If you look at the history of companies like Apple, for example, you see this effect can be quite pronounced. If we Mac-heads had let Apple die, our investment in skills and hardware would all be worthless now!
Don't see anything wrong with this (Score:4, Interesting)
Seems common sense to me...
Re:Don't see anything wrong with this (Score:3, Interesting)
If that were the case, then the companies should free their employees to provide all the assistance they can right there at work, where those statistics are gathered. Instead, what we have are scripted procedures for helping that really don't help at all. I've had to lie to techs several times when they ask me to reboot my computer while trying to resolve an issue of why I am getting busy signals or no answer from their dialup pool, just to get them past one of the many "stupid points" in their script. In at least one case I know I was dealing with a tech who knew damned well I didn't reboot, but because the call may have been recorded, he couldn't really say it. But he obviously knew Linux and dropped a few buzzwords that hinted to me what he was really thinking, which would probably have gone over his PHB's head as chit-chat (often allowed when tests being done take some time). But the real problem ultimately is that under company rules, getting tech support from the company usually sucks. There are some notable exceptions.
Re:Don't see anything wrong with this (Score:3, Insightful)
The wave of the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:The wave of the future... (Score:2)
Tim
is...? (Score:3, Insightful)
The employees should be allowed to do pretty much anything they want when they go home. (apart from selling non-disclosure agreement secrets.) This is kinda like firing a doctor for curing someone without charging them. Seems kinda silly to me.
But then again, the tech market is in a slump, and they may need the money.
If this is during work though, it's somewhat understandable (note: I am not condoning it (IANCI).). Some offices prefer you work for them during work hours, and not work for free online.
As well, if these techies are giving out details that they aren't allowed to (due to some agreement or another). Then again, it is understablable (IANCI). Businesses have their "intellectual property" that they'd prefer to sell then give away.
Seem odd though for a company to do this and risk the bad press.
New? to who? (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for a dial-up ISP for several years. In 1999 they closed our forums so that the techs could not answer questions that way. The only way after that to get tech support was to call us or to send an E-mail. No public forums allowed. At the time it was justified by saying that we were only following an industry trend.
What this article should have pointed out is that the shutting of access to a help forum has more to do with the disinegration of the item being supported. You only restrict access if their is a problem. This is a bigger indicator that the broadband networks are overloaded and are starting to self destruct more than it is a new indicator of customer service. Look for some major system failures in the next year (like anyone with any industry knowledge didn't already know that).
"Official Capacity" (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't blame these companies a bit for wanting to be able to control what their company says and how their company is portrayed. The article says nothing about the companies prohibiting the techs from posting in an unofficial capacity.
Understandable... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is akin to an employee offering up advice to people on the street corner, off hours, saying that it's the offical position of his employer. It would introduce all sorts of legal headaches if something gets broken, someone gets misinformed, etc.
I fail to see anything in this article that says that employees cannot offer tech support off hours, it just says that they can't do it and say it's the stance of their employer, as indicated by "As of December 31, BellSouth employees will not be allowed to lend a hand in any official capacity." So what's to keep someone from helping out without saying it's their company's line? Nothing.
Its the correct move. (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally have seen incorrect information posted on BBSs. Yet if the poster IDs him/herself as an employee of company X and that incorrect information causes damage the company could be liable. The article says "So instead of spending twenty minutes drafting clear corporate policy on public forum relations protocol, some companies clamp down on such activities; sometimes brutally." No they took there 20 minutes and elimiated a potential legal loophole. Running a proper BBS forum would take a lot of resources and I can understand why a corportaion would want to clamp down on this.
This isn't the evil empire. This is CYOA. And considering the amount of stupid and incorrect information that can be found out there I don't blame them on bit!
Re:Its the correct move. (Score:3, Funny)
I think it has to do with the goatse.cx guy.
Why can't they be like TiVo (Score:2, Interesting)
Shouldn't be allowed (Score:2)
The corporate world is all about politics, not technology. The people that know the technical answers cannot know the politics behind the problems.
