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Technical Support Revisited

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I called technical support again. Yes, I should have known better but I was having a terrible internet connection and I need to do the daily update for my site. It is the same broadband issues that I have been having and I thought that perhaps, in the light of day, I might have better luck with technical support from my service provider. I was wrong.

First, the technical support person insisted that I do a reboot. I didn’t want to reboot but this person insisted and told me that over ninety percent of problems are resolved with a reboot. That is something they have all their customers do. So I rebooted and then I did a ‘ping’ to my site. The packet loss was seventy five per cent and the times were usually slow - after the reboot. I relayed all these data to the technical support person.

The response was ‘how do you know what the packet loss was?

I ended the call as soon as I could. What a complete waste of time. It did elevate my pulse rate though…

Catherine

[tags]technical support, reboot, ping[/tags]

3 Comments

Not sure if you’ve mentioned in the past who your provider is, however this sounds like a page from the Verizon workbook.

The people are barely more knowledgeable than the ‘average’ user at the first level of support. The people at second level usually have a small sense that if they don’t have a clue what you’re talking about, the best bet is to elevate the problem to the third level. Here is where some degree of intelligence lies.

The best thing to do, even before rebooting, is to politely ask if you could be handed off to the next level of support. It is the only thing that has kept me sane after 7 years of occasional DSL troubles.

You have to know that most companies utilize a tiered support system, a majority of issues can be solved by less than knowledgeable operators working from a script. Customer Says this, turn to page 6..

Next time, ask for tier 2 or 3.

[...] Because I have had repetitive problems with broadband speed, I have been curious as to what frustrations other broadband users have been experiencing. The article by James Andrews for MSN Money shows that I am not alone. We frustrated broadband users are legion: [...]

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