PC Users’ Final Line of Defense
Katherine Mitchell had just plunked down $2,500 for a top-of-the-line desktop computer, so she was more than a little miffed when it went on the fritz. Mitchell, a District of Columbia resident, had no trouble pinpointing the problem--”Control D would do one thing once, and five minutes later it’d do something else,” she explained--but as for the cause, she was stumped.
Seeking help, Mitchell called the toll-free number for the machine’s manufacturer, AST Research Inc. in Irvine. And so began her saga with technical phone support.
First she spent a long time on hold. When she finally made human contact, she said, one technician was “rude” and another was “clueless.” Finally, she called AST’s president.
The president’s secretary recognized that this was one angry customer and sent Keith Vinson, techie extraordinaire, to Mitchell’s rescue. It was a move that would make all the difference.
“I wanted to bad-mouth AST . . . to tell people not to buy their machines, that it was the same as throwing money down the drain,” Mitchell said. “Now I would buy from AST again, and that’s exclusively because of Keith.”
Vinson is officially a technical support supervisor, working out of AST’s Fort Worth call center. As a “Level 3 guy,” he would handle the most escalated phone calls--those problems that the Level 1 and 2 technicians weren’t able to solve.
Unofficially, though, Vinson is part of a small cadre of technicians at hardware and software companies around the globe who can best be described as “techies of last resort.” Theirs is the ultimate profession in the technology-heavy, answer-hungry 1990s. With computers in an estimated 35% of U.S. households, more people need someone who can quickly, but competently, cut through all the techno-babble and just get their machines to work.
Different companies give them different job titles--some are called Level 3 technicians, while others are Level 2--but the task of these techies is the same: to solve the callers’ seemingly insoluble problems and turn them into satisfied, committed and, most important, repeat customers. This means spending hours, days, even weeks on the telephone, conquering the most recalcitrant computers and soothing the most irate customers.
This all takes a person with special talents--someone who is equal parts computer geek, teacher and often, in the emotion-wrenching world of bytes and bits, shrink. These computer guys have a mix of “techie” and “fuzzy” skills, a combination that psychologists attest is rare. They have the technical savvy as well as the people smarts to deal with stressed businessmen, computer morons and crying college students with term papers that won’t print.
That’s not to say that Vinson and his colleagues are necessarily natural-born techies. While companies employ a fair number of computer science majors, they also hire people who don’t have any previous technical experience.
“The bedside manner is even more important than the technical skills,” said Steve Pollack, U.S. customer support manager for Hewlett-Packard Co. In short, the technical stuff can be taught, but that special knack for dealing with customers can’t.
In Mitchell’s case, it was Vinson’s personal characteristics as much as his technical know-how that turned her situation around. “Keith was so great, so reassuring. He kept saying, ‘We will get it to work,’ ” Mitchell gushed.
In October 1995, when Mitchell’s computer trauma occurred, she and Vinson spent about 10 hours on the telephone. For four consecutive nights, they had a 7 o’clock phone date. “He’d always call right at the appointed time,” Mitchell said.
The problem, Vinson quickly determined, was that two operating systems were running simultaneously on Mitchell’s machine, and “they’d fight with each other.” Mitchell’s computer came with Windows 3.1 installed and with a coupon for a free upgrade to the soon-to-be-released Windows 95. But something went wrong when she tried to do just that three months later, and that’s what Vinson had to figure out and fix.
Although Mitchell’s computer trauma occurred some time ago, her relationship with Vinson continues. She hung on to Vinson’s private phone number, and--though he has since moved into another job--she wouldn’t hesitate, if need be, to call him with her computer questions.
