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The Money Pit

Of course, many tech support tales have a happy ending. Last summer, Steve Hampton of Calgary, Alberta, returned his 667-MHz Celeron PC to HP for repair of a faulty hard drive. When his system was returned, he discovered a different CPU--a 750-MHz Pentium III. "I offered to pay the difference," he says, "but HP said 'No, it was our mistake, just keep it.'"

Spectacular service remains the exception, not the rule. The biggest reason: Quality service comes at a high price. It takes money--a lot of money--to staff call centers. A vendor spends anywhere from $10 to $15 to handle a typical tech support call, according to Giga Information Group customer relationship management analyst Erin Kinikin.

So from a vendor's perspective, phone support is a money pit. "It [can cost] millions of dollars to build a call center, and companies have to find people to answer the phones," says International Data Corporation software support and services analyst Ana Volpi.

These days, few PC makers have money to spare. Last year, the average price for a system in the United States was $909, just over half the $1728 average in 1996, according to market research firm PC Data. Fewer consumers are buying, even at those prices. Naturally, vendors are scrambling to cut costs, including laying off their workforce, to stay competitive. "If you're not making much on the machine, every service call takes away from the profit margin," says Giga Information Group hardware analyst Rob Enderle.

Customer support is tricky to manage, too, says Giga analyst Kinikin. Staff turnover is high, and telecommunications systems are expensive to set up. As a result, many high-tech companies find it cheaper and easier to hire third-party contractors to handle their support operations.

But contract-based tech support can create a new set of headaches for customers. Third-party tech reps may have limited knowledge of the product brands that they field queries about. According to Kinikin, they may have minimal access to a vendor's bug fixes and advanced technical support.

By the same token, a manufacturer's lack of direct involvement in the support process may slow its response to and correction of product flaws. "When something goes wrong, it often takes vendors a long time to notice and to react to it, in part because they aren't on the front line taking the [support] calls," says Kinikin.

Ted Cwiok is vice president of corporate technology at Cincinnati-based Convergys, which provides customer support for AT&T Wireless, Compaq, and other companies. He observes that the quality of third-party support often depends on the service level vendors are willing to pay for. "If they want 90 percent of support calls answered within 1 minute, we'll hire the staff to make that happen," Cwiok says.