It could be very bad for the company if a moonlighter helps with a security issue, say, when the offical company line is to deny its existance.
People should do what their job descriptions says they should do.
All Aboard! (Score:2, Insightful)
Things never change.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Things never change.... (Score:2)
Hell, that's the motto on 99% of the call floors out there. Even when I worked for an outsource company for Dell (supposedly focused on customer satisfaction... apparently my satisfaction issues with their controllerless modem don't count...), there was much more pressure to "clear the que" than to solve problems. To the point where it's easier with most problems to tell the customer to do an FFR (FDISK, FORMAT, re-install, doo-dah doo-dah) simply because you can get them off the phone while they're formatting.
Pretty standard, actually, unfrotunately (Score:4, Informative)
It is important to be cautious in drawing many conclusions from a single press account. As everyone knows, sometimes the press does a mediocre job.
The key word is "official" -- the company should and must control its employees' official activities, because they are then acting as representatives of the company. This is standard business law. True, the company would get credit for the good things the reps did in their spare time, but it would also get the blame or, worse, monetary liability.
So the employees shouldn't do it if told not to. That might be dumb business logic for the company, but who knows, is is their call. Assuming the reps were doing a good jobs and not generating complaints, their committment sounds laudable. I've avoided calling for tech help of any sort for years b/c of frustration with clueless techs (not always, but too often).
That's the right; but here it *sounds* like the companies here are also being jerks about it and treating their employees reprehensibly. That's a whole 'nother ball of wax, and one for which I am entirely unsympathetic.
Re:Pretty standard, actually, unfrotunately (Score:2, Interesting)
Excuse me for babbling there.
Wait a second (Score:2)
Re:Wait a second (Score:2)
Eh? (Score:3, Interesting)
FYI (Score:3, Informative)
I got fired (Score:3, Interesting)
I described the letter promoting it to some people working there so they'd know what to avoid, trying to help you see, and this girl went to management and they fired me.
When the word got back to the agency that sent me there THEY fired me. Twice in one day, a personal best.
I'm not making this up.
BellSouth's New Slogan... (Score:2)
Two-part solution (Score:4, Interesting)
First of all, the employers need to get all their support personnel to sign NDAs. I worked tech support for a small regional ISP [iocc.com] and we were not allowed to tell people what brand of AS we used (this could change), the speed of our uplink, the model of our gateway router, details of our network map, etc. What's wrong with that? (I should mention that we also always recommended hardware-based modems and customers could bring in their PC for connection troubleshooting FOR FREE. This was a great ISP.)
Second, though, these tech support people should know better than to identify themselves as employees of the ISP. That makes it sound like it's official company policy when it's really just some guy saying "try this... it might help".
Not surprising. (Score:5, Interesting)
Then it came time to hand off the problem to Verizon's internal tech support team, since it became obvious that it was a systemic problem affecting people in my area (or at least me, but we determined that the problem was clearly on their end, not mine). At this point, my friend tech apologized, and warned me that this report might not go anywhere-- since I was not running Windows on my box. Apparently, internal tech support only honors reports from people running Windows...
It's just another example of how the legions of PHBs running the telecom field (and the dot-com field, as I can testify from having worked far too long in said field) are trying to regulate everything in the support process. It's all about the Benjamins, and these people believe that by regulating, and restricting, and prohibiting everything-- to the point of "scripting" common tech support dialogs and replacing human operators with "automatic phone support systems", they can make more money.
They may be right, they may be wrong. In any case, I don't like it...
Re:Not surprising. (Score:5, Funny)
Not New (Score:5, Interesting)
Basically any company with a big enough apparatus wants to control its public image, and it can't do that if its rank-and-file representatives are speaking when they're not spoken to.
Sprint PCS [sprintpcs.com] squelched one such representative who was participating in alt.cellular.sprintpcs. Over the four or five months she hung out in the newsgroup (as a publicly known SPCS employee, but not representing the company in any official capacity), she made a number of customers happy by offering solutions to their problems, or offering ways that they could get Customer Care to take care of their problems without calling the President's office or escalating to a supervisor. Her respect in the newsgroup was very high.
