Jessa recently bought a new computer from HP, and, unfortunately, the graphics card was defective-on-arrival. After doing a fair amount of troubleshooting ourselves (and, truthfully, correctly diagnosing the problem), it was time to call up HP support to get the ball rolling on getting a replacement. Listening to Jessa talk to support reminded me why talking to tech support is never a fun proposition. At the core, I think, is that neither person on the call trusts that the other knows that they are doing.
As technical customers with years of training and job experience in technical troubleshooting, Jessa and I did a lot of legwork before we even called technical support. As such, our hope was to be able to start somewhere closer to what we had narrowed down. The early questions the tech asked, such as, “what have you tried so far?” seemed like we might, but the hours we spent afterward doing things like turning it off and on again, reinstalling software, reinstalling drivers, resetting to factory settings, and, finally, getting the computer into a state where it wouldn’t stay booted, made us lose trust in our tech. He asked what we had done, then did it all over again, and got nowhere closer to the problem (and, in fact, made it worse).
It wasn’t until the third support representative helped us access additional diagnostics (available from the boot menu through a hidden key-combination), listened to the description of the problem, and observed as we recreated it (multiple times) that we were able to trust him and start communicating again. From there, it took less than an hour, and they agreed to ship us a new graphics card – the thing ended up solving the problem.
On the other side though, it’s just as easy for me to understand the plight of our technical support representatives. I’ve had the conversation with my technical counterpart about a problem they swear was not on their end, when, in fact, it was. Having someone describe to you the steps they have taken is always going to be incomplete, how do you trust that they did it right?
As such, I suspect that technical support will always be a non-trivial problem. Additionally, I think we’ve probably reached a reasonable state – my guess is that the current system works for 99% of the calls they get. Really, how many households have a combined 20 years of of education, training, and job experience doing technical troubleshooting and are willing to do significant work ahead of time?