Knowing the Technical Support Options

This section describes the professional technical support options available to you, along with some information you need to know about them. Up to 70 percent of the technical support people seek is done via telephone, but the advice offered for getting the best out of your support time applies across the board, regardless of how you find your help.

Types of Support Services

The documentation accompanying your new PC or PC hardware should spell out the support options available to you, which can include

• Telephone support. The manufacturer should provide the number to call to get help for your product; this may be a toll-free number but isn’t always. You may have to pay a per-incident fee, typically through a credit card or by calling a special number that automatically bills your phone account for the service. Read the conditions carefully.

• Web-based support. You may be directed to reach the company’s support technicians by visiting the company’s web site. From there, you leave an e-mail using a Contact Us feature in a Customer Support area or post a message in a message board or newsgroup (see Chapter 15, “Finding Help Online”).

• Fax/e-mail support. These options allow you to communicate with the company via fax or through e-mail.

• On-site support. This is available only on a limited basis and on selected products; check your documentation carefully to see what restrictions or special charges may apply if a technician comes to your house. Most of the time, a company will do everything in its power to correct a problem before they send a technician out, so be prepared.

• Authorized service centers. This is usually available only for hardware (including whole PCs) under warranty, although such centers may also repair non-warranty items on other types and brands of devices.

Types of Support Professionals

In many cases, the first person to answer a support call may not be a PC technician or an expert in a particular product. You may find that the person on the other end of the line isn’t even physically located at the manufacturer’s company.

This varies from company to company. With very small companies, the person you speak to for technical support may also be the person who wrote the software or developed the idea for the product initially.

However, when you’re calling a manufacturer for support, you don’t have a lot of choices except to go through their prescribed support structure. And you rarely have any choice about who you speak to, but hopefully, the manufacturer has enough talented and experienced people to field their support calls.

What to Expect When You Call for Support

If you’re calling a free (you pay only for the cost of the call, and not even that if the manufacturer offers a toll-free number) telephone support line, expect to wait on hold for several minutes. Sometimes, this can stretch to 20 minutes or more, depending on many factors, including the time of day you call and the traffic into the support line at that time.

If, instead, you’re calling into a special support line where you’re paying per-incident fee or paying by the number of minutes you spend on the line, you can expect a fairly short wait. Often, your call will be picked up almost immediately because you’re paying for what are known as premium services.

Should your product’s manufacturer offer on-site technical services, you’re still going to have to troubleshoot over the phone before they’ll send a technician out to your house. Be sure it’s covered under your warranty, too, or you may be stuck paying a hefty price if it turns out the needed repair is not covered by that warranty.

If the warranty or product documentation doesn’t clearly spell out your obligations in terms of cost for technical support, make this your first question when you call for support the first time.

Outsourced and Tiered Technical Support

Many companies, to economize and to broaden the number of calls they can handle, hire outside companies to provide technical support for their products. Sometimes, such hired folks concentrate just on one product or brand of products. At other companies, your product may be just one of many brands and products they support. This can create even more variety in the type of person who may be answering your call.

Many companies operate their technical support on a tier system. Tier 1 is the initial contact between a customer and a technical support person, where basic questions are asked and essential troubleshooting is performed. The goal is to have most problems resolved at Tier 1 without demanding the time and expertise of the more experienced support staff.

When a problem defies the best efforts of Tier 1 support, a customer may get bumped up to Tier 2 support. At Tier 2, more experienced technicians may know a product far better than the Tier 1 technicians. The thorniest problems go to Tier 3 support, where the most senior technicians (and sometimes others) become involved in trying to rectify the problem.

A Cautionary Tale: “I Waited Forever on Hold, and Then They Rushed Me Off the Line”

I’ve listened to some incredibly bad canned music and prerecorded ads over the years waiting on hold for someone to pick up the support line at a software or hardware company. If you haven’t yet, you probably will.

Part of the problem is that technical support folks are often given an impossible number of calls to field in one day. They find themselves harassed by supervisors if they take longer than a predefined period of time (as low as two–three minutes) on a single call. When they’re under the gun to spend no more than two minutes with you, you may feel like you’re pulling teeth to get them to explain a complicated set of steps.

By presenting yourself as highly motivated to fix the problem in just one call and by keeping your frustration in check, you may be able to get them to spend the extra time now so that you won’t have to call again.

If they can’t spend a great deal of time resolving your problem, ask if they can send you a set of instructions via e-mail (providing your problem doesn’t prevent you from getting online to access it) or let you jot down a series of steps or suggestions so that you can try them later, when you’re off the phone.

Here’s a suggestion: If you find that a particular technical support representative was especially helpful, please ask him or her for the e-mail address of a supervisor. Then send a note letting the company know that this representative took the time to win your satisfaction. Getting this positive feedback keeps good representatives willing to go the extra distance to help because their bosses know they aren’t wasting precious time.

How to Improve Your Chances of Success

The following list is gleaned from talking with hundreds of technical support representatives and users to learn what helps them most in making that first call or contact most effective.