When she left the newsgroup, here [google.com] is what she said.
It's telling. Especially telling is the 40+ responses she got.
Big companies can't deal with the Internet. It's too new, too public, and too uncontrolled. Despite all of our whining about corporate control and ICANN's UDRP and copyright and DMCA, the fact remains that the Internet scares the crap out of large multinationals.
And that won't change any time soon.
This is standard operating procedure (Score:4, Interesting)
I tried to propose an internal volunteer group of people who wanted to do this. They'd be held to standards as to the correctness and appropriateness of the information they were providing to outside sources. And there would be peer review and recourse for people doing the wrong things. The idea was that AOL could significantly improve their image within the community by participating in it. Noone wanted to hear it. I wrote a formal proposal and passed it up the line. I don't think it even got past the director.
Corporations sit here and ask for your loyalty as employees. They offer bonuses, options, perks, and tons of other things to try to secure it. But they can't imagine that employees might actually want to do things to help the company in their spare time. And more than that, they don't want to release their tight grip on corporate communications and allow employees to help out with the forums they participated in. Until they realize that these things are harming them and find a better way to deal with employees than by saying "Don't talk to anyone unless we approve it first," they'll have the same old image problems.
The most we can do is continue to attempt to raise consciousness within the corporations we work for. Write proposals for new communications policies for employees. Leave copies of The Cluetrain Mainfesto on the VP's desk. Not much else we can do.
-Todd
Re:This is standard operating procedure (Score:2)
But, well, aren't they already offical? (Score:2)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't most technical support staffers already official representatives of the companies they work for? When I did technical support for computer manufacturers, the word 'representative' was in every title I held. So what's different now?
I think the real problem is that companies are afraid low-paid techs might take out some of their job frustrations in on-line forums, where the eyes of supervisors are usually absent. That, and the fact that by putting their help in writing on a public forum, these companies worry that their employees might reveal embarrassing service issues to a wider audience instead of just one customer at a time. Of course, if these same companies bothered to instill in their employees a sense of professionalism and loyalty, or God forbid maybe even pride in their work, I doubt there would be a problem with this.
The truth is, you represent any company you work for, regardless of if you're on the clock or not. Executives certainly realize this, but it's easy to blame low customer satisfaction scores on employees just trying to lend a hand to angry customer's they meet in other parts of the on-line community.
Sad really, just another example of PHB syndrome.
Re:But, well, aren't they already offical? (Score:4, Interesting)
First off, BS FastAccess is a great service when it works. But when it doesn't, it can take forever to get taken care of. Personally, i've seen enough horror stories i went with cable modem instead.
When you call BS tech support, if they don't sound like they know what they're doing, hang up and call again. The support is handled by several contractors (I worked for one). When they're borderline, ask where they're from, if they're in South Carolina or Florida, hang up. You want Tennessee or North Carolina. Trust me, i've read notes from all of the above.
If all else fails, demand to "speak with the president of bellsouth!" This goes into a special queue, a "presidential" escalation, and you eventually will get at least part of what you want (Free truck roll? definitely. Free home run, maybe. Free replacement equipment... sometimes). Just don't act like you know what you're getting into, and be very, very pissed off. BS has quality standards they promised shareholders they would adhere to or some such, so they have to handle pissy customers very nicely.
If you demand to a "Supervisor," you won't, but it's a fasttrack into second-level technicians. Keep in mind that the best frontline techs get stuck on the front-line because their average handle times are generally very low (they know exactly what the problem is and snip it in the bud) or very high (they're very thorough and check for secondary or tertiary issues).
If you have a network, for god's sake, work with us. We need to prove it's the line that's at issue so we can issue tickets up to DSG.
Dirty little secrets:
DSG (Digital Services Group), another set of "contractors" that happens to be a wholly-owned subsidiary of BS, is the set of people who actually do the line maintenance and such. They handle the lines for all ISPs.
