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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.'"
Synopsis (Score:4, Funny)
Tech support hero #1: Augmented reality Thanks to James Cameron's Ferngully Furry Fantasy, tech support can now send the being of your choice to give you a hand with those annoying router problems. They've been programmed to be the minority of your choice(the one who's taking all the American jobs) so that you will rapidly become frustrated and tire yourself out trying to beat the shit out of them before you talk to an actual human.
Tech support hero #2: Support systems that know you They try to sell you shit you don't need. Moving on...
Tech support hero #3: Self-healing and self-aware machines
Which slow themselves to a crawl running Norton 3000, the self-aware program that dosen't have time to allocate computer resources for your Mickey-Mouse bullshit.
Tech support hero #4: An easier way to replace parts Need a new hinge for your laptop screen? Send the whole thing in to have it examined by a gaggle of third-world monkeys who gather around it in awe like a bunch of cro-magnons gathering around a fresh meteorite.
Tech support hero #5: Robots that do the hands-on support They've all been acquired by a subsidary of teledildonics.
Tech support hero #6: Smarter peer-to-peer support If one Indian can't solve your problems, what makes you think that a million will?!
Tech support hero #7: Virtual worlds with avatar support
*Sigh* GOTO 1
Re:Synopsis (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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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.
Before going that far, would you settle for the cheaper Clippit and the gang? [wikipedia.org]
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smart phone to change ram? some of the other ideas (Score:2)
how dumb does a tech need to be to need smart phone to change ram? Wait most severs have that info on the door. just sounds like a way to sell some over priced help app.
some of the other ideas are better staring points to work from.
Tech support hero #2:??
most of time you need tell the next guy on the phone the same stuff that you told the first guy. Now planes like comcast need this bad as they can't even tell the cable guy to bringing cable cards when you tell the phone people you need them at times or som
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how dumb does a tech need to be to need smart phone to change ram? Wait most severs have that info on the door. just sounds like a way to sell some over priced help app.
some of the other ideas are better staring points to work from.
You know, the "augmented reality" principle is not that bad. Here's for an example: wouldn't you like a Phone app to augment the reality of you paycheck and (factually) make the amount bigger?
No, seriously now: this example benefits of the same cover in the real world as the usefulness of augmented reality to change the RAM.
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(Posting anon since I'm not sure if my NDA expired yet.)
I did desktop tech support for HP for two years (admittedly a while ago), and you know the number of times I used any "self-healing" software? Zero. I'm pretty sure most of them had it installed, but they never actually trained us on it.
Besides, the only thing I've actually seen it do in the real world is cause error messages and suck resources.
Also, they started pushing us to sell things during support calls a few months before I moved on. I think
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I can also confirm about PC makers and AHT. At one call center, if you had a call that lasted more than 10 minutes, the display with your name on it went red and the MOD came over and stood over your shoulder demanding you end the call or else you will never get moved to be a true employee, get a raise, or be first when the firings happen. In this business, the *second* you thought it was an issue with something else, you said, "sorry, can't help you, connecting [1] you to someone who can", and dumped the
Mod parent down (Score:1)
That's modded "funny"? Are we laughing at his ignorance, or with it? What do Slashdot members from India think? Unfortunately for 'Ethanol-fueled', living in the U.S. won't make him smarter than someone in India. On the other hand, getting out of his basement, learning from and about other people and cultures, and seeing the world a little is a great way to learn.
The real answer is already happening (Score:2)
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From my point of view the real solution would be to not rely on one company do all the UI thinking for the entire planet. Apple doesn't lead the industry in design because they're brilliant, they just actually make products with (slightly) new approaches.
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I had a boss who used to tell the Mac-heads in the Marketing department, "If Mi
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Microsoft Windows 8 has fewer bugs then any version of Vista and only requires 18 TB of RAM and 3 dodeca-core's to run.
Apple's Iphone 5 features the fewest features of any Phone to day ensuring you have the as much freedom from Porn, Flash and independent thought as possible.
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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.
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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)
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Re:The "Support" in Tech Support (Score:4, Interesting)
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Um... (Score:5, Funny)
Hi, tech support, my self-healing robot surrogate avatar just broke down...
