Unfunny Business of Tech Support
Here’s a joke that’s been making the rounds on the Internet: A helicopter flying above Seattle experienced a malfunction that crippled its radar and radio. Clouds and haze made visual navigation impossible. The pilot saw a tall building emerge from the gloom, flew toward it, frantically scrawled a large sign--”WHERE AM I?”--and held it up to the window.
People in the building quickly responded with their own sign: “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.” The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to the airport and landed safely.
Later the co-pilot asked the pilot how he determined their position. “I knew that had to be the Microsoft building,” he responded, “because, similar to their help lines, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”
Microsoft’s a big target, but the joke would be funnier if this experience wasn’t typical throughout the industry. Most consumers don’t understand much about how computers work. But ignorance often breeds fear; people tend to panic when something goes wrong. (“A [expletive deleted] ‘Type 11’ error AGAIN!?”)
After paying thousands of dollars for a complex box that sometimes suffers from mystifying problems, you’ve got a right to expect good service.
So the pitiable, poorly paid tech support person faces a daunting challenge. It’s tough to be geek, therapist, PR person and father confessor all at once. Maybe this explains the prevalence of inept support.
As the Mac clone market adds vendors with no track records--there are already three sources for mainstream Macs and within a few months several more will join them--tech support is becoming an important buying consideration.
To wit, I conducted my own test of support from the three mainstream makers of Macs--Apple, Umax and Power Computing. My survey, though unscientific, echoes a lot of the anecdotal experience found in Internet newsgroups.
I made four calls to each vendor to test for responsiveness, courtesy (on the “snide wise-ass to Eagle Scout” scale) and accuracy of response (solved the problem, wasted my time or made things worse).
First the good news: Unlike Microsoft, all three companies offer toll-free support and were easy to reach. In one case I waited 14 minutes on hold for Apple, but otherwise reached a live voice in three minutes or less. The support people were uniformly gracious, never patronizing.
The bad news: None of the vendors was perfect. And Apple--vendor of choice for the vast majority of consumers--fared worst.
Umax and Power Computing did fine on a softball question about how to get an audio CD to play on your CD-ROM drive. Give Apple partial credit; their technician walked me through the control panel steps incorrectly but steered me generally in the right direction.
A trickier test involved a scenario in which my hard disk died and I needed to access data on a Zip Drive cartridge after booting off a CD. Again, all but Apple correctly identified the utilities on the CD to get the job done.
I then called for a fix to frequent system crashes with an accompanying “Type 11 error” message--this actually happens to me. Not a single right answer among them--ouch. They all said it was an extension conflict and advised me to reinstall applications or the Mac-OS. Even my pointed question about the version of the system I use didn’t help; none of them seemed to know that an upgrade to the recently released Mac-OS 7.5.5 makes “Type 11” go away.
Finally, I posed a problem about getting Microsoft Excel 5.0 to launch; if you don’t have more than 16 megabytes of memory on your machine, you need to turn virtual memory on. All three vendors punted, referring me to Microsoft.
“Microsoft is very significant in our world, and we aren’t eager to provide their tech support,” said the Apple guy. Fair enough, but given that this common problem involves a product that owns 99% of the Mac spreadsheet market, it seems a bit lame. (Microsoft, by the way, did get the answer right.)