If you had real problems getting online at the beginning of the year, it was because DSG fucked up a BBG upgrade. BBG basically DHCPs IPs out to the PPPoE clients. They tweaked some settings and then rolled some existing customers to BBG and ran out of IPs. Those were hellish days to work.
There's a giant A-B switch someplace, labelled "Atlanta | Miami." If Miami is up, Atlanta is down, and vice-versa. Keep this in mind.
BS tech support has no procedures for dealing with hosed machines, period. If you're lucky, you'll wind up with someone who knows what they're doing as an "escalation."
If your account gets "turned off" for non-payment, and you've still got sync (like they ever turn the circuits off...) try the normal username with a password of "hotline". This was supposed to be changing in the future.
Lots of sensitive customer data is available over the public internet via HTTPs. That 3-digit code can be looked up on a public HTTPS site. Password resets, account cancellation, etc, is on the same site as the customer controls, but with a different login page and set of logins.
Completely understandable - even nescessary (Score:5, Interesting)
Succesful helpdesks, specifically in the level 1 & 2 enivronments, rely on scripts. These scripts are written so that an escalated ticket (one that level 1 cannot handle) arrives at the next level of tech support with that user environment "clean" - that is, level 2 assumes that level 1 has already made sure the user's environment is in a kind of "virgin" state.
When a higher level tech jumps in on a problem from level 1 (such as in these forums) they almost always prolong the length of the customer's next call to tech support because of user assumptions and level 1 ignorance of the support history. While some problems may be solved completely within the context of a forum, the majority of users will at some time in the future call tech support again. This raises costs and decreases the availability of support for the rest of the userbase.
BTW I talk with Optimum Online techs on the BBR forums and Yahoogroups all the time. They are careful not to engage in tech support out in the open, and speak only in an unofficial context. They're extremely helpful and hundreds of users appreciate their unofficial support everyday. If you want a model of how to keep your more advanced users happy while limiting liability and misrepresentation - check out the impromptu support model they've created there.
Re:understandable - even nescessary (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't seem to realize that there is no way in hell we can guage your intelligence in a 10 minute phone call. No, saying you are a network administrator/engineer does not make us think any more of you because half the people who are calling us for tech support ARE network administrators who run Win2k networks and have no clue how to set user permissions!
I had a customer profess over and over that he was a cisco engineer, he made routers for a living and our network was down! Uninstalled and reinstalled his dialup networking in windows and look at that, back on the net...
If I had a nickle for every time I've told a customer that he would have to talk to his network admin to fix his network and then have them reply "I am the network admin" I would be a very rich man.
Also, if you're so intelligent why can't you understand that there is no way we can support Linux, *BSD, BeOS, QNX, etc? What part of "Windows and MacOS support only" don't you understand? A select few may be able to pull off Linux support but not every tech can and if we do it we set customer expectation that "well the LAST guy I spoke to helped me!" and start pissing more people off.
Your singular account is quite the exception and not the rule.
Now, I'm not a big fan of scripts and I don't use them myself, we don't generally have scripts where I work. But we do have a thing called support boundaries (only supporting what you make) which I follow almost to the letter because I understand the merits for both I and the customer, even though the customer may think less of me.
-- iCEBaLM
Tech Support (Score:2, Insightful)
No, it's not right or fair. Unfortunately, in these days when people cannot recognize that hot coffee can burn and so sue the restaurant, Bell South is protecting itself from that sort of legislation.
But, no, it isn't right.
Brazil (Score:2)
Before everyone says how rediculous this is.. (Score:2)
And that makes sense.. because OFFICIAL SUPPORT should only go through OFFICIAL CHANNELS that the company is geared to deal with.
Employees are still free to offer support in forums.. just not in an official capacity.
Sorta makes sense (Score:2)
The Good and the Bad (Score:5, Insightful)
The main problem is that some people just do not have the correct "attitude" and a disgruntled employee (rightfully or not) might cause severe damage to the "corporate" image.
OK, OK. You must be thinking now: "But not helping also damages their reputation!". And I couldn't agree more. I think they should "pre-screen" the employees that can do that, or employ some similar process.
