We've all experienced it: the moment your PC (or some vital part of it) just up and quits on you, at the worst possible time. Mine was last December, when I fired up my four-month-old laptop to finish a project due the next day, only to have the screen display the dreaded Windows Blue Screen of Death.
Fortunately, an astute tech support rep recognized the symptoms of faulty RAM. Rather than have me send back the system--and my precious data--he shipped me fresh RAM modules to replace those in my notebook. Less than 24 hours later, my problems were solved.
Alas, not all tech support tales end so happily. In fact, in recent years our annual Reliability and Service survey has shown a groundswell of dissatisfaction among PC World subscribers with the support they receive from their technology vendors (although satisfaction with service generally improved in the most recent survey; go to the "Reliability and Service Report Card"). Whether it's interminable hold times, clueless technicians, the difficulty of understanding the heavy accents of some offshore reps, or just plain bad advice, PC users aren't getting the quality of service they expect from tech vendors.
We went undercover to try out support for PCs, software, and ISPs. The PC World Test Center concocted two failures--one simple and one more complex--for three PCs, one notebook, three software packages, and three broadband ISP accounts. For example, the PCs suffered a loose power plug (easy) and a bad hard-drive cable (difficult).
We then tried to solve the problems using all the support options the vendors offer. Most of our interaction with vendors took place on the phone, but we also used their FAQ pages, knowledge bases, and other online support resources.
Based on the 21 calls we made, there are still some support stars out there. We found knowledgeable and experienced technicians manning the phones at Dell, and one of the reps for budget-PC vendor Polywell wowed us with his spot-on advice and cool demeanor. Unfortunately, we also found that there's no shortage of bad advice emanating from call centers, wherever they happen to be located. Please take our limited, first-hand experiences with a grain of salt, however. We set out to get a reality check on the state of tech support in general, not to damn or praise specific vendors. Your experiences with the companies we dealt with may not mirror ours.
'Your Call Is Important'
Topping most people's tech support complaint list is long hold times. We were pleasantly surprised to find our wait times sufferable, especially for our calls to PC vendors and ISPs. We waited less than 2 minutes to get through to HP and IBM (Dell had us listening to canned music for an average of 12.5 minutes, however). The three ISPs we called had us talking to a human after only a few minutes on hold. The news isn't so good on the software side: Microsoft made us wait a half hour--twice--whereas our two calls to Symantec were answered in 12 and 13 minutes, respectively. We waited 24 and 10 minutes on our two calls to Adobe.
During our calls we chatted up the support techs to find out where they were located, whether they worked for the product's vendor or a third party, and how long they had been working in tech support. Only three of the reps we spoke to acknowledged being located overseas--all in India. Whether overseas or in the U.S., several other reps spoke with foreign accents. In our limited experience, the techs with identifiable accents were as likely as those who spoke standard American English to give us good advice.
Offshore reps were generally more difficult to get off script as they diagnosed a caller's problem. A script serves as a decision tree for technicians, but it can also keep them from doing any critical thinking about the problem. Too often the script is a crutch for someone without technical experience. Luckily, most of the reps we dealt with dropped the script soon enough (or at least appeared to).
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