The Future of Tech Support

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.'"

Re:Synopsis

[Galactic Dominator]

I know avatar support is something I have found severely lacking. I mean I can get so much more tech support done in Virtual worlds, but our genderless gray figures are so bland. How are users supposed to find the right tech person if we all look the same? Now if we can get our Avatars tied into OpenID, then miracles will happen.

This article was the biggest piece of crap I've seen today and that includes the sick calf I'm treating. Come on robots?! Give me a break.

Kenmore Connect

[tclegg1]

I am not making this up -- I found out today that my new Kenmore washer & dryer have Kenmore Connect, which lets you call tech support on your cell phone, then hold the phone up to the appliance so that it can be talked to directly. Supposedly, the majority of service calls are not hardware related, so this lets Sears see what's wrong with your machine and potentially fix it without having to send someone out. I'm guessing appliances connecting to service sites with wi-fi would be next.

Re:Kenmore Connect

[BitZtream]

I'm guessing you're either fairly young or new to computers.

PC's have had these for years. Maybe you've heard of them? POST codes? The beeps your PC makes when it detects a hardware failure or utterly invalid configuration?

Before the Internet there were several things that did this, some things were basically loosely coupled modems. Only goes in one direction.

Pretty much every high end server, disk array, UPS, (insert any other computerized equipment, including industrial machinary of pretty much every type) phones home when it needs help.

The only surprising part is that everything in your home isn't already like this ... until you take into account the fortune made having an over priced repairman come out and replace your AC starter capacitor because its illegal to sell them locally to someone without an electrical license ...

Did I mention my fucking AC went out yesterday and I can't get a damn capacitor because of retarded laws meant to protect morons that don't deserve protecting.

Re:The "Support" in Tech Support

[delinear]

I would have killed for a 90 second wrap time - we got less than ten (I think it was in the region of 5 to 7 seconds before the next call came through, and you were then meant to pick up within four or five rings). The crazy thing was, there was some industry inposed regulation saying customers should wait on the line no more than 20 minutes - now you'd think that meant we'd answer all calls within 20 minutes, but it was interpreted by my employer to mean if the call wasn't answered in that time, the caller just got cut off. They then had to dial in and join the end of the queue again! At busy periods we'd often get callers who had been on the phone for an hour and a half and disconnected four times, we were then meant to somehow deal with their query in the target time (I think this was around five minutes) even though the first three minutes was spent trying to calm them down (while refusing to let them speak to a manager - we weren't allowed to do that or even to give out the customer service number, we just had to let them vent their anger on us at our expense). We also often had no notes from previous calls (you can't make many notes in 7 seconds AND enter a call wrap up code in the logging system) so just as we'd calmed them down we'd have to piss them off again by asking them to repeat what they'd already probably told three other people.