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On 12/17/2011 11:55 AM, MBR wrote: > After Dell fired their U.S. support people and outsourced the function > to India, I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation > with their support people. During my calls to them over the first few > years after they did that, I naively assumed the support people were > technically knowledgeable, and I continued trying to engage them in > technical conversation to solve my problem, but that was always > impossible. My experience with Dell was very spotty since I have no Dell stuff, and it was only for a friend or client. "I found it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with their support people" This is the key. You want to be able to have an intelligent conversation with a support person and to be able to understand. I had a few times to contact Compaq support (before HP). I found back then that the Indians were much more technically competent that the non-Indians. On a single issue, I had a couple of US people who gave me the wrong answers, where when I spoke to an Indian, he gave me exactly what fixed the problem. First, many people have trouble with some foreign accents, and I believe that this was one of the major Dell user complaints. Whoever you speak to should be reasonably articulate and easily understandable. Second, the person should be knowledgeable enough to either identify and solve your problem or escalate it to someone who does. My recent conversation with the RCN customer service person was that he told me: 1. While I paid for a "static IP", since you had only a single static IP it was only a sticky and he refused to budge. 2. We were paying for an 8-IP subnet not a single static. The issue comes under that category of intelligent conversation. I had the bill in my hand. What they failed to do was to move the subnet over from the 20/2 DOCSIS 1 modem to the DOCSIS 3 modem as was required by the contract. My problem is I had a SonicWall that could only be programmed by our IT department. The only thing I could have done was to do a factory reset, get it on some working network, and then let IT reprogram it. I told him that, but I didn't tell him that I had 2 other networks in the same computer room. In any case they finally fixed the problem after I yelled and screamed. The bottom line is it does not matter where the support people are. It is a matter of training. -- Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> Boston Linux and Unix PGP key id:3BC1EB90 PGP Key fingerprint: 49E2 C52A FC5A A31F 8D66 C0AF 7CEA 30FC 3BC1 EB90
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