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Honestly it’s not that much worse than being forwarded off to India where someone’s getting paid $0.10 an hour to read off a flow chart to me. If your 24-hour service line doesn’t have an actual engineer available after the flow chart It’s not meaningfully different than the AI.
Yep. I hate having to phone support lines to be told to run basic troubleshooting like turning something off and on again when that’s the first thing that I’ll try.
Keep in mind that the service lines also deal with customers who can’t distinguish a CPU from a modem from a monitor. Hence the basic troubleshooting in the beginning.
Yeah, I know they have to follow their script, so I just play along. And honestly, it’s not as if I’ve never made a stupid mistake before, like accidentally leaving something unplugged.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
Years back, I bought an Asus workstation motherboard with IPMI, the stupid BMC would reliably crash every 12 hours rendering the IPMI absolutely useless since it would hang upon login. I emailed support and told them that the BMC sucked and asked if they had an internal build I could try… They directed me to the downloads page and told me to download the UEFI firmware 🤦♂️ It took about SIX back and forth emails over the course of a week or so to get them to understand that I was talking about the BMC and not motherboard itself. Their tier one and two support had ZERO clue what a BMC or IPMI was. After begging them to forward me to an engineer who actually knew what I was talking about, they agreed and that engineer sent me an updated build…which still crashes every 12 hours 🤦♂️. In the end my solution was to set a cron job (I run Linux) to execute every 11 hours that logged into the IPMI from the running OS and did a cold reset on the BMC. That worked like a charm as long as Linux was running.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
They don’t listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there’s probably at least three people who don’t have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they’re an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
I also think it comes off as a bit snotty. Nobody’s perfect and asking through the basics is the tech covering themselves, too. And who says that your basics and their basics are identical?
I usually start by giving a detailed description of the problem and of what I already tried in particular.
Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it’s a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that’s clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don’t even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.
Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It’s designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.
My time is just as important as theirs. I have a busted product that I paid good money for, but now, in order to get useful support I have to slog through the basics which is frustrating and useless since 99% of the time I’ve already tried everything that they’re suggesting.
I worked for Disney+ as a System Administrator and later an Engineer, we’d have servers die all the time (with thousands of servers, we’d easily have 10-20 support tickets open at a time) that would need to be replaced. We pay for top tier support and get stupid suggestions from them like “did you try and clear the CMOS?”, “Try and flash this new firmware” even though nothing changed hardware wise in years and it was working fine for years, “try this and send us logs”, etc… This type of shit costs businesses a lot of money in downtime. It’s a disservice to the customer to not support them at the level that they require. In the end the product would just end up being RMA’d after a week or two of back and forth.
If you went to a doctor for a problem and they suggested all the things you already tried, and then sent you home, would you be happy?
I agree that “I work in IT” gives off “I want to talk to the manager” vibes.
Since when is “let’s skip the basics” asshole vibes? It’s a waste of time for them and myself to cover all the basics, which I’ve already gone through.
“did you check the power cord?”, " did you reboot it?", “Is it actually on?”
Yes, I’m not tech illiterate. We don’t need 5 back and forth emails over the course of a few days to get down to something helpful. Give me the helpful stuff up front. Sometimes this stuff is time sensitive and these support people are costing companies a lot of money due to unnecessary downtime. I used to work for Disney+ and we had servers that died all the time, we’d email Dell or SuperMicro and tell them what the issue was, and then we would spend days or weeks of back and forth doing things we already tried, or things we know wouldn’t fix the issue before they finally decide “ok let’s replace it”. A few times their suggestions even bricked our servers and made the problem worse! We’d say that there was a CPU issue on a server that started crashing and the IPMI logs and Linux itself would point to a faulty CPU or RAM. They told us to flash a new EFI, we would do so, and great now the server doesn’t power on at all instead of just crashing occasionally.
I list off everything I did so far, and explain the problem. That usually gets me the best results.
