[PLUG] sony warrany

[Karol Kulaga]

Alright, well, apparently the tech was full of bull umm... feathers. 
Spoke with a manager, confirmed that the tech was a 'tard. 
He barely spoke English, so I wasn't exactly surprised. 
Yeah, I know about the hole that is tech support. That said, Stream 
isn't that bad for most of their stuff. I worked there for a while 
and I spend 8 months out of one year in "training" 
That was cool - and the exception. 


-----Original Message-----
From: plug-admin at lists.pdxlinux.org [mailto:plug-admin at lists.pdxlinux.org]
On Behalf Of Chris Jantzen
Sent: Thursday, June 10, 2004 7:17 PM
To: plug at lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: Re: [PLUG] sony warrany

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 06:00:08PM -0700, Karol Kulaga wrote:
> God I hate damn tech support.

Here's how it actually works: Big company contracts out their tech
support to a company like Stream or Cyberrep. But they reward on the
basis of number of calls handled. So it is in Stream/Cyberrep's best
interest to handle as many calls as possible. So they train their
employees to meet a so-called "Average Handle Time" per call.[1] If you
miss your AHT, you're fired. Oddly, they still have a strong culture
of "you do a good job of helping people" (and humans want to do that
anyways) or you're fired.

It's *almost* worse than working at McDonald's for the poor people at
the bottom. Unfortunately, the environment drives some people to
develop "tricks" and "techniques" for ditching callers as fast as
possible. Most techs do try to be helpful, but the system actually
encourages them to abuse you.

[1] Actually, "train" is a strong word here. They don't actually give
their employees any skills to meet AHT -- they just throw the techs in
the deep end (often without even much of any practical training for
the product they're supposed to represent[2]) and assume the constant
flow of new bodies from turnover will keep the business running.

[2] It's not uncommon for a new hire to receive a week (or less) of
training. Even if they've never actually used computers before in
their life.

-- 
chris kb7rnl =->