Interesting fact many people don't know about tech support

How many people here know that when you call up a company like HP or Compaq or Dell for support you are not even talking to them. Yes that is correct joe bob jim from Dell doesnt even work for Dell, he works for a company called Stream.

Slack Space 1613 This topic was started by ,


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1623 Posts
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How many people here know that when you call up a company like HP or Compaq or Dell for support you are not even talking to them.
 
Yes that is correct joe bob jim from Dell doesnt even work for Dell, he works for a company called Stream. What Stream and companies like it do is hire themselves out for tech support. Many of the people they hire don't know what they are doing, and they have programs that narrow down the problem that the person that calls in support is having by getting basic info and then entering it into the computer.
 
That is why their tech support sucks.

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24 Posts
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MS does this also. They have one of their outsource centers here.

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1438 Posts
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was about to say that
 
"outsourcing" tech support
 
scary thought.
 
i do tech support, but i work for the company.
 
it is a cheap way to do it. but not efficient to get a good customer service rating.
 
in this industry (online gaming) alot of people will go to your site if u got great support - and that we do, we know what our problems are, we don't read some...
 
try this - did that wrok or not, if not click here to try this etc etc like the built in window troubleshoot'n guide.

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I'd just like to say that although this is true for much first line/home user support this is not the case for most second line/enterprise support people.
 
The idea of first line support is to catch all the "So, which slot do my CD's go in" and the like whereas second line support deal with the more serious issues.
I use Dell for all my servers for the very reason that their server/enterprise support people are extremely knowledgeable - every single time I've had need to call them we've gone through various things over the phone and if it hasn't been a physical hardware failure they have always managed to get things back up and running.