So do I, but that becomes very difficult and frustrating when they have zero clue what you’re talking about, like in my above example of the IPMI and BMC. It sounds like you’re talking about the Dingle Arm and Reticulated Splines on your Rockford Retro Encabulator.
You likely could have followed their script in less time.
If only shibboleet actually worked…
The alt text on that XKCD is even better:
“I recently had someone ask me to go get a computer and turn it on so I could restart it. He refused to move further in the script until I said I had done that.”
tbf, customers have a near-infinite number of different issues and problems. those ‘flow charts’ and scripts are designed to start at a baseline and work up from there and they start with the most common ones. you’d be paying more for whatever it is you’re calling in about if they hired only fully-qualified persons that can ‘think on their feet’ without the flow charts and scripts wrt whatever issue it is you have, troubleshooting it, and coming up with the specific solution for you… a hell of a lot more. and yes, the first thing you should usually try with tech items is a power cycle. ::insert itcrowd-turnitoffandonagain.jpg::
No one is asking for a gaggle of full-time engineers.
The flowchart is designed to fix the vast majority of problems top down. If 90% of the problems are solved by rebooting you’re going to reboot. It doesn’t matter if the ONT shows your fiber line is not connected. Wow that sucks I understand and don’t have a problem with that. But most support these days can’t even connect you with an actual engineer once you break the flow chart.
You spend 30 minutes on the phone having them check off check boxes when they get down to the point where there’s actually a level two problem, there’s no one there to talk to you. Here let us take down your information and we’ll get back to you within the next 24 hours.
A couple of decades ago this really wasn’t a problem. Level 1 technicians would run their flowcharts if you broke out to a level two technician you wait on the line for 10 to 15 minutes and you’d end up with a level two technician, It almost always solve the problem if it was solvable. Honestly the products I call for support on haven’t really gone down in price with the lack of support provided these days. They used to be able to provide me multi-tier support live on the phone with just their existing margins. It’s the same thing screwing over pharmacies and retail. They found they can get by with giving less support and having less people work the lines so that’s what they’re doing.
Something very sweet with living in a country with a different language than English is that the people on the phone can’t be outsourced.
The AI problem remains though :(
I’d probably feel very different about the whole situation if the call center is that were being subverted were in my own country.
(Goes through a phone maze to get the option you need, then the robot voice comes on)
“OUR STAFF CAN HANDLE THAT REQUEST TUESDAY THROUGH THURSDAYS BETWEEN 10AM AND 4PM. GOODBYE.”
And it’s never even a half decent bot.
“You double charged me this month”
“Hi! For problems relating to your wifi, please visit our FAQ.”
support bot has ended the chat
Followed by an automated email that reads “Would you like to participate in our customer survey? We are dedicated to improving the quality of our customer support! :D”
I see you answered 0 out of 5 stars. Janice in Support (whom you’ve never spoken to) will now get put on a PIP.
Technically they aren’t 24h if they didn’t shut down for one of the 1:00am hours last night. If they stayed open for both 1:00am hours, they’re a 25 hour service line today.
“We’ve been running for most of a year now. It’s what BeefPiano would call a 7000h service line”
Yo I have a story for you.
I have a damn Thinkpad T495, so not thaat old, but “oUT oF WaRrAnTy”.
I need Windows for work stuff, so I tried installing it and that shit misses drivers. Downloaded .exe drivers and put them to a seperate USB stick (after giving up the wish to include them in the ISO).
But supposedly these drivers are installers and not direct executables, and I have no idea of Windows. So well… contacted their support.
First, if its not a hardware problem it doesnt exist. Did the typical thing, click through the “Oh maybe its a problem with X?” “No, I know your stupid FAQs wont help me,
other problem”Support mail? No way.
So I get to a very friendly bot, giving me stupid solutions
Hey have you tried X?
Not helping, I want to get a mail contact
So would this help?
It does not help me, I need to speak to a human.
maybe this?
fuck you
Oh, I am sorry not being able to help, here is a list of options.
