I work for SewellDirect.com, and I definitely get to see a lot of both sides of the phone support dilemma. I’ve worked there over a year and a half doing tech support through phone calls, email, and live chat. Here are my thoughts on the subject:

I recently had to deal with T-Mobile about my cell phone dying six days after I bought it. I called to see what they could do to get me a replacement, and their solution would have put me without a phone for two weeks. Frustrated, I called a second time. I got a second rep, and they shipped me out a phone the next day, with overnight shipping, no less. I had to pay for the phone upfront to protect them from losses, but that’s understandable.

The frustrating thing was that I was never offered that option the first time. And when I originally asked if there was an option like this, I was abruptly told that it wasn’t an option at all.

I think we all have our horror stories. More specifically about technical based support, there are lots of things that contribute to the problem. The cost of providing good support is often cited as the reason. There still seems to be a high demand for technically inclined employees for all businesses. For a tech support rep to be effective, she needs to know a lot more about computers and technology than the person calling her.

There just aren’t enough people around that have had real, hands-on experience troubleshooting and working with technology. Often times when you call a technical service rep, they haven’t ever touched or used the product you are inquiring about. So for a company to provide real technical support, they need to have employees that not only know how to read prompts on a screen, but also know how to address the problem directly and know how to discover the cause.

It would take very large amounts of time and resources to train people up to that degree of knowledge and experience. And companies are constantly trying to cut margins and increase profit. So often the tech support side gets outsourced.

Fortunately for me, the company I work for is trying its hardest to provide a more direct and personal touch to its support. When you call in on the phone, you do have to select which department you want, but it’s very straightforward. Option 1 is tech support (instead of being buried or hidden). Option 2 is sales (for placing an order or checking on the status). And Option 3 is for bulk sales (obviously for large scale sales dealing with special situations and/or pricing).

If you choose option one, you go straight to the next available caller, and we work to keep that a very short wait. When a tech support representative answers your call, you will be given his or her name so that you can speak directly with the same rep again if the first call doesn’t resolve the issue. If you want, you can even get the direct extension so you don’t even have to ask for the rep by name.

No prompts are used; we cut right to the problem and address it on the spot without asking you to make sure your computer is turned on or something ridiculous. This means that the tech support employees have to know their stuff. I can guarantee we don’t know all the answers, but we have very few questions go unanswered. If one person doesn’t know the answer, several of us will get together to solve the problem.

And if we still don’t know the answer, we’ll call the manufacturer of the part and wade through their crappy support until we find the answer for you. It’s not a perfect system, but our focus is to get your equipment working for you. Not to just throw out some fancy words and read a prompt on the computer that neither of us understand.

If you can’t tell, I do kind of take pride in the type of support we work to give. We probably do have to pay more per order to cover our support crew, but we all hate the kind of support we get elsewhere and would be embarrassed to think we were the same way.

I don’t see it improving much any time soon. But this is what it takes to provide quality phone support. I hope more companies will realize how important it is and begin providing better customer service.

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Published on: March 26th, 2008

Categories: Do-It-Yourself Tech, Tech Stories