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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

If you're talking to front line support, you are talking to a finite state machine. Getting mad at the finite state machine because a transition was not written in it will not get you better customer service. Just inspect the finite state machine looking for the transition to escalation, and provide it exactly the input needed to achieve escalation. (Edited to add: plus such pleasantries as are necessary and proper to polite society.)

(I only know what a FSM is because I was one for two years.)

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I was also a frontline tech for some years, for Verizon DSL. These are all things I was asked by other geeks that I couldn't do:

* Help you configure an email client that wasn't Outlook. (I could give the servers/ports/config info, but I couldn't help you figure out where to put them.)

* Connect you directly to a higher-tier support person. At least at the time, if I tried, you'd be immediately redirected back to the front-line queue once the higher-up realized you hadn't done our troubleshooting.

* Talk to Real Network Engineers without a serious wait time. You think we're in the same building, let alone state as them? The hold times were always horrible to get to talk to them.

* Troubleshoot outside the script. Most of the guys we had were barely-trained phone jockeys, and the script was set up for them. I could deviate from the script as it was written, but I couldn't troubleshoot anything that wasn't somewhere on the list anyway.

* No shit, some geek somewhere lost the ability to resolve DNS. First words out of their mouth: "Can you reboot your DNS servers?" I am not rightly able to comprehend the confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. (My answer was, verbatim: "Of course not. I'm not in the same building as them, I wouldn't have permission if I were, and they're working fine for our other customers.")

Helpful hint: if the call times went over 12 minutes (this varies by call center and company), there will be folks prodding you to "resolve the call" so the call center had lower average call time stats.

Quickest route to help: Just answer questions and do what they ask quickly. "Have you rebooted." Yes. "Have you power-cycled the modem?" Yes. Sometimes they'll ask you to do it, on the phone, for documentation purposes. Either do it or lie. The quicker you get to the end of the end of the script, the quicker you get an escalation.

>> Quickest route to help: Just answer questions and do what they ask quickly... Either do it or lie.

That's exactly what I do when I know it's not my stuff. Just get me to someone who knows what's going on.

"Is your computer connected directly to the modem?" Yes, sure, whatever. Of course it's actually not because I know my router isn't the problem. It's almost always their network. I'm almost always one of the first to report it so it's not declared an outage yet. I learned it's declared an outage when enough customers ask for a technician to come out.

The last time I actually listened and believed that it was my equipment, they had me get a new cable modem. Wasted an afternoon going to swap out my modem at their office only to come home and find an outage had finally been declared.

Edit: longer rant

    > "Is your computer connected directly to the modem?"
    > Yes, sure, whatever. Of course it's actually not
    > because I know my router isn't the problem.

Be careful with this one. I know I said to lie, but lie only if you're certain, because you've tested yourself already. These places have central ticketing systems, and if the history of your calls indicates that you're telling us you've done things and you haven't, you'll have a hell of a time getting escalated unless you do everything asked of you.

Fun fact: I had plenty of calls where the router was obviously not the problem. But I had plenty where the router may have been an issue, and if you refuse so many times to remove it, we were allowed to "disconnect the call due to unproductivity" -- hang up after a short statement. Just take the extra few minutes to plug a machine straight in and check.

I got a high score in this game once, calling Dell tech support to get a hard drive replacement. I had of course done all the troubleshooting in advance, so when the agent answered I said "Hi, my hard drive is having trouble, I've done this, and I've done that, ..." basically fast-forwarding through the script that I knew must exist. And I must have done it right because his response was "Uh...OK...looks like you have a bad hard drive, we'll ship a replacement right away." Yes!

I had a similar experience.

There are little code numbers on some of the Dell troubleshooting self-help pages. When you call in, you can mention you've already tried doing XYZ and list of the code numbers. The guy on the other end of the line said, "I've never had anyone so prepared before. I'll send out a replacement laptop screen right away."

I was a contractor for the phone support group in a big mail-order PC vendor years ago. More than half the hardware that was swapped out like this was no-defect-found (NDF) after being tested, for example it was a Windows problem rather than a drive problem. For a while some vendors were recycling that NDF used hardware into new equipment but I think there was a lawsuit against Dell about it.

With the cheap hardware nowadays they don't even bother to ask you to send the old stuff back. Call in complaining about a mouse or keyboard problem and they'll just mail you a new one.

> No shit, some geek somewhere lost the ability to resolve DNS. First words out of their mouth: "Can you reboot your DNS servers?"

Please don't call that kind of people "geeks".

The major challenge, of course, is when the FSM is improperly programmed. I recently ran into this situation when installing a new 1xEVDO USB dongle on my laptop. It was one of the new devices that had the OS X and Windows Drivers built right in. It was visibly advertised as "No Driver Disk Required!". When I attempted to get it working on my laptop, it was recognized, device IDs and everything, lit up its LEDs properly, but refused to get an IP address.