I speak from past experience. In a previous job, we were in charge of fixing a broken Oracle Database (poor backup schemes and a disk failure -- you get the idea). The development team sent a programmer to "help us out". The management team on the branch office where the problem happened was already demanding answers (who? why? How can we avoid it?). We were kindly explaining everything to calm them down (a new backup policy, redundant hardware and all). Everything was going in the right direction.
Later on that day, in the middle of a big meeting to discuss the problem (with the aforementioned managers), Mr. Programmer does some quick queries to an yet to be fully restored database and says "Well, I say that this database is completely messed up -- I don't trust this data anymore...".
Needless to say we had to counter his false and invalid arguments with some facts. Took us some good hours and a lot of paperwork.
That is the danger of having someone without any tact representing the company or a group in a "delicate" situation.
Customers want/need contact (Score:3, Interesting)
In return, most of our customers remained loyal customers despite the fact that we charged a little more than most ISPs.
Unfortunately, this is not a good business model - we were never quite profitable. We ended up getting bought-out by a larger company. Though the current Tech Support is OK, it's nothing like the old days. Now, it's more like "help them, but do it as fast as you can - don't waste time".
How do you find the balance between great service and cost-containment?
"Our employess are. . . (Score:2)
KFG
peter principle (Score:5, Interesting)
funny story kinda. Once I was made city manager of this company. I hated it. I was great and quite happy at my previous position, acting as a project strawboss/hands on worker. Loved it. Was offered the management position, significant more money at salary so I tried it. It was terrible. So many times it was quicker for me-on the clients nickle-to just "do" a problem rather than try to explain to someone how to do it. I thought this was good customer service, granted, it dropped our billable hours slightly and occassionally, but the industry we were in was/is extremely competitive and it helps to retain established customers and keep them happy. The customers loved it, my bosses hated it, sometimes I would cost the company x amount small bucks on a particular job, but to me at least the brownie points seemed like a decent tradeoff. We lost zero customers under my watch and I got all good reviews and feedback. The bosses hated it ordered me to "manage" only which was a useless expenditure on a lot of smaller jobs, it meant standing around doing nothing a lot of the time. I hated it, prefer working to slacking. Anyway, after a couple of months I went in and demanded my old job back, and they did it for me but were amazed, I mean dumbfounded that anyone wouldn't just keep the superior paid position, it was such an alien concept to the "money is god" types. They had never even seen anyone do that. In short I demanded to not be a peter principle victim, or to participate in it.
Oh ya, the company basically collapsed a coupla years later, none of the bosses got along with each other, they kept losing customers, etc. I was right, they were wrong, but they were the owners. Ho hum I found other work same field easily.
How this applies to bell south and these other ISP's is-this is *probably* what's happening. Internal politics and back stabbing and greed lead to too many rank foul bosses in levels of decision making where they have no ability, no skill and cause problems. I mean, for real, harassing employees for trying to help customers on their own time and for free? ISP's don't charge for tech support as far as I know, seems to me these employees were saving the company money, and also creating more satisfied customers. And this is wrong?
There were many reasons the grand telephone monopoly was broken, customer complaints were right up there, and the baby bells are apparently infected with the same retarded mindset and lack of intelligence. Too many bosses in positions of incompetence.
Hope the fired techs start their own businesses (community WISPSs perhaps?), bell south doesn't deserve quality employees. Let them hire and keep on the clock drones and robots, lead by drones and robots, then let them go broke and collapse and be sold off for pennies on the dollar, let someone else give it a try. the techs actually got a good headsup of who they work for, now they can start looking for better quality humans to work for.
Re:peter principle (Score:4, Interesting)
I spent a year tour working for a major ISP, and what bothered me was that when I started in the trenches, there was a feeling that 'yes, we want to help the customers. We want to make them happy. We want to do a good job.'
But after a short time it was discovered that customer satisfacation is not what makes the company happy, and it does not help you if you actually do want to move up.
