• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

What is tech support coming to?

I

ioman

Bizz Bum
Joined
Jul 19, 2001
Messages
121
I called Netgear for techsupport and it went to their service center in India. The guy told me that even though the router has a 3 year warranty I only get phone support for 1 month. After that it costs $29.99 for each call into Netgear - but they have free support on their website.

What is the hardware world coming too? Would you pay $20-$40 more for a router to keep the jobs in the US and to have a better warranty? I know I would.
 
well it's increasingly becoming a problem to offer free tech support anymore. Even large companies like AOL need to fund there technical support seperately, thats why they have those ads at the end of most of their calls.

companies claim 24x7 tech support, but it's not always free =)
 
I guess this is the way Netgear has such competetive pricing, but I agree with you. I wouldnt mind paying a bit more if I knew if something went wrong I could at least talk to someone about the problem, instead of knowing that I will waste my time.
 
Just had a similiar problem, what makes it worse is when you get someone on the other end of the phone that has no clue what your talking about and sends you to 5 other people and you wait on hold for 15 minutes. lame. Your better off to just google for tech support nowadays.
 
ioman said:
I called Netgear for techsupport and it went to their service center in India.
Click to expand...

speaking of India.

I just watched something on The Discovery Channel a few days ago about the subject of outsourcing and how much actual business is going to India now when it comes to customer service calls.

they said that something like 3 million jobs in the customer service/support filed have already been outsourced to India and that those numbers are only going to increase in the future ahead.

why? cheap labor, pure and simple. they said that the average monthly pay in their money (Indian Rupees I think) equals to something like $200 to us. in other words, giants like Dell and Gateway are getting away with only paying someone $200/month to sit there and answer your customer service calls.

$200 per month? holy sweet mother of God... no wonder this country's going down the sh*tter when it comes to the job market. how the hell can anyone be asked to work for $200 in America? :(
 
Back on topic a bit, I work at a Mom 'n' Pop-type computer shop in a small town during the summer. We mostly deal with SMC gear, but that doesn't really matter. We've found that trying to deal with actual hardware companies is next to useless, and instead, when hardware doesn't work as we expect it to, it simply gets RMA'd. Check the website, see if they have any suggestions, flash the firmware, and then try a new one. If the new one works and the old one doesn't, it's RMA time.
 
Not to long ago, or just recently purchased are the best words to use in that situation. :)
 
note: I'm not racist ect....

but I hate getting an Indian on the phone for any type of tech support.. It's always a whaste of time call. They are not in any way ever knowledgeable enough to help and the poor engrish :) that they speak makes it even worse.
 
paulmr said:
...and the poor engrish :) that they speak makes it even worse.
Click to expand...

I think that's probably the worst part about it. Trying to explain computer problems across a language barrier is useless. I was helping a customer install a German copy of MSWorks the other day, and it was going ok, until a message box popped up. He read it and tried to translate it, but I still didn't know what to tell him. I just guessed, "Pick the right button". Sounds like it worked though.... :D
 
You get what you pay for when it comes to tech support. I mean like I can't even remember how much my warranty was on my Dell laptop (it was alot though!) - but the screen went bad and so I called them - was on the phone for maybe 10 minutes - and the next morning a guy arrived and replaced the defective display.
 
NleahciM said:
You get what you pay for when it comes to tech support. I mean like I can't even remember how much my warranty was on my Dell laptop (it was alot though!) - but the screen went bad and so I called them - was on the phone for maybe 10 minutes - and the next morning a guy arrived and replaced the defective display.
Click to expand...

Sounds like a business grade machine with a business grade warranty. ;)
 
CentronMe said:
Sounds like a business grade machine with a business grade warranty. ;)
Click to expand...

Not necessarily. I have had a wonderful experience with Compaq warranty on their laptops. I don't recall if it was a "business-grade" laptop, but we definately didn't purchase an extended warranty. It was my sister's, and lets just say it lived a very hard life. Dropped off tables and such. Finally, the screen got this huge red bar down the side that randomly flickered, and it was absolutely awful. We called up Compaq, and they informed us that it was out of warranty :(.

After a bit of discussion about the problem, and our possible venues (buying a used screen assembly from ebay), he put me on hold, and then came back and said "Ok, what's your address? There'll be a postage paid box delivered to your house tomorrow. Put the laptop in it, and take it to the post office. We'll see what we can do for you." This was Monday afternoon. Sure enough, Tuesday morning, the package guy shows up with the box. Take it to the PO, and ship it off. Friday comes along, and there's another package guy. I open it up, and they replaced the entire screen for free. There was a little note inside: "Screen was bad. Replaced." No bill or anything. I was impressed.
 
And thanks to outsourcing, people like me are always gonna have a hard time finding jobs... tech support or programming..

