RE: AT&T Broadband

["John A. Tamplin" <jat () liveonthenet com>]

On Thu, 20 Dec 2001, Simon Higgs wrote:

> <rant>
> Here's my #1 help desk gripe. I call up and the person answering the phone 
> is totally incapable of opening a ticket, and totally incapable of passing 
> the information (or me if it's too technical for them to grep) to someone 
> who can do something with it. You name 'em - all the help desks have this 
> problem. Management want the statistics, and the help-desk want to close 
> tickets to show performance. The customer has the problem, it's their 
> problem, and the help desk is not going to take ownership or responsibility 
> for the problem other than making the customer go away and the ticket 
> closed. The help-desk is incapable of opening a ticket assigning 
> responsibility to the company ("oh, it's us... we goofed").
>
> Let me give you a real-world example. I call up with a problem (i.e. I 
> can't connect to a specific VPN gateway because it requires my IP address 
> to resolve forwards and backwards in DNS), and I know how to fix the 
> problem (i.e. "you're PTR records say that when they're supposed to say 
> this"), someone on the help desk telling me a router is down or a fibre is 
> cut gets me really annoyed, and really quickly, because it has absolutely 
> *NOTHING* to do with the problem at hand. The problem got solved by AT&T 
> buying MediaOne and renumbering, but their help desk was completely 
> incapable of assigning someone to fix their DNS.
>
> All I want to hear is that the information has been taken down, repeated 
> back to me, and a ticked number assigned. I will sleep peacefully knowing I 
> am in the capable hands of a professional (whether that is true or not, I 
> don't care). I don't want to open my control panel or change my 
> resolve.conf when the problem is not mine to fix.
> </rant>

I understand your point, but for every person who calls and who truly 
does know what they are talking about there are probably 3 or 4 who just 
think they do.  You don't want to pay big bucks for top technical people 
to answer the front-line calls, and those people hate when something gets 
passed to them anyway.  So you have minimally capable people answering 
the phone who are told not to transfer the call to the next level until 
they check all the idiot things that could be wrong (which probably gets 
a large percentage of their calls).

It would be nice however, if after one call when you prove that you do 
know what you are talking about you get a different number to call which 
bypasses the "is your computer plugged in" people.

John A. Tamplin                                 jat () jaet org
770/436-5387 HOME                               4116 Manson Ave
770/431-9459 FAX                                Smyrna, GA  30082-3723