Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
I'm in IT, and I've called tech support, however usually it is because of a service failure. For instance, last night me and my girlfriend were watching a streaming TV show from Netflix when my internet connection died. If I don't call tech support, they often are unaware of the failure.
The only time I've called tech support related to a product and not a service, is when I've received a defective product. The last time for that was in 2004, when I was building a new system, and one of the cables for the motherboard was bad (had a burn through the center of the ribbon cable, where something obviously hadn't gone through the manufacturing process correctly). I called up tech support, and after 45 minutes I hung up on them, and got a cable on my own. The tech support center was in Taiwan, and the people I spoke to couldn't understand "I have a defective IDE cable. It is damaged. I want a replacement.", and kept prompting me to go through steps from a script in highly broken english to "solve the problem".
|
I'd rather buy a replacement cable than talk with tech support.
I only call tech support for outages (for services) and RMAs. I don't contact them for anything else. Any good techy knows tech support is generally useless, and decent customer service barely exists any more.
It is nice, though, when you need to get something replaced, to get someone in America who speaks decent English.
I called Shuttle for a bad power supply in a Shuttle mini cube case - I was amazed. One quick digital menu and I was talking to a dude from California and they let me remove the power supply after I talked to them - and just mail it to them in a padded envelope - no excessive troubleshooting, "please unplug the computer and try to boot it up", etc.
That kind of customer service goes a long way to getting repeat business, but I don't think companies care any more. Whatever outsourced provider is cheapest.