Have Information Ready  Wherever possible, know what you’re going to say before you call or write for assistance. Have a synopsis of your system and your current problem ready, along with any registration or product ID. When calling Microsoft for Windows help, for example, you’ll need to provide the product key for your Windows install CD or the label listed on the certificate stuck to your PC case.

The synopsis of your system might look like this:

I’m using a Dell Optiplex with a Celeron 500MHz processor and 128 MBRAM (upgraded from 64MB). I’ve been having problems with the video since I installed a new game called March Hare Madness. Ever since installing it, my desktop looks different; all the letters and windows look bigger and not as clear.

Prepare to Write  Have a pen and a piece of paper handy (or your PC journal) on which to jot down notes and suggestions that may be offered to you. You may receive an incident or tracking number for your problem that you’ll need if you have to call back again later.

Stay Calm  Don’t get nervous, and don’t lose your temper. Emotionalism doesn’t help much and in fact, can hamper your ability to hear and process important information.

Call From a Good Location  If you’re calling, use a telephone where you can sit at your PC; only use a wireless phone if it has very good reception from where you and your PC are located. Don’t try to call from a different room from the PC where you must run back and forth. Also, don’t call when you have distractions (kids, TV, other people vying for your attention) that may prevent you from giving your entire attention to the call.

If you’re having a technician come into your home or office, try to limit the distractions as well.

Tip 

Timing is important, too. Technical support lines are often busiest in the first two hours at the start of a workday, at lunchtime, in the last few hours of the workday, and during the early evening hours. Schedule a time to call that avoids these peak hours to reduce the time you wait on hold and to increase your chance of having the representative not be in a rush to get to the next caller.

Make Your Presentation Clear and Succinct  If calling or talking with a technician at your home or office, speak slowly and clearly so that the other person doesn’t miss important information and doesn’t have to ask you to repeat what you said.

Try to limit how long you speak before you let the representative confirm your information and limit the amount of extraneous information you provide. The representative will ask you if he or she has questions you haven’t yet answered.

I once found myself unable to stop a user from giving me a 20-minute monologue about all the PCs she’s ever owned, the prices she paid for every component, and the names of her exotic birds before I was able to get an answer to a simple question so we could proceed. (And I’m pretty experienced at getting information quickly.) After we were done and her problem was fixed, she complained that I had taken so long even though I was able to show her how to fix the issue in less than seven minutes after she finally let me speak.

Note 

Technical support representatives say that you can help them understand you better if you don’t eat, apologize, use a speaker phone or a cordless phone stretched to its geographical limits, or have conversations with kids and others while you’re on the line with them.

Ask for Follow-up  If you get suggestions for fixing your problem that you must perform after you’re off the phone with customer support or after the technician leaves, ask the person if there’s a way you can reach him or her again. Sometimes, a representative has a badge number or can provide an incident number that can help you be back in touch for follow-up discussion. Obviously, if you’re able to talk to the original person who helped you, you won’t have to explain the entire problem again because they’re already familiar with it.

When to Ask for Escalation  All too often, people get frustrated when they don’t feel like they’re being helped and do one of two things: hang up or angrily demand to speak with a supervisor.

Rather than hang up, ask the person you’re speaking with what other support options are available. For example, some hardware companies can recommend a qualified service professional in your area who specifically deals with that brand of product.

As for requesting to speak to a supervisor, this is a good technique to use when you feel you’re getting the run-around or you have a legitimate beef that only a supervisor can resolve like issues about warranty coverage, returns, and so on. However, this is a bad technique to use right off the bat before you’ve let a representative try to help you. You don’t want to bring out the big guns to tackle an ant or you might be out of ammunition when you really need it.

Look Over Your Notes After the Call  Stop for a moment and review your notes after you finish your call. If you’re like me, what you write in shorthand you may not be able to decipher easily later on. Make sure you can read what you wrote now while it’s fresh in your mind. Also make sure you took everything down. If not, now is the time to record it.

As soon as you can, try the recommended suggestions so you can use your current incident or tracking number again if needed. Such numbers usually only sit in a manufacturer’s computer for a few weeks to a few months before they are closed out.

A Cautionary Tale: The Blame Game

There is an old joke in the PC industry that goes like this: A hardware tech support line always tells the customer, “It’s a software problem” while the software support line always insists that, “No, it’s a hardware problem.” And when all else fails, just blame it on Microsoft or the operating system.

You don’t know how much I’d like to be able to tell you that is simply a joke and you won’t run into this yourself. But you very well may, because support lines do engage in this kind of behavior.

This is especially unfortunate because there are times when there is a legitimate issue where problems with hardware are indeed caused by software or the operating system, and vice versa, leaving many users scratching their heads.

The best way to avoid this is to keep your drivers and software updated and use only hardware and software that are compatible with your version of Windows, as you’ve read about in previous chapters of this book.

However, if you still find yourself caught between one company telling you it’s the second company’s problem and the second company making the same charges against the first, ask, “OK, how can I rule out whether your product or the other product is causing the problem?” Often, there may be a single procedure or a short series of tests that can give you this answer. Do your part by following through with such tests or suggested repairs to see if you can get more information or resolve the problem.