Tech Support Shortcuts

It happens more often than you'd like. Something you paid for stops working and you need help fixing it. It's under warranty or it's a subscription service so you decide to call Tech Support. You wade through menus, entering the odd piece of personal information, and finally get to a human being...in India, the Phillipines, or if you're really lucky, Utah.

It's at this point that most people's real frustration begins. See you probably didn't just have a problem and right away call tech support. You probably tried to fix it yourself. You tried 2 or 10 different ways to solve this problem. None of them worked so made the call.

It's irritating that the technology doesn't work. It's irritating that all the things you tried didn't fix it. The coup-de-gras of irritation comes now, when the tech support person most likely will have you repeat all the things you've already done. Since you don't want to, here are some ideas to get that CSR out of their script.

1. When they ask you what the problem is, you can run through a prepared list of the strategies you've taken. You don't have to be specific, your goal here is just to prove that you know more than them and use the techiest words you can with confidence. The only thing better than breaking them from their script is to get the level 2 or 3 but of course you can't just ask.

2. You can say you were just troubleshooting the problem on the phone for an hour and got cut off so you've tried all the simple things. You can say "Bob" was just transferring you to "level 2".

3. Did you know that when they put you on hold for a bit during the troubleshooting session, they're just doing their own little google search or IMing someone who has half a clue? It's at this point you know they've not met this problem before. That may mean they are inexperienced or it may mean this is a rare problem. In either case you want to get to someone else.

These tips would be wholly unnecesary if these scripts were just made public. If a company makes money selling support, then I can see why they'd want to run a call center full of level-1 people. On the other hand, if it's a cost center for them, they should just make the script or flowchart available on their website and pay for better level-2 people to create flowcharts and populate a good, search-indexed knowledge base.