Everyone knows about telephone support. You call a number and a person answers; you tell them your problem and they read a script that tells you the steps you must take to produce a solution.
But what happens when even that support stops working?
A fellow computer repair guy near me has had just such a problem. He was building a web site with Microsoft's new Office "Live" web creation tools when he encountered a "bug" (In software terms, a "bug" is an undocumented and usually unwelcome feature built, or left, in the software by the manufacturer.)
The problem was that when he added a link to a traffic analysis website, Microsoft's new web tools locked him out of his new website. And, as it turned out, locked him out of every Microsoft website requiring a user name and password(like Hotmail, etc.)
So, naturally, he called Microsofts support hotline, and gets a person who only has passing familiarity with English and then attempts to log in from the support desk. Because the support rep did not speak English well, they were not able to accurately understand my colleague's name, which is not easy to spell for fluent English speakers, they mis-spelled it often enough that the log-in failed and locked this customer out of his own website for 24 hours.
This went on and on for five days, because each support rep was a merely a clerk reading some words off of a screen, and so could not "support" Microsoft's product when it went wrong.
So, technical or any other type of telephone assistance that does not and cannot provide the "assistance" that is needed is not good. Unfortunately, more than ninety percent of all telephone support centers are staffed by people who have never been trained on the item they are supposed to be assisting with; in some case, the support people have never used or even seen the item they are hired to assist with.
What is the point of that?
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