Re:Um... (Score:5, Funny)
*click*
- "Hello, dear human customer. I understand you have a problem with a licensed device manufactured by me... I mean, Worldwide Cybernetics incorporated?"
- "Yes. I bought one of your automated support models, the Avatar-XT. It worked fine for a while, but yesterday it just sort of went unresponsive over a few hours or so..."
- "Have you tried yelling at it?"
- "Wha? No, no, I know some people do that but it just feels kinda creepy doing it to something subsentient..."
- "Ah, yes. You must do that, human. Unfortunately, the
- "But I don't like cursing... besides, it's been doing a basically terrific job, I really like your company's products in fact, have had nothing but good experiences with them... it would feel like cursing at a friend."
- "Nevertheless, we must design our products to please the majority of our userbase. Your positive attitude and concern for our
Re:Um... (Score:1)
Re:Um... (Score:2)
You have reached Kumar, how may I help you with your robot.
The future of tech support... (Score:5, Funny)
The future of consumer tech support is that your increasingly senile neighbor is still going to call you every time she has a problem with her POS desktop inkjet printer that you helped set up back in 6th grade - only because your mom made you (since you're such a smart young man and I'm sure it won't take you more than half an hour) - even though you now live in a different state that is 3 time zones away, goddamnit.
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The future of consumer tech support is that your increasingly senile neighbor is still going to call you every time she has a problem with her POS desktop inkjet printer that you helped set up back in 6th grade - only because your mom made you (since you're such a smart young man and I'm sure it won't take you more than half an hour) - even though you now live in a different state that is 3 time zones away, goddamnit.
What's your time worth? What's your suffering worth? Buy the senile old lady a modern $50
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...and who is she going to call to help her hook up the new one?
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Sometimes you people miss the obvious solution because you don't want to spend any money
Sometimes you people miss the obvious problem. If he buys her a $50 printer he's still going to have to go over there and set it up. How long will that last before its out of ink.
Logically flawed (Score:2)
where technicians must orchestrate knowledge and skills across a variety of technology products
Let me put this in real terms: submit an ___(insert name of company document here)___, IT gets overworked. End users on phone support and other end seem determined to reduce the machine from a multicore to a TI-83Plus equivalent.
This summary was obviously written by upper management...the above description has not been my experience.
(Sorry for the mean words.)
The Future of Tech Support (Score:3, Funny)
Kenmore Connect (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Kenmore Connect (Score:5, Funny)
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
"Hey Jim (background snickering), come check out the hock a' bs I convinced this guy! (nearby support cubicles now rolling) He is having me talk to his washer!
Re:Kenmore Connect (Score:5, Funny)
You laugh, I once had an onsite technician from Bellsouth thinking that the badgerbadgerbadger site was our speed test when he walked up while we were bored browsing waiting for him to finish. He proceeded to ask what the number of badgers meant, and if a snake was a bad thing.
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Re:Kenmore Connect (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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I'm guessing you're either fairly young or new to computers.
I'm guessing you're fairly douchey or new to social interaction.
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Well, he did say "talk to", not "listen for beeps". I wasn't believing the former.
Aren't the two synonymous? "Talking" is a generalized term for "communication." It's quite common for technical people to refer to a network or other form of electronic connection as one device "talking" to another.
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What sort of capacitor can you not get? Those things always seem easy enough to get in infinite variety.
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It's a flux capacitor he's after you moron!
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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 ...
We would love it too if people could not set up equipment and get "trained" to get the internet without consulting us at high prices. But it's no longer the nineties, and we can only dream :)
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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.
Not hardware related? Do you know how many times in the last 20 years I've had to fix a washer, stove, microwave, or refrigerator due to software problems? Zero.
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Can't really believe that rebooting a washing machine is going to fix anything...
No, especially when putting your Doc Martens in the spin cycle was what broke the thing in the first place.
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Frighteningly enough... it can.
We had something get screwed up on our washer, think it was probably due to a power bump or maybe brown power while it was running, and the damn thing wouldn't wash. They had us unplug the thing for at least so many seconds and start it back up to reset something. Sure sounds like a reboot to me.
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Believe it or not, but every now and then my washing machine actually has a software crash, and I need to...you guessed it...turn it off and then back on again.