That damn list suddenly had a support mail? Lol? These bots really react best if you plain up harass them. I reproduced this exact scenario twice.
I always do that if I’m on the phone and the stupid bot is being unhelpful. And especially if my call might be monitored. “No you stupid fucking bot that didn’t work. I want to talk to a human” “Fuck you. Get me a person to talk to”. etc. It’s the fastest way
It probably won’t always work, but pressing 0 is usually a “hidden” option that’ll connect you to a human. It used to be used to connect people to an operator, and many companies still use it that way, even if they don’t advertise it.
Related XKCD: https://xkcd.com/806/
I’ve been encountering fewer and fewer of those that still work lately. Most IVR systems I’ve interacted with just disconnect you if they can’t understand your input.
I’ve had plenty get really snarky when you try to do that. The prompt will pause then just restart the speech.
I just say “agent” until it gives me one, works like a charm!
This. Must voice systems use the word “agent” as a shortcut.
For Lenovo, install Win10 from a USB, install Lenovo Vantage, hit update. For Dell, install Win10 from a USB, install Dell Command Update, hit update.
Manuallyneeding to find and install drivers stopped being a thing after Win10 1709, which was 6 years ago at this point. Win10 will almost always get you fully updated drivers if you just keep hitting Windows Update on a fresh install.
I cant install Windows because of missing drivers. I know vantage is the tool to use
What? Drivers usually come after the windows install. Whats the error?
I bet you it’s because of the intel RST settings in the UEFI. If RAID is turned on the RST driver is needed. Ive ran into this exact same issue, not being able to see my drives when installing windows. Swap over to AHCI and the windows installer should see the drives.
Note that changing that setting can cause problems for existing OS installations. Make a backup and do your research before changing that.
For sure iRST. Will sometimes need the chipset driver to detect the SSD/HDD during install when that’s enabled.
Its an AMD laptop with an NVME ssd.
Thanks for the tip!
In a similar vein, I’d like to remind my apartment complex that your emergency maintenance line doesn’t count as an emergency maintenance line if nobody answers it outside of business hours.
Especially if you only call me back after leaving a message Saturday, on Monday morning. The AC was broken and luckily it wasn’t dead of summer, but it still hit 90 something inside Sunday, and god forbid it was flooding or something like that.
I remember how last year there was a long time when ambient temperature was about over 30 degrees too. I don’t have AC at home and if I remember correctly I just opened one window and attached foil to another so sun wouldl not heat my room as much. Wasn’t that bad.
Right up there with customer service lines that just have menus of canned responses that don’t address your need. No, I don’t need to hear your hours, I don’t need to know where you are, I can find all of that online. I need to talk to a human being.
A few years back you could say “operator” or press zero to get transferred to an actual person. In my experience it only works about 1/3 of the time these days.
Sometimes the system would even escalate your call if you were swearing while you were on hold.
Swear. Loudly. Scream ‘Fuck This Shit’.
It works and gets you a more immediate operator. May or may not be one with empathy, but 🤞
Sure! I’m transferring your call now!
Sure! I’m transferring your call now!
Hangs up
The first thing I do when I am greeted by a customer-service bot is spam it with “I want to talk to a human”, “Forward me to an assistant” and “Let me talk to your master”.
It works in like 2/3 cases.
Has anyone tried “shibboleet” yet?
Fuck you Seagate, this doesn’t excuse your behaviour. I would like my drive RMAd please
Three months to actually initiate the rma. Got billed 3x for replacements i have yet to receive. Please dont come at me when they didn’t show up.
But is it a 24 house service if it’s only staffed by a chat bot?
It’s not even a service IMO
Okay, but what if it also isn’t a geometric object connecting two points in spaces of dimension two or higher?
Do you expect them to jeopardize their bonuses by spending money on human beings to support customers? Then you’ll probably want them to keep them employed for more than a few months so they can actually become good at their jobs and familiar with the products.