Thanks Pres. Bush :rolleyes:
 
holy crap thats insane, 29.99 per call...
well for HP, its not that they overcharge or anything, they reply really quickly, its that the tech support SUCKS BIG TIME, i know more from reading articles, forums and reviews, sad...
 
Dammit, I had an excellent reply, but the forums ate it.

Basically, here's what it boils down to. How much did you pay for your router? How much free technical support do you expect from it? Also consider that, although you purchased it from a retailer, you're expecting the manufacturer to provide this support. We're currently selling routers for $69cdn. We bill on-site work at $60/hour. I guarantee that we'll sit on the phone with you for 10-20 minutes if it seems you're actually trying to read the instructions and get things set up. However, after that, our margin is completely gone. As a matter of fact, we start losing money (taking a loss on the sale, not just having lower profits) about a 1/2 hour in to helping you get it started.

Does it make sense for a company to sell products at a loss? No. That's why we won't spend hours of our time on the phone with you for free.

This isn't nearly as good as my last reply, but I'm grumpier now than I was before.
 
JSClark said:
And thanks to outsourcing, people like me are always gonna have a hard time finding jobs... tech support or programming..

Thanks Pres. Bush :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Hehe - the "problem" started long before the current pres, or even former pres. Its just that its finally happening to the "knowledge" workers after working its way through the textile, blue collar, and electronics industries.

And ditto what fat-tony said. All that cheap labor and outsourcing is what affords us the disposable culture we live in (20 dollar pants, 30 dollar shoes, 60 dollar routers, 100 dollar CPUs and motherboards). Its cheaper to RMA or trash/buy new than it is to fix anything anymore.

BB
 
And expectations. Honestly, it's the expectations that blow me away. When you come in and buy a 25ft crossover cable to hook your two computers together, why would you expect me to tell you step-by-step how to network two computers? Our business sells hardware, software, and service. If you don't expect to be able to walk in and take hardware off the shelf, why would you expect to get service for free? It is one of the things we sell.
 
dlink has free tech support... but it took me 3 times at a half hour per time(hung up after 30minutes) before I gto to somebody... an hour and a half for an answer is ridiculous...

QwertyJuan
 
Greetings from the other side of the phone so to speak.
No im not in India, but a college campus. I provide tech support for the Residence halls.
We have our share of international students here. Its defiantly a lot harder to support international students because of the language barrier. I would say on average a problem that would normally be a 2-3 min phone call becomes something like 10-15 min due to just trying to communicate what you want them to do.

When there are problems we just cant fix over the phone, we ask them to bring there computer down here. I have been asked more than once if i have spoken there language because of the ease i navigate the OS with. :p :D

i too have my India horror story though: This one was with a Linksys wireless router i bought, it was bad, but i wanted to call up tech support to be sure. Well after 20 min of talking to one guy explaining my problem about 10 diff ways, I finally said intermittent connection and THEN he understood what was going on because it was in his script. :sigh:
 
Rombus said:
When there are problems we just cant fix over the phone, we ask them to bring there computer down here. I have been asked more than once if i have spoken there language because of the ease i navigate the OS with. :p :D
Click to expand...

Gotta love dealing with OSes in foreign languages :). It goes fine until you get an unexpected dialog box that you have no idea what its for. That's when you play eenie-meanie-miney-mo, and pick a button, hoping you get it right.
 
Rombus said:
i too have my India horror story though: This one was with a Linksys wireless router i bought, it was bad, but i wanted to call up tech support to be sure. Well after 20 min of talking to one guy explaining my problem about 10 diff ways, I finally said intermittent connection and THEN he understood what was going on because it was in his script. :sigh:
Click to expand...

Thats the thing that bugs me about outsourcing to India. I've lost a job to it myself, but the real pain in the ass about it is that it's subpar service. ALWAYS. You occassionally get a real whiz on a tech support line when/if you need help and you get a stateside callcenter. (i'm a googler myself) but when you get some nitwit in India who's PC experience is summed up by the training course he took, and finding his tech support software on the start menu... You're up a creek.

If they can provide better service at a lower price in India, by all means, go ahead and do it. But don't isolate and frustate your customers with incompetency to save a few bucks.

I work for one of the largest travel reservation companies in the world, and we'll never, never, never outsource our call center. Why? Plain and simple, we provide a higher level of service and quality than our competition, which generates loyalty. Its the only business model anyone needs.
 
TheAcorn said:
Thats the thing that bugs me about outsourcing to India. I've lost a job to it myself, but the real pain in the ass about it is that it's subpar service. ALWAYS. You occassionally get a real whiz on a tech support line when/if you need help and you get a stateside callcenter. (i'm a googler myself) but when you get some nitwit in India who's PC experience is summed up by the training course he took, and finding his tech support software on the start menu... You're up a creek.
Click to expand...