The management structure is such that so many people sit in a position they are incompitant to handle. In a large company, managers are unable to handle dynamic concepts such as 'quality', 'customer satisfaction', or 'customer retention', so they fall back on easily measurable numbers such as call times as their only way to judge perforance.
And it is quickly learned that a manger who incourages his/her people to take the time to fix the problem right the first time and making sure that the customer is happy does not make the poor boob above him happy. Who cares if the customers are happy, don't cancel their service, or refers the service to others, or at the very least is able to resolve the problem with 1 30 minute call instead of 5 10 minute calls? The person above him/her can't seem to handle that leap of logic.
And what does the company do when suddenly the customers are unhappy and start cancling the service? They take some of their best techs and put them in a 'retention team', and offer all sorts of benifits to the customer--such as a few months free--if they change their mind.
To the customer, the impression the ISP sends is 'We will treat you like shit, unless you decide you want to get rid of us.'
That this is not the way to do business should be obivous to anyone. It happens more often then not, however, because the people calling the shots find it's a heck of a lot easier to look at the bottom line in small, quantifiable statistics then to take the trouble to look at the bigger picture.
In my case my guess is that it came down something like this: 'Our research indicates that the biggest customer complaint is long hold times. The top of the company has told me that I have to fix this. So I will do whatever I can to make my people keep call times low. I am succesful, and my bosses are happy. 6 months later the biggest customer complaint is poor customer service. I can just blame the techs on this and yell at them to be nicer to the customer. The top brass trusts me on this; after all, I am a good manager (I reduced call times!)'. But by this time, the company decides to promote me to a higher position.
I left that company, making a promise to myself to never work for a large corperation again. I havn't, and I couldn't be happier.
Not all ISPs are like this (Score:2)
I like to see this sort of interaction from an ISP, and it's one of the reasons I'm with them.
But it's nice to see a large ISP with a healthy attitude towards their customers.
Yeah. (Score:2)
More proof that big providers don't care... (Score:2)
Big providers don't care about their customers.
Techs are always being fired for being too helpful.
Their biggest "offense" is undermining the PHBs and
the process that prevents them from _properly_ doing their jobs.
For once Qwest does something right.... (Score:2)
When I was on DSL, I and my friend closely monitored DSLR and tried to lend a helping hand.
I've also had sups encourage my activities on DSLR.
wow...
Re:For once Qwest does something right.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Recently, everyone in my department was asked to sign a broad non-disclosure agreement. It covered just about everything we might say about this company I'm not naming. (It's the one who's mission is to "carry out Paul Allen's Wired World vision".)
I balked a bit at signing it, and asked my supervisor (who is pretty cool, having been one of us until very recently) what this was all about. He told me Corporate was concerned about things posted to DSL reports, and mentioned one example in particular.
The post in question was not inaccurate--it was the company's own conclusions. The post sumarized an analysis of a (still) ongoing problem affecting lag time for high use customers.
Since the crackdown on what we can say, many regular posters to DSL reports who work for the company have slowed way down on posting, or changed accounts, or even dropped off. I don't think that helps customers.
Posting anonymously so I don't have to worry about discussing this with someone from HR.
Non-disclosure (Score:3, Interesting)
perhaps they lose money? (Score:3, Informative)
That is SO-O-O Corporate (Score:4, Interesting)
I used to be like this: going out of my way to help people in my free time fix their mouse; reconnect to their ISP; trouble-shoot that broken coffee holder...
I don't do this any more, but that's not really relevant to the point I'd like to make. We live in a day where our government (yes, you Aussies and Euros, too; can't actually see what's happening in Asia but different story) is continuually seeking additional control over our personal lives. Most 1st world governments are largely financed by the people in some form of taxation, but controlled more by corporations within (or even outside) them. Think about that for a second.
So, we get something like 75 - 80 years to live; the first 25 we're busy getting educated, partying and otherwise not doing much productive, and then venture into a 20-year career helping some company with our expertise and best years, all the while making yet a little more money from our boss and paying yet a little more in taxes to our government to help subsidize it's financing for the corporations to use it to control its minions... Seeing a trend here?
