Outsourcing
I’m on the phone for the last 10-minutes with Linksys support just trying to figure out if my (clearly) fried router is under warranty. The support guy (clearly an outsource job) is forcing me to do all these crazy tests he is pulling from his knowledge base when it’s clear as day the router is fried. With the hillbillies who used to do support, you could always just say, “Look, I’m a tech-savvy guy. I am 100% positive the thing is fried. Warranty — Yes or no?” Nine times out of ten they would chuckle and give you an RMA number right off the bad.
These outsourced support guys might was well be AIM bots for how useless they are in helping diagnose the problem, and how they just seem to take pre-programmed paths based on your response to the last pointless exercise. Not to mention the language barrier. Now I know firsthand how painful it must be for someone with no technical knowledge to have to get stuck on the phone, for sometime hours, going through useless drills in order to fix their problem. Do you think my dad would know typing “ipconfig” from the command prompt has absolutely nothing to do with a hardware failure on the router itself?
The big red DIAG light is glowing on the router when nothing’s connected to it. I did a hard reset. It does not take the Geek Squad to tell me the router is fried. Having me check the duplex setting on my Windows machine is NOT going to help, but I can’t seem to communicate this with the support guy (I am typing this as I chat with him).
Ok, I am done here. After he told me to go to the Start menu and type “CMD”, I politely said, “Thanks for the help but I am sure the thing is fried. If you are not going to tell me if it’s under warranty, I will just purchase another router, preferably for another company. Thanks again and have a nice day.”
I have to wonder how much corporations really save by outsourcing support. IMO the end results is a much, much worse experience. Keeping someone on the phone for longer than they should be must cost a lot more than being able to actually communicate with the person on the other end.