Hacker News Reader

Comment by ecf | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

View on HN

Having worked in this kind of customer support, the issue isn't that technician doesn't understand DNS, but rather that the end user frequently hadn't even heard of it. It's a massive pain to troubleshoot something like that remotely when the caller is non-technical. Not impossible of course, but frustrating and requiring a great deal of patience on both ends.

I'm sure that's quite common, but so is the reverse. Almost universally, CSRs have no idea how the product works or have any technical knowledge whatsoever.

Also, if their ISP-provided router got owned by a virus and is now part of a botnet, how is the end user going to fix that? Many of those devices are locked down. It may not be a problem they can solve without manually configuring every device to use 8.8.8.8, so now every device needs to have a full flow for configuring its DNS servers. I'm personally in favor of every device having that option but it's also the case that the vast majority of people will not benefit from their TVs and lightbulbs having customizable DNS.

> Perhaps companies should hire more talented customer service representatives who have a technical background instead of continuing to make their products shittier.

Most people with technical skills would not settle for being customer service representatives when they can make far more money by putting those skills to work in technical roles.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com