Tech Support

Let's face it: We all know that tech support in this day and age is horrible.

You have to wait for ages to actually talk to someone, only to be put on hold again because the first person who answers can't do anything more than tell you to restart (even if the problem is that your computer won't restart). You can often barely understand the person who's supposed to be helping you, and they most likely have had almost no training. After an hour of this, you often get told to call someone else.

What's with this? Plenty of people I've talked to say that years ago, when computers were still not too common, you could call tech support and immediately get people who knew what they were talking about and exactly what needed to be done. In reality, I think users are partly to blame for calling about issues they could resolve themselves, making call centers more ready for those types of calls. Most experienced users call only as a last resort, because they know that they're going to have to deal with this, only to be met with an hour of redoing stuff they've already done. More to blame, though, are the vendors, who can save money by assigning calls to people who know nothing about the product. In fact, I doubt that it really helps much, because it just leads to more unsatisfied customers and more time spent on the calls. In a country where we can go back to the store and return almost anything with no questions asked, am I the only one who thinks this is absurd?

I don't even care to count how many hours I've spent talking on the phone with people who often don't resolve my problem, but it must be at least thirty. Recently, someone I know bought a new computer, only to find that the sound card had a known problem. We were trying to copy a cassette tape to the computer, and we weren't sure exactly what we could do, but decided to call support in the hopes of having a working sound card sent to us. After explaining the problem, the rep had us download software that let her access the computer remotely, then proceeded to check that the volume was up. After this, we got transferred no less than four times, often without doing more than explaining the issue. The best part, however, was when one of the reps said, “Well, if you want to hear sound from your tape recorder, you should just hook it up to the speakers.”

The next day, we got back on the phone, and after another two hours of being transferred, and a time when we were on hold and they were doing things remotely on the computer without our consent, we finally gave up, went to Best Buy, and bought a new sound card, which worked perfectly. But afterwards, I realized that we actually knew more than tech support, after just a little bit of experimenting and searching Google. It's just pathetic, and what a waste of four hours.

Another time that was even worse was when I bought a new computer in 2005. It was an HP (a brand which I have since decided to avoid if there is an easy choice), and at first, it felt great, coming from a Windows ME computer with a 900Mhz Pentium and 64MB of RAM. But after about a month, I started to notice weird things: the computer rebooted randomly with Blue Screens of Death, I got messages (related to that) that said “The system has recovered from a serious error” on startup, the NumLock key wasn't working right, and when I put programs full-screen, the screen would go black when I exited, and I would have to put it in standby mode and come out again to fix it.

I called tech support a few times about this, and none of it actually worked. Finally I got sick of the full-screen problem, and after I had called about something else, when the rep asked, “Is there anything else we can help you with today?”, I told him about that problem.
I was told that it “was a problem with the operating system” and that I would have to reinstall Windows. So I did. However, once it was done, the problems were worse than before. I tried completely reformatting the hard drive and reinstalling again, and had no more luck. So I called again, and, after about an hour and a half, finally made it to someone who agreed to let me ship it in for repair.

When it came back from repair, I was told that they had found a problem with the real-time clock and that it had been fixed. Nope, same errors, and to add insult to injury, the system didn't turn on, and we had to actually tape the power wires somewhere to get it to turn on (I suspect it was a loose connection). I had it sent in for repair again, and they replaced the hard drive. Same errors. Finally they shipped out a completely new system. It only had the full-screen problem, so I decided just to deal with it. It worked fine after that until about a year later, when it completely crashed. I tried to install Windows and, after a few confusing dialog boxes on first startup, ended up at a screen telling me to input a license key, which I didn't have. The system was out of warranty, but I called anyway and they agreed to help. We reformatted the hard drive yet again (the fourth time in the computer's lifetime), and it worked, although the full-screen error was still there.

About a year and a half later, I bought a new computer (an HP, because the specs were too good to pass up for the price). Only recently, I managed to get rid of the Vista installation that had gotten so screwed up that it took over ten minutes to boot, two to shut down (so that I usually just hit the reset button), and a few seconds to switch programs. This installation had only been on for a year, and it's not like I had been abusing it.

There was also the time that a hard drive I had bought (it was labeled “Certified Repaired”, which meant it had broken in the past, so I was only using it for backup) completely broke within the stingy 180 day warranty period. I called the support number (which by the way, was a long distance call for me), waited on hold burning money for ten minutes, and eventually was told that a return request had been approved already. Turns out I had already submitted one some months previously for an issue that had been my fault, and was never notified that it had been approved. What bad service.

There are, fortunately, a few success stories, like the time I dealt with a brand-new computer that had a CD burner that was making a noise like a jet engine. After about fifteen minutes, we were told that a tech would be coming to the house the next day to replace the drive, which worked perfectly.

I have a feeling that computer stores with support services are going to be getting a lot more business if this keeps up. People just don't have time to deal with this sort of thing, and they are willing to pay if their computer works again in a couple of hours without any more work than driving their system a couple of miles. One statistic I have read stated that 20% of all computers are returned. Now what does that mean? When you return something, you either discovered you didn't want it or need it, it was broken, or you couldn't get it to work and gave up. People don't make purchases like computers without knowing that they really want them, and the other two both mean bad reliability and bad tech support.

After my experiences, I've decided that I'm not going to buy another desktop from a manufacturer again. I'm more than willing to put one together myself to save a few dollars, and I'd much prefer to know that what doesn't work is my fault and figure it out myself, especially since I'm fairly confident in my ability to do it right.

--
Soren "scorchgeek" Bjornstad
http://www.thetechnicalgeekery.com

Microsoft is not the answer.
Microsoft is the question.
The answer is "No."