My Call with Tech Support at Sprint went something along the lines of the following:

   Me: Hi, my 1xEVDO USB Dongle isn't connecting.
   Tech: Have you inserted the Driver Disk?
   Me: No, this is one of your new dongles.  No Disk.
   Tech: You need to insert the Driver Disk before we
         can proceed.  
   Me: No, really - can you just google this device 
       you sell?  It's clearly identified as having
       NO driver disk.  
   Tech: I can't proceed until you install the driver 
         disk.
   Me: Can you please escalate to your manager?
   Tech: I can only escalate after we have completed
         some initial troubleshooting.  Can you please
         insert the driver disk?

You may think I'm engaging in hyperbole. I'm not. If anything, it was even worse than the above. I think at one point I started reading, verbatim, the box description where it made it abundantly clear that there was not, and could not, be a driver disk.

Attempting to call back into the pool didn't get me any further. I gave up, called back a week later, and they had modified their instructions and we were able to proceed, and remedy a relatively simply account configuration issue on their side.

And don't even get me started on the time I was shipped another CMDA device with a HEX ESN printed on it, and the tech refused to continue until I provided them with a decimal one. How is it that I, the customer, have to in real time figure out how to convert a HEX ESN that was shipped with the box into a decimal ESN that they can enter into their system?

At the end of the day, though, I doubt that anyone really choses their Wireless provider based on the level of technical support they get - it's usually on stuff like coverage, cost, quality, so it probably makes sense to invest in those areas rather than enhancing their tech support teams.

Personally, I know a lot of people who stick with T-Mobile for the customer service. They actually dread the prospect of switching, even though they pay roughly the same as anyone else and the phone offerings are generally worse. T-Mobile is at enough of a disadvantage in other areas that I have to believe their customer loyalty is what's keeping them afloat.

This is why they have binding contracts. You're already in with them for a while. Then if everything is working why would you go through it again by going with another carrier at the end of the contract?

Speakeasy is definitely not easy on the prices, but they've never once put me through any of that crap. I've been able to cut straight to the chase and get some BERT tests done, which usually reveal problems with one of the repeaters. They actually helped me figure out the wiring on my NID to make sure everything there was ok.

And I blame the internet, but I actually expanded the acronym "FSM" incorrectly and was horribly confused until I realized that you meant finite state machine.

But I fully agree with your message about troubleshooting scripts: you just have to learn to path through them. I'm pretty good at navigating them myself, enough so that after Grandma had spent hours on the phone arguing with someone, I went back and had the right guy doing what we wanted in just a few minutes.

one frontline speakeasy rep helped me figure out that I had configured my iptables on linux incorrectly and what I needed to do to fix them. they won a customer-for-life, even though a) they are much more expensive than the alternatives and b) I haven't needed much tech support since then.

I have to enthusiastically agree. Speakeasy's support has been amazing. I fear it will decline with all the times the company has changed hands. Always straight to the point after telling them what I've already done. And I've paid the insane price of $60/mo for 1.5 Mb down for quite some time pretty must solely based on their support.

But I have to say, I'm looking at switching to faster and cheaper--I just can't imagine that this support will last since they've recently gotten bought again.

That's what I thought after the last buyout, too, given that I'm also paying really high prices (more than you are for a slower connection, even). I figure I'll at least wait until I actually start getting bad support, though, before leaving. I probably would have torn my hair out trying to solve these repeater issues with any other company.

If these other companies had any clue (and they don't), they'd train their staff to just go ahead and escalate the call to someone high enough that they don't have a script if the caller sounds like some kind of geek.

I too stayed with Speakeasy for years solely because of their high quality tech support. Since switching to Comcast, all of my tech support have been pretty much like the AT&T transcript in the linked article.

Well said. My wife and I usually say to each other "its a machine with a human interface" when we get these.

I'm so going to say "honey its for you, it's a finite state machine" next time around.

What's the easiest path? Does simply asking for a supervisor usually do the trick, or is there a secret trick?

It depends on the company. Here, the agent is practically begging him to call the right people. That is the forward path. He should have done so.

If you're getting the run around, asking for escalation usually works. If not, ask in so many words what information you could provide which would require someone else to evaluate, then repeat that exactly. You can also do social engineering in a good way -- I prefer paper for issues which are not time sensitive. Paper to the CEO's office or VP of CS is the way to resolve most bank issues, for example.

Another favorite trick is calling Investor Relations. (I am an investor in AT&T. I own probably eight tenths of a share in an index fund. That is enough to call IR with the expectation of favorable treatment.)

Love it, when I did tech support I would always get in trouble for my customer appreciation letters usually involving the customer being happy that I did something that I wasn't allowed to. I eventually learned to tell customers not to write letters of appreciation as I feared it would lead to my termination.

Also, I was frequently in trouble for letting my average handle time fall below average, what I mean by this was that my AHT was 4 minutes instead of 6. Largely because I didn't waste the customers time doing things I knew they didn't need to.

It turned out that Berkshire Hathaway owned a > 5% stake in the company, a good friend of mine who worked there learned of this from reading the stock info on Yahoo. He actually wrote Warren Buffet and explained the insanities, a couple weeks later he was taken into a supervisors office and asked politely not to write letters to company shareholders. Oddly enough he now works in IR.

A few weeks after that the policy regarding reprimanding employees for below average AHTs was also rescinded.

This guy does not pass the Turing test.

If he's a FSM that explains a lot.

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