You seem to have a lot of faith in your fellow Americans. I have only dealt with domestic call-centers, and (other than a wonderful compaq experience) I've had the same experiences as everyone else. Our local telco/DSL provider has gotten better recently, but it's still sketchy sometimes.

So, here's my take on it. You're not getting sub-par service. Sub-par would imply that it's worse than most. Rather, you're getting the service that I've come to expect. Par!
 
TheAcorn said:
I work for one of the largest travel reservation companies in the world, and we'll never, never, never outsource our call center. Why? Plain and simple, we provide a higher level of service and quality than our competition, which generates loyalty. Its the only business model anyone needs.
Click to expand...


Sadly, I experience every day the fact that relying on your loyalty only goes so far. We're in a relatively small town (35k people), and although we have a number of loyal customers, I see them coming in more and more with an E-Machine that they bought in Regina (about 45 minutes away, ~200k people). The nice thing is they realize they're going to get no tech support from there ;), and bring it to us. We still lose the sale though.
 
fat-tony said:
So, here's my take on it. You're not getting sub-par service. Sub-par would imply that it's worse than most. Rather, you're getting the service that I've come to expect. Par!
Click to expand...

No, 'par' for the course implies an english speaking employee who isn't waiting for you to use the right word for 'not working all the time' in his script so he knows what you're talking about. Not everyone who works in PC tech support is incompetent, though like most entry-level positions, most of them are. You don't even have that luck of the draw when you reach a phone center in India. They don't speak english, they've never used any sort of equipment that they're supporting, and the company that's letting them take your phone calls moved jobs overseas at some point. The only reason for it is cost.
 
CentronMe said:
Sounds like a business grade machine with a business grade warranty. ;)
Click to expand...

Between DHS and SMB, Dell warranties are the same, they just have different names. Sounds like MichaelN went with the next-biz day instead of mail-in-service. DHS calls that "at home service", and SMB calls it . . . Next Business Day OnSite service. You call an 800 number, if tech support can't fix it, somebody comes out with parts. It's the same across the board between departments and each individual laptop or desktop.

I think we wouldn't need to outsource anything if people would learn to RTM :D
 
TheAcorn said:
No, 'par' for the course implies an english speaking employee who isn't waiting for you to use the right word for 'not working all the time' in his script so he knows what you're talking about. Not everyone who works in PC tech support is incompetent, though like most entry-level positions, most of them are.
Click to expand...

I'd say if most of them are, then that makes it the average, no?
 
Great answers. I guess no one really answered what I was looking for.

Would you pay more for a product to get better customer service and a better warranty?
 
ioman said:
Great answers. I guess no one really answered what I was looking for.

Would you pay more for a product to get better customer service and a better warranty?
Click to expand...
<rant> This thread is pissing me off, it's eaten 2 long posts in 2 days... lets see if the 3rd time's a charm. </rant>

No, not only that but the market will correct for such an attitude. *IF*/when people get tired of negotiating languages with their techs they will either bail or not. Dell is taking ITB right now on customer satisfaction, but sales are still decent. Some services/jobs will get away with being outsourced, other can't because of customer service.

Anyways, give me a cheap router with 30 days support. I'll wind up supporting 100% of it anyways. The uninformed consumer is the one to anwswer that question (would you spend more), not us techies. Besides, there is ALWAYS the option of calling a tech out to your house and having them set it up instead of calling for support. Your on one side of the fence or the other, self support or house calls.

edit: woot I guess it likes me now...

And thanks to outsourcing, people like me are always gonna have a hard time finding jobs... tech support or programming..

Thanks Pres. Bush
Click to expand...
That's a very uninformed statement, did GW himself let you go? Outsourcing is NOT evil... :rolleyes:

BTW, I lost my job to outsourcing about 2 years ago, to India, too.
 
paulmr said:
note: I'm not racist ect....

but I hate getting an Indian on the phone for any type of tech support.. It's always a whaste of time call. They are not in any way ever knowledgeable enough to help and the poor engrish :) that they speak makes it even worse.
Click to expand...

Not all the time,though ;). A few of my friends worked for Dell tech-support in Delhi. They are all pretty smart, 90% of them have EE degrees. They seem to have done pretty well *shrug*.
I dunno about the ones less fluent in Engrish. They may have problems, but cut them some slack. It's not our first language. The lower cost of labour here does help,though.
 
While I wouldn't pay more for better customer service, I'd pay for a longer warranty (like with hard drives). I haven't called tech support for years because I always got a Level 1 who were like the rookie A+ cert kids at Best Buy: most had no clue what I was asking or how to solve it. If I have a problem, I'll try to solve it myself or come to the good old [H]. Of course, Mushkin tech support is an exception; those guys rock and talking with them on the phone is quite an experience.
 
