Clueless IT support staff
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| Author | Content |
|---|---|
| Sander_Marechal Nov 10, 2008 7:31 AM EDT |
Looks like yet another company that hopes to save money by putting clueless people on the helldesk. Did you get his name? Make sure you mention it to the supervisor. I really can't understand why companies keep putting clueless people on the helldesk. They all seem to focus on hourly wage but totally ignore the fact that a skilled worker can have a productivity that's an order of magnitude higher. Hire someone who can resolve 98% of incoming calls immediately. Yeah, he will demand a nop-notch salary (especially because tech experts find helldesk a boring job) but you get much more bang for your buck. I am very pleased that my own ISP (XS4All in The Netherlands) seems to be one of the few companies that understand this. When you phone their helpdesk you won't get a clueless underpaid wageslave that got his MSCE with a packet of cereal, but a real geek. As a result, the service is great. In the past 7 years they have won the award for best helpdesk 6 times. |
| SamShazaam Nov 10, 2008 9:44 AM EDT |
The help desk is a difficult, despised, and punishing way to make a living. Most management feels that it is a useless expenditure of capital which would not be needed in a better world. They believe this in spite of whatever the advertising department may say.
Most other IT people look down upon the help desk as the worst of the breed. A position to be passed through while a person is just starting in the business. Customers, who can be excused for being clueless, also know that they can end your career with a phone call to a supervisor. Customers will often behave irrationally and without regard to consequences. |
| tuxchick Nov 10, 2008 12:22 PM EDT |
Quoting: Customers will often behave irrationally and without regard to consequences. What's irrational about raising heck with an incompetent helpdesk person? whether the alleged helpdesk tech is by nature a twit, or has received special training in being a twit, is not the customer's problem. |
| devnet Nov 10, 2008 12:30 PM EDT |
Whenever I have a helpdesk call, I personify myself with language. When the person calling becomes aware that I am a real person, with real problems, similar to themselves...and that I am also an employee at the same company with the same worries/problems as them, they relax. I find it refreshing to be able to change perceptions like this with just some careful language and some extra attention/care. |
| DrDubious Nov 10, 2008 12:58 PM EDT |
"What's irrational about raising heck with an incompetent helpdesk person?" Nothing - but the problem is the end-user being competent enough themselves to recognize when this is the situation and when they themselves are the problem. MOST customers of ISP's and related companies really don't understand what they're dealing with, and many are prone to throw tantrums when they don't like the answer the tech has given. (That said, yes, I've been on the "clueless tech driving me nuts" end of the situation too. Our moderately-competent ISP got bought out by a "lowest-common-denominator" outfit with the most maddeningly clueless people answering the phones...) |
| tuxchick Nov 10, 2008 1:04 PM EDT |
Did anyone read the article? Tracyanne is certainly not clueless, and here in this glorious year of 2008 any ISP helpdesk person who can't run simple tests to determine if a problem lies with their servers or on the client side is a helpdesk person who should be in a different job. Something simple and pleasant, and that does not tax the mind unduly. And any company still parroting "Oh you're not running windows so it's your fault" doesn't deserve to be in business. |
| tracyanne Nov 10, 2008 3:47 PM EDT |
@SamShazaam I have every sympathy for the help desk person who does their job properly. I used to manage the help desk for a large New Zealand company, my first job in IT 30 years ago was as a help desk person. It doesn't take all that much effort, if one has any interest in furthering one's career, to learn a little about the technology one is dealing with, and it also actually increases the respect of one's peers and managers if one has a reputation for asking questions when confronted with a situation one has obviously never had to deal with before. |
| dthacker Nov 10, 2008 6:18 PM EDT |
Tracyanne,
My commiserations. Thanks for sharing your cautionary tale. When you couldn't get a satisfactory answer, was escalation an option? tuxchick, There's raising heck, and then there's abuse. I've learned over years of support calls that most of the time my attitude towards the help desk person will be reflected back at me. When I'm courteous and the help desk person is not, it's time to escalate. Having said that, I completely agree that advertising a linux option and not supporting it deserves to be out of business. I should run hosting business. It sounds like mere competence could be quite lucrative. Dave |
| Sander_Marechal Nov 10, 2008 7:29 PM EDT |
Quoting:It sounds like mere competence could be quite lucrative. It can, but spreading the word and getting clients is hard. Most people look for the cheapest price and will only start to look at quality after they have been burned 3-5 times. |
| tracyanne Nov 10, 2008 8:08 PM EDT |
@dthacker, yes I did, I got hold of a supervisor yesterday. @TC, The Supervisor is claiming that it was a simple matter of the domain name/IP address not propagating out to the names servers. I could be wrong, but I find it somewhat strange that it took over 48 hours for this to happen for adailypenguin.com, while feral-penguin.com.au (and indeed feral-penguin.com), which was configured on a server within, allegedly, minutes of adailypenguin.com, was almost immediately available, on Friday, and appears to have propagated to the name servers within a few minutes of the server being configured. |
| techiem2 Nov 10, 2008 8:15 PM EDT |
I've seen DNS change propagation take 2 or 3 days to fully propagate and the change take maybe a day for another domain at the same registrar. I believe providers/ISPs generally say up to 72 hours. |
| tracyanne Nov 10, 2008 9:51 PM EDT |
The servers, these domains are configured on, use the same name server, and were commissioned, so I'm told, within minutes of each other. Not that, any of that excuses the help desk person, for simply brushing of my help desk request as my problem, because I'm using a system he knows nothing about. |
| techiem2 Nov 10, 2008 10:06 PM EDT |
Weirdness... And yeah, no excuse for help desk brushing off a request just because you aren't using the "approved" (i.e. what they have a script for) OS. |
| jdixon Nov 10, 2008 10:10 PM EDT |
> I've seen DNS change propagation take 2 or 3 days to fully propagate and the change take maybe a day for another domain at the same registrar. Possible, but unlikely within the same ISP. It should take a few hours at most. It sounds like that provider had one or more nameservers misconfigured for it to take that long. In any case, pointing to the domain servers in question (where the changes were made) would have eliminated the propagation problem. I suspect Tracyanne tried that before calling, though I obviously I can't be certain. > Not that, any of that excuses the help desk person, for simply brushing of my help desk request as my problem, because I'm using a system he knows nothing about. Especially since he was almost certainly running a "supported system" and could have checked with his equipment. How long would it taken him to have reconfigured his copy of outlook express (or whatever) and verify that it didn't work. Apparently longer than he wanted to spend. |
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