I love good samaritanism, generosity and philanthropy just as much as the next dude, but there are other ways to spend our spare time. You don't have much left anyway, so go pick up a guitar, write some poetry, ride your mountain bike off a cliff, or throw frisbees at your mutt, but don't spend your limited leisure time on line helping other people try to figure out what your money-grubbing employer can't make work for them.
And, if you really need to, then go log in and break a digit, or two; just don't say you're representing your employer. They can sue you for helping them out! How cool is that?
just thinking aloud, here...
DSLreports Is A Terrible Place To Get Help (Score:3, Insightful)
Have any of you actually gone to DSL reports and gotten help from message boards? You post a problem and you get 200 answers about "it's your CDROM drivers" and, "your MTU window size is too small!".
Most of these techs may be enthusiastic about their jobs and helping people, but they are also not very technically inclined to help the customers. How many of them are actually qualified to do anything on the ISPs systems? Does that tech know about ATM VPI/VCI addressing, am I supposed to be using 0/32 or something else? The difference between AAL3 and AAL5? What about PPP components and how laying PPP over Ethernet is such a bad idea? Can they tell you why they use PAP instead of CHAP authentication? Do they know half a DINK about RADIUS? Ask them what the frequency ranges are for CAP and DMT. Do they even know how IPv4 addressing works? Hell, ask them how many pairs DSL runs on and you may be surprised at the answers that you get. They couldn't lay out a static route on a Cisco if their jobs depended on it -- which is why they don't get exec, or even login access.
At first I was disappointed when I turned to DSL reports to see what their message boards looked like. Then I realized that it was a good thing. DSL Reports is a idiot magnet, keeping all of those screaming kids and adults away from... ME.
I am still against the big ISPs, telcos, and cable Internet providers. This was a good move but done in classic big-stupid teclo tradition. They are to blame for the fact that these customers need technical support in the first place. Your network operator is stupid from top to bottom.
in customer relations, you DON'T.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Where's the common sense? (Score:3, Interesting)
Liability and identification (Score:5, Interesting)
In addition to the liability issues that would be redundant to bring up, there is the issue of identification.
You don't see people who work for Schwab or Fidelity offer "good sumeritan" advice online for financial services. These guys should know better even if they haven't signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Do you think your doctor's insurer for malpractice would like it if a doctor began diagnosing people outside the scope of his work environment?
These types of people can do what they do anonymously quite easily over the net, but yet they choose to identify themselves as currently associated. A pseudonym or anonymous claim of credibility as "formerly employed" or "technical consultant to" would be sufficient identification to those who would be consumers of his assistance.
I've seen it both ways, though. When I did tech support for an OEM (outsourced, though), one guy I know got led out of the building and fired immediately for posting opinions and disclosures on legitimate problems with certain system configurations and the unlawful actions the OEM was doing to stall and prevent customer returns on the defective product until the engineers came up with the solution. This info (even though unlawful) was considered to be proprietary and a breach of trade secrets according to the outsourced vendor. He got fired without due process and was unable to fight back because he was under the age of 18 at that time.
My bet is that there is more behind the scenes going on than this story reports and that because reporters are lazy, they got the sensational side of this in their back pocket and just let 'er rip.
They're only hurting themselves (Score:3, Informative)
I've suffered through SBC's DNS servers being setup incorrectly, a bad router, and a line problem, NONE of which I would have gotten solved without the help of the OFFICIAL tech support by SBC in those forums.
I literaly spent 5 days in phone queues and Tier 1 hell to try and confirm and get fixed reverse DNS problems with NO luck. IT was only after the official tech in the forums looked into the issues or made calls that I got things fixed.
It is clear the forums/usenet support is more efficient than phone suppport in most case IMHO.
I agree with the polilcy, here's why: (Score:3, Interesting)
The main reasons for me: Job secruity and a Professional projection of myself and my company.