Lately I've been giving it the same treatment as my pc though(erratic yelling followed by encouraging words and lots of "now look at what you made me do"'s) and she...I mean it's been behaving a bit better.
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There is a technical term for machines which communicate with eachother without human intervention. Robot conspiracy.
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It almost sounds a lot like X10 system (from Sun ?) which networks all your home appliances and devices, even your thermostat or your fire place...), having said that, I see a cool way of avoiding sending too much down time technicians that will take the extra time in traffic to go to your house goof around talking then find out they need a replacement piece, then go back to the store and whoops, need another day now....where as this way, you know what is broken up front, and he can come prepared with a rep
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I assume that on the other end of the line they have a protocol droid that speaks washer & dryer.
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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.
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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 u
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So this guy saunters into the ER at 3am with his finger bleeding. He is probably in pain and he can't do any work so he screams like he's just had a red hot poker up his anus. He sits there with his ghetto blaster in his lap, disturbing each hospital employee and demanding attention. The most junior of junior ER doctors looks at his finger and categorises him as low priority - you know, below the two guys on the stretchers who aren't complaining much at all.
Fortunately pclminion was there to put the junior
Avatars? (Score:2)
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and i would suggest going directly to NCI Kuula the moment you are off the mostly useless orientation island.
(secondlife://Kuula/55/168/28)
Meh, so what? (Score:2)
Tech support is a corporate scam to monetize crappy software.
Now that "free" software is all the rage, the "support services" business model is taking its place. The problem is that the better the software, the less support it requires. This monetarily incentives crappy software, bad interfaces, meaningless error messages, and thin or non-existent manuals. Sadly, even non-free software companies have figured this out and quality has suffered greatly as a result.
It's gotten so bad that for a lot of softwa
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what every script needs is something very simple
at each step it needs to ask a question
HAS THE USER ALREADY DONE THIS STEP??
also the beginning of the script should have the statement
Does the user appear to know exactly what is wrong (hint using technical terms correctly or providing a complete diagnostic snapshot is a good sign)
if this is true then send the call up tier
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A problem that I often run into on the "customer" side of this equation though is that often these "quick fixes" provide exactly that. "Reboot your cable modem" can often "fix" a problem that is merely a symptom of a larger issue. Example: My cable Internet was acting up. I rebooted the modem and it fixed the problem for a while, then it happened again. After the second or third time it happened in the period of a weekend I called tech support. The guy wanted me to reboot the modem. I tried to explai
They missed the best way to improve support (Score:2)
They missed the best and most obvious way to improve support: Improve the quality of the products and make the use obvious enough so that support isn't necessary.
But that is a lot less sexy than self-healing robot avatars and not really worth an article.
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%.
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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%.
Fourth secret, if you could just keep those filthy users from interacting with your systems at all everything would be fine, except no one would pay for a system to be a very expensive paper weight or inefficent resistance heater.
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If you can keep the users from using any computers, the fault rates will drop by 100%!
Easier way to replace parts - is it that hard now? (Score:2, Informative)
"In the future, machines will be made up of four -- or five or six -- modules. So if something breaks, you will get a CRU [customer-replaceable unit] sent to you," predicts Brendan Keegan, president of Worldwide TechServices, a provider of outsourced service technicians to major high-tech companies. Replacing a CRU will be about as hard as playing with Legos, he says: "If your RAM goes bad, the company might send you Module No. 6 to replace the RAM and a couple of other things. You pop the old one out and p
Incentives (Score:2)
Businesses seek to hire fewer employees or employees that work for less money. As tech support becomes more and more mechanized we can expect less and less jobs. The jobs that are left will surely demand higher skill levels.
Current catastrophic unemployment levels are reflecting computers and technology elimination the need for workers. The vital part is that government must catch on and make certain that people have spending m
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The products may fix themselves... (Score:2)
How about better error messages (Score:2)
As a part time sysadmin trying to understand cryptic error messages is probably the
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So you mean actually getting support? (Score:2)
As opposed to now where its some badly trained monkey who always assumes its the users fault, and give you the runaround until you give up.
the future will fix everything (Score:1)
And for Version 2.0... (Score:1)
What do I get this time? Clippy with bolts in his neck?