The Future of Tech Support 105
snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Christina Tynan-Wood reports on 7 emerging technologies and strategies that could make tech support less of a living hell for those in need of a fix. Augmented reality, self-healing systems, robot surrogates, avatar support — most seem the stuff of science fiction, but many are much closer than we might expect. 'As products become more and more interconnected, support itself will break off from the current model and become a product of its own,' Tynan-Wood writes. 'The same model has already happened in corporate IT, where technicians must orchestrate knowledge and skills across a variety of technology products. Even as the techniques and technologies used by corporate IT will change in the coming years, the shift in consumer tech support to an integrated approach will pose new opportunities for today's techs.'"
The "Support" in Tech Support (Score:4, Insightful)
What I find is quite often forgotten is the word "Support"
Most people generally just want someone to acknowledge they have a problem and give them a realistic time frame on when the problem can be fixed.
Computers are Logical, people are generally not and will always get emotional about a problem they are experiencing with any piece of technology, the more you abstract the support for these complex systems the more you alienate the people who actually require it.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Tech support ? (Score:2, Insightful)
They don't know how LUCKY they are that it was "Medium" and not "Lowest" or something lower. I'm in charge of 5 sites, most having over 100 computers on campus, with one other person.
Wow man. You're SOOOOO important that you're doing.... tech support. For people with broken sound cards.
Grow the fuck up and do your job.
Re:Tech support ? (Score:1, Insightful)
That's what he did. Setting the priority of the task is the job of the developer/admin/support person (client just can't do this as he has no idea of other tasks and their priorities). The client can of course increase the severity of the problem if sound happens to be absolutely mission critical for him. That is an entirely different thing as far as issue management goes -- many people don't understand the difference but surprisingly these people don't handle thousands of issues in a tracker...
So... grow up and shut up.
Two secrets for reliable systems (Score:5, Insightful)
1.) Don't change anything. Most of the faults I've ever encountered have been the direct result of someone, somewhere changing something. It might be the user futzing around with things they don't understand - or a technical person doing the same. It could be an upgrade that didn't work properly, or that hadn't been tested properly. it could be patches installed to fix some other probem. Whatever causes changes causes problems. The most reliable systems I've ever encountered were a set of Solaris 6 servers that only the supplier knew the root password for. They never crashed, never got upgraded patched or reconfigured. Of course this presupposes you have an operating system and application that actually works - which hopefully the mass market will attain within the bext 20 years or so.
2.) Get the user out of the loop. The worst thing about trying to support a system is having to deal with the user. they don't have the skills to reliably diagnose a fault. They can't follow instructions, they tell you what they think you want to hear and are so often the cause of the problem, in the first place. The single biggest improvement a company can make to its support operation (apart from #1, above) is to install remote diagnostics and remote take-over of users computers if the diagnostics detect a problem.
OK, three secrets:
If you can keep the users from installing their own stuff - software, tunes, their own hardware AND if you can keep them away from the internet, most company's fault rates would drop by at least 50%.
Re:The "Support" in Tech Support (Score:5, Insightful)
The "Support" in Tech Support began to die out in the mid to late 90's when company's bean counters realized that providing in-house phone support was more expensive than outsourcing it to call centers. Instead of having people who specialized in the company's products taking calls, the same person who answered calls for a farm machinery company, hardware store chain, and five different ISPs during his shift would now take your support call for your fancy state of the art 19" flatscreen CRT monitor(hey, it's the 90's remember?).
Very soon after that the call-center bean-counters decided that calls don't need to be answered as soon as it come in, for a caller will accept sitting in a queue for a short period of time. Thus the call center would need a few less ppl to answer the phones during each shift for as soon as the employee finished a call he can immediately pick up the next one.
Finally they imposed 5-minute talk times, 90 seconds for post-call wrap up, and instituted bonuses for the people who took the most calls per day, had the lowest talk-times, fewest call-backs, whereas the few remaining employees who still cared about 'customer care' or 'customer support' soon abandoned that industry.
The end (of support)