When I get home, I drink beer, sniff glue, etc. If I were to post to the boards I would probably offer some good help. Then the beer starts to kick in (and the glue, oh boy!) I bet my own level of control and professionalism would begin to disappear. (and if I were in my physical work building they would know)
How many times have you seen post where some "tech guy" or such says, well you know what?: Customers are Idiots, Aholes, etc? I have seen this. How many times have you gone to work the next day and said to yourself, 'shit I really should not have sent that email last night...' because you were half in the bag when you sent it.
It reminds me of the guy who posted on the Ciruit City thing, saying "we don't need customer's like that" (the ones who return a lot of goods). While he may have posted a fact about the company he still sounded like a jerk b/c the companies public position probably is that "the customer is always right". Now the real position is out in the open, for good or bad.
Companies want to present themselves in a professional way. People acting as rogue representative of a company after hours is a bad thing.
But don't get me totally wrong, it took me a while to get to this point (beer, glue, etc) and if I go out for a beer I wear work logos and all (shirts, hats, etc).
If you have so much energy to devote to helping others do it at work. Teach the other techs a thing or two, improve the 'system' don't operate out side of it.
All that being said, if you still want to help out on your own time, don't claim to be an employee of 'the company' and don't reveal the 'secrets' when you do so.
Tech Support Contractor (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course we were also told to lie to our customers and tell them that we worked for BellSouth. We were told not to schedule installer/techs earlier than 3-4 days unless the customer was angry, then we could send one out in 24 hrs. We also had the usual stuff like not recommending any brands over others.
Promotions were dependent not on whether we went above and beyond, but if we could get the customer off the phone in a certain amount of time. Our target was 16 minutes total handle time including our opening spiel and verification (1-2 minutes) and ACW (after call work, 1 min) of entering notes about the call. If you averaged about 16 minutes you were meeting the requirement, but you should be about 12 minutes to be "good". Anyone remember OfficeSpace's "flair"?
Half the tech support calls I took were people complaining because the previous agent told them to download new drivers from the website using dialup since they were calling because their DSL was out.
We were supposed to be there to help people, but our "metrics" were about how fast we handled the call and whether we mentioned the "Connection Manager" which didn't actually manage your connection, it was basically spyware and slowly evolved into being able to backup/restore your internet settings... but not drivers etc where we really needed it, and it didn't make a connection to FastAccess like all the customers thought.
There is a valid point... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is really sad that it comes to this, when in reality I've gotten help from covad tech's on DSLREPORTS before, and several times I've gotten help with advanced router functions from some really sharp people there...
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:3, Insightful)
Kyle
You stupid troll (Score:2)
Re:You stupid troll (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:3, Insightful)
The key part you're missing is that these techs ARE doing this in their free time. It's not that they're being asked to visit these forums while off the clock. The only reason the company caught up to them, is because they identified themselves on a public forum as company employees. The company is worried about being asked for a paycheck, it simply doesn't fit along the company line of using answers to technical questions that have been reviewed and OK'd by management.
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:2)
See what not having my replies passing management review does?
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Sounds about right to me (Score:3, Insightful)
The same applies to some extent for technical support. If I say I work for xyzzy (even if I don't!) then people are going to assume I know what I'm talking about at least as far as xyzzy's service is concerned, even if I explicitly say I'm not currently answering in an official capacity. I'm exploiting (and if I screw up, damaging..) xyzzy's reputation.
The simple answer (at least for web forums) is to log on under a pseudonym and don't say who you work for. Build your own reputation. The company won't know who you are so they can't gag you. The customer has no idea who you are IRL or who you work for, so they can't sue anyone. Everyone's happy.
Re:breach of personal privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Kyle
Re:breach of personal privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:breach of personal privacy (Score:2)
Re:breach of personal privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
RTFA. The main complaint of these ISPs is that these people (in their free time) say "I'm a tech support person for XYZ ISP and..." Their free time doesn't seem so free any more if they seem to be acting in their official capability as XYZ tech support. And if the information is harmful, does the poster get blamed or the employer they all but claim to represent?
Re:There saving company time and money (Score:5, Funny)