Yep. I hate having to phone support lines to be told to run basic troubleshooting like turning something off and on again when that’s the first thing that I’ll try.
tbf, customers have a near-infinite number of different issues and problems. those ‘flow charts’ and scripts are designed to start at a baseline and work up from there and they start with the most common ones. you’d be paying more for whatever it is you’re calling in about if they hired only fully-qualified persons that can ‘think on their feet’ without the flow charts and scripts wrt whatever issue it is you have, troubleshooting it, and coming up with the specific solution for you… a hell of a lot more. and yes, the first thing you should usually try with tech items is a power cycle. ::insert itcrowd-turnitoffandonagain.jpg::
No one is asking for a gaggle of full-time engineers.
The flowchart is designed to fix the vast majority of problems top down. If 90% of the problems are solved by rebooting you’re going to reboot. It doesn’t matter if the ONT shows your fiber line is not connected. Wow that sucks I understand and don’t have a problem with that. But most support these days can’t even connect you with an actual engineer once you break the flow chart.
You spend 30 minutes on the phone having them check off check boxes when they get down to the point where there’s actually a level two problem, there’s no one there to talk to you. Here let us take down your information and we’ll get back to you within the next 24 hours.
A couple of decades ago this really wasn’t a problem. Level 1 technicians would run their flowcharts if you broke out to a level two technician you wait on the line for 10 to 15 minutes and you’d end up with a level two technician, It almost always solve the problem if it was solvable. Honestly the products I call for support on haven’t really gone down in price with the lack of support provided these days. They used to be able to provide me multi-tier support live on the phone with just their existing margins. It’s the same thing screwing over pharmacies and retail. They found they can get by with giving less support and having less people work the lines so that’s what they’re doing.
Keep in mind that the service lines also deal with customers who can’t distinguish a CPU from a modem from a monitor. Hence the basic troubleshooting in the beginning.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
Years back, I bought an Asus workstation motherboard with IPMI, the stupid BMC would reliably crash every 12 hours rendering the IPMI absolutely useless since it would hang upon login. I emailed support and told them that the BMC sucked and asked if they had an internal build I could try… They directed me to the downloads page and told me to download the UEFI firmware 🤦♂️ It took about SIX back and forth emails over the course of a week or so to get them to understand that I was talking about the BMC and not motherboard itself. Their tier one and two support had ZERO clue what a BMC or IPMI was. After begging them to forward me to an engineer who actually knew what I was talking about, they agreed and that engineer sent me an updated build…which still crashes every 12 hours 🤦♂️. In the end my solution was to set a cron job (I run Linux) to execute every 11 hours that logged into the IPMI from the running OS and did a cold reset on the BMC. That worked like a charm as long as Linux was running.
I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.
They don’t listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there’s probably at least three people who don’t have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they’re an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.