TechHead said:
Not all the time,though ;). A few of my friends worked for Dell tech-support in Delhi. They are all pretty smart, 90% of them have EE degrees. They seem to have done pretty well *shrug*.
I dunno about the ones less fluent in english. They may have problems, but cut them some slack. It's not our first language. The lower cost of labour here does help,though.
Click to expand...
EE degrees don't help much when doing end user support, and that's exactly the problem in many cases. India has lots of knowledgeable people. MSC whatevers, EEs, CCN whatevers, devs., etc. But not many people good at doing customer service/end user support. There are also cultural barriers, on top of language barriers, plural. Because there is an english-indian barrier and the technology lingo barrier.

I think some of the things outsourced to India will wind up back in the US, where there are less problems. I'm not saying, by any means those call centers in the US are more knowledgable, just less 'other' barriers to deal with. Maybe PC support will work, but it will take time.

The real question is what is the consumer going to do in the mean time? Because, the answer to that will determine what services stay in India.
 
That's a very uninformed statement, did GW himself let you go? Outsourcing is NOT evil...
Click to expand...

Well, its not all GW's fault, its more this outsourcing thing, but it is people like GW that don't look at the economy at all, which is still suffering, which makes it hard for us Americans to find a job, especially when it comes to tech related. I feel as though if we had a more powerful economy, outsourcing wouldn't be this out of control today as it is. As said before, people want to pay for professional help, not to call India only to get frustrated by the language barrier.
 
You know, I'd rather be on the phone with someone in India who speaks English pretty well and clearly than to get someone in the USA that speaks with such a horrid accent that they might as well be using sign language.
 
JSClark said:
Well, its not all GW's fault, its more this outsourcing thing, but it is people like GW that don't look at the economy at all, which is still suffering, which makes it hard for us Americans to find a job, especially when it comes to tech related. I feel as though if we had a more powerful economy, outsourcing wouldn't be this out of control today as it is. As said before, people want to pay for professional help, not to call India only to get frustrated by the language barrier.
Click to expand...

If the economic playing field were more level, there'd be no point in outsourcing to other countries.

The "fuck tomorrow for a dollar today" attitude that seems to be all too favored by analysts and investors probably doesn't help matters much, either.
 
You know, if India and Pakistan ever get themselves into a full-blown war, things will get interesting... Especially if they start planting mushrooms on eachother's territory.
 
Cardboard Hammer said:
You know, I'd rather be on the phone with someone in India who speaks English pretty well and clearly than to get someone in the USA that speaks with such a horrid accent that they might as well be using sign language.
Click to expand...

So you think its fair that us US citizens who do tech work get the shaft because other countries are suffering? You do know this is one of the many reasons why unemployment is so high in the US, right?

If the economic playing field were more level, there'd be no point in outsourcing to other countries.

The "fuck tomorrow for a dollar today" attitude that seems to be all too favored by analysts and investors probably doesn't help matters much, either.
Click to expand...

This I agree with. Its because of politicians thinking the rest of the world needs help, that we should suffer because of it. I say, we mind our own, and let the other countries deal with their problems. With all that is happening today with the US basically bullying everyone around, thanks to GW, I'm even suprised we get the outsourcing we get.

Anyways, before this thread gets locked, lets go back on topic please?
 
JSClark said:
Well, its not all GW's fault, its more this outsourcing thing, but it is people like GW that don't look at the economy at all, which is still suffering, which makes it hard for us Americans to find a job, especially when it comes to tech related. I feel as though if we had a more powerful economy, outsourcing wouldn't be this out of control today as it is. As said before, people want to pay for professional help, not to call India only to get frustrated by the language barrier.
Click to expand...

I'm going to disagree with this. The people who have been up a creek before and had tech support actually resolve the problem or set them on the right course (i.e. they derived some benefit from it) are the ones who are willing to pay for it. Funny that those are generally the techies and a few non-techies who are a little more independently minded. The casual users still won't pay for it, so you see what I've experienced for a few years running - an increasing reliance on friends to solve problems.

Being the only techie in my neighborhood results in a constant barrage of emails, phone calls, and questions in passing conversations. These people ask me because I know the answers, or can find them, and by and large I don't charge for this support. Most people simply won't pay if there's a charge, not the $50 an hour a shop would charge, not the $20 I would. Technology should work, like their TVs and microwaves.

This also continues to grow for us techies. It used to be we all called tech support, then called each other looking for fixes and information on problems. Now we've got google, newsgroups, mailing lists, web support forums, etc. Even the companies who make the stuff jump on forums/newsgroups, as it takes a couple grand to build the servers, buy the bandwidth, and have someone check the place periodically for nasty language and anti-corporate rants, then magically users support themselves.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top