Probably a call center in India or the Philippines that hires people that have no experience and turns them loose with a script.

Sad but true. Most "technical support" nowadays comes from call centers in places like India. Outsourcing, you know.

Ditto. Almost surely an outsourced call center. Incredibly tiring dealing with them. That, and call center policies in general are designed more to make you give up on getting support than to actually resolve your problem and you get lousy customer service more often than not.

FeedingDragon wrote:

request: I recently upgraded my sx-somenumber motherboard, and am now receiving a beep code of one long and 2 short beeps. I cannot find the chart of beep codes for this mb/bios (bios is award rev x73.) Could you please point me to the beep code table to get this answer?

Hasn't long-short-short been the beep code for a graphics error since, like, forever?

Actually, it depends on the BIOS. The beep codes are not completely standardized. It used to be that the back of a MB manual would list the beep codes for the BIOS on that board, but not so much nowadays. The board in question's manual only states "A sequence of tones (long/short) will indicate the source of the error." Without giving any details. Then to turn around and the web site doesn't provide them is rather frustrating. Generally, you can just search for the BIOS type (Award, Phoenix, etc...) and that will give you what you need, but even that isn't always true.

In my example, I didn't actually remember the code in question, I just remembered the e-mail war I had over it (it was a system I upgraded for a friend - got it working and moved on.) I used a code I looked up just for the example. The problem, in his case, was the graphics card in the end (which is why I chose that beep code.) Which is also why the repetitive answers about checking the RAM (and I replaced the RAM twice on their advice,) made me so angry in the end. If they had just answered my actual question on any of the e-mails, I wouldn't have had to return/re-buy the RAM. I do remember that the actual code was not one you might expect. Something like 2 long, 15 short, 3 long.... I had to reboot a couple of times to get it. I just no longer remember the exact code 🙁

I'm afraid it all came to a head recently though. I'm still arguing with someone else right now trying to get them to actually read what I'm asking. My 3rd e-mail has gone out, and I'm afraid I put the question itself (IN ALL CAPS,) this time in the vain hope they might actually read it. I'm not getting my hopes up however.

You tell me. Today I contacted my Internet provider and explained that my internet cuts out every Saturday night. Guess, what was the answer? She said, I need to upgrade my service from 10Mbps to 20Mbps 😀

Might as well give up on tech support, it's been on a downward slide for many years. Outsourcing and the constant need to "cut costs" has driven it right into the ground, along with customer service. It's so bad that some large corporations have actually turned both into additional sales outlets, telling customers that they need to buy more of their products/services instead of providing them any kind of support. Consider yourself lucky if anyone you do business with actually helps you - it's now the exception rather than the rule 🙁

In a way you get what you pay for, shit's gotten too cheap.

Last time I called Nintendo's tech support it was still going to an American call centre, granted that was a few years ago.

General rule of thumb is that the smaller a company is the more likely their tech support will be decent. :B

reminds me of a friend of mine who some years ago wanted to have his X360 repaired. When he called their UK call centre, he got a call centre in India where they didn't seem to speak decent English.
When he tried the American call centre, it gave him an automated response which wouldn't recognise his accent. Finally he got to a MS call centre in Austria where somebody could help him.

I couldn't care less where the call centre is, but if its meant to serve English speakers, the employees should speak English to an acceptable level outside of reading from a script.

Tech support

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AmD_8cBqhW0

Part 2

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6K4iTkXgwAg

Part 3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yTe6yEhgBw

My email address is some kind of dumbass trap - it's just my lastname @gmail.com and there are always some that think that just because their friend/colleague/customer has the same lastname that this the email address of that person. And then there is this woman called Susan from Philadelphia who thinks that this is her email address and subscribed to all kind of bullshit (right wing stuff among stores) and it's apalling to see how many companies don't use a two-step mechanism to subscribe people.
She also tried to sign up with PayPal and they don't serm to want to honor their sign-up-confirmation mail and won't listen to me when I repeatedly told them that this is not that woman's email address...

(Funny story is that a girl once sent me her half naked selfies because her boyfriend has the same last name as me)

Either you get half ass service on the phone or they want you to buy some frickin extended warranty or some other BS.

The few times I call technical support I tend to have more knowledge of the product then the person on the other end. I normally just ask to be transferred to a technician who knows his stuff.

Sutekh94 wrote:

Sad but true. Most "technical support" nowadays comes from call centers in places like India. Outsourcing, you know.

I work support for a PACS vendor based out of Canada. We're getting large enough that we actually looked at outsourcing on-call hours to some mickey mouse outfit in India. We trained two of their guys personally for about a month, paid for them to fly out here, housing for a month, the works. We found in addition to the guys we trained, they had other guys taking calls that we had not trained. Hell, one of the guys they sent was actually a replacement for someone else, and this guy was completely useless. Couldn't trust tasks scheduled for this moron to handle, so I ended up doing work scheduled after hours myself, or fixing crap he broke.

Ended up dropping them about two months later because their quality of work was complete trash. The customers started complaining; we dumped them after they fucked up a scheduled patch deployment which caused a morning worth of downtime for one of our biggest clients. Apparently they also tried to bill us for additional hours of work that they never did.

Even domestically based support is garbage sometimes. Had some ISP issues a while back, provider sent me a new modem as mine had outdated firmware. Morons provisioned the new modem after I told them multiple times the unit was toast. Spent days wasting time with these guys providing clear evidence the unit was DOA. Ended up having to post a thread on dslreports because the guys handling my original ticket were completely useless.

I've occasionally had to make late night calls to the ISP. Perhaps it was because of the late hour, but almost every time, the phone would get picked up by a network engineer in Texas. It was refreshing to get help from somebody who knows what's going on and can efficiently and intelligently address it.
Sadly, it was too good to last. The last couple times I've called it's been some generic call center person who doesn't have technical knowledge, and the connection is so bad I can't hear half of what they're saying.

Back in 1997, I sent a support email to Electronic Arts, and their immediate response was to ask an obvious question which I had directly answered in the first sentence of my email. I guess EA has always sucked.

shamino wrote:

Back in 1997, I sent a support email to Electronic Arts, and their immediate response was to ask an obvious question which I had directly answered in the first sentence of my email. I guess EA has always sucked.

That's one of the things that frustrates me so much as well. I tend to use e-mail tech support over phone support. Unless, of course, I sort of need the help right then or the problem involves lack of internet. I also used to work as a technician, so I do most of the preliminary work on my own. When I send in the yelp for help I list the steps I've already taken in an attempt to solve the problem. Yet most times, I'm asked to do them all over again anyways. Like I said at the beginning, it's like they never even read my message. They just looked at the title and nothing else. It used to be less common (I was going to say rare, but not sure it quite qualifies for that.) But it seems lately to be almost everyone does it that way now. The only 2 exceptions that come to mind are Nero and MSI. They both came back with informative answers that obviously took into account what I had already done. Though, the Nero case took them 3 months to send me an actual answer (needed to download a newly minted patch.) The only thing they asked was for me to provide them a log/dump file produced with some special software they sent me at the time.

Any support organization nowadays has standardized process and work flows whereby the 1st level support is scripted. The person on the phone knows nothing and just runs down the script. They are also pushed to sell more as a solution to anything and everything. You just have to persist and escalate / ask to speak with a supervisor until you finally get 2nd / 3d level support. In some cases there is only 1st level support so just terminate the service or ask for a full refund and move on the competitor.