re: #689 Gus 802

Amazing no? My line has been screwed up since midnight. Third time in 3 weeks. Then I call up support and get some robot from India on the phone.

That’s not really an India thing. It’s a “Help Desk” thing.

My former employer’s corporate help(less) desk was outsourced to a third party. You basically interacted with 2-3 levels of them before you got to the actual IT (or other service group) that was responsible to fix the issue. They worked entirely from scripts since they generally had zero operational knowledge. (And in the evenings/weekends the service was further outsourced to a regional/national center.)

As part of my application support work I had to write some of the scripts they used. You had to write the installation/diagnosis as if a monkey was was reading it and doing it; e.g. assume they knew nothing and were incapable of making an informed decision.

And with that the routing of problem tickets still essentially boiled down to what “key word” they heard first since they often routed the ticket to a work bucket based on that. If the word “SAP” was in the email or mentioned in the phone call there was a 85-90% chance it would be routed to the SAP Support bucket regardless of what the actual problem was.

Outsourcing may save a company money. But in every case I’ve dealt with it there’s been a definite loss in level of service and ability to get a fast fix unless you’re willing to massively escalate the issue. (And when everyone starts making everything a Priority 1 issue the system reacts by starting to automatically downding everything to Priority 3…)

:p