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Getting tech support

Let me start this by saying it would be a better idea to hire strung out domestic crackwhores for technical support and pay them with two packs of smokes per day then what most companies are doing in India.

Why do I think this?  Because $9.00 per day in cigs to a crackwhore is probably less than they pay to unqualified and untrained tech support staff in India…and it’s all about saving a buck, right?

I’m happy that the folks in India have a decent and clean way to earn a living with all of this outsourcing going on.  They are good people and they are hard working people.  I try to not get testy on the phone and try to remember that they’re just doing what they were told to do by their US customers.

HOWEVER, what our US companies are failing to do is make sure that they are qualified to handle the calls to which they are asigned. 

If you call Microsoft pay-per-incident support, you will probably get someone from India to handle your incident.  That’s fine because the people that are handling these calls are wholly trained and qualified to deal with these issues and everytime I’ve needed to do this, I hang up the phone as a happy and satisfied customer.

On the other hand, when my DSL went down, I made two hour long phone calls and worked with a glorified script reader in India who was not equipped to do anything but run down a basic troubleshooting script.  Anything I would say didn’t matter - they were instructed to keep to their script and when all else fails, waste more company money and send me a new modem - causing my line to be down an additional 3 days.

But then I found the phone number to local support and within ten minutes had someone n the phone who was empowered to to real troubleshooting and within ten minutes I was running again.

At the end of the day, I can care less that tech support is being outsourced to India - what I care about is the fact when I need tech support, so much of my time is wasted because that outsourced tech support is not qualified or not empowered to do anything more than read the same troubleshooting steps that I can find in my user manual.

So, I will say again that I feel I would be just as satisfied as a customer if they would just hire local crackwhores to give me unqualified tech support….at least then I wouldn’t have to snap at some unfortunate person from India who is just trying to make a living.  I wouldn’t feel bad about snapping at a crackwhore.

Whether or not outsourcing in general is evil is not what concerns me - after all no one on the US complains about foreign auto manufacturing being moved TO the US.

What concerns me is the fact that