Comcast, Firefox, google, youtube

[Matt Shields]

You're right, level 1 tech is for weeding out the people who claim to
know what they're talking about, and 99.99999% of the time most people
fall into this situation.  And when my problem has been a "my service is
down" I've opened a ticket and left it at that till it's fixed.  And I
have been in their situation (a long time ago), but I'm not trying to be
their friend, I'm trying to get a problem fixed.

For the rare cases where it has been a system wide problem, I have
forced my way to the right people to get the problem fixed faster.
There's no sense explaining routing or other type of problems to a level
1 tech that's going to try to walk me through some flowchart script
which doesn't apply to the problem I've called about.  Then having them
open a ticket and wait for 100's or 1000's of other complaints to come
in for the network or system engineers to finally look into the problem.

Think of it this way, if there is a system wide problem I can do two
things.  Either sit around and do nothing because it's not my company so
why should I help them.  Or offer to help.  And when I have I've been
thanked for me taking my time.

Back in the day when I was at a local ISP (when most of the ISPs were
local), we knew every other network and system admin in our area and
called them when we knew of internet wide or Tier1 ISP wide problems and
they called us.  Even though we were competitors.  Everyone helped each
other out.

Matthew Shields
Sr Systems Administrator
NameMedia, Inc.
(P) 781-839-2828
mshields at namemedia.com
http://www.namemedia.com
 

-----Original Message-----
From: Matthew Valites [mailto:matthew.valites at webex.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2006 3:26 PM
To: Matt Shields
Cc: markw at mohawksoft.com; Jeff Kinz; discuss at blu.org
Subject: Re: Comcast, Firefox, google, youtube


> Maybe it's just my attitude, but I won't put up with they're attitudes
> or their policies of dealing with Tech Level 1.  In cases like this
> where they are having a network wide problem and I'm trying to help
them
> I've always been escalated to the network team.  I also don't waste my
> time trying to explain to them what I've found out, I make it very
clear
> that they are wasting everyone's time by not putting me in touch with
> who they need to.
>   
Have you thought about from the tech's level?  Think of how many people 
claim to know what they're talking about and ask to get escalated to the

next level of support.  Most of the first tier support procedures are so

simple that if you actually follow them, it won't take more than 5 
minutes. 

I've had support escalate problems to me because the client claimed they

knew what they were talking about when in fact they didn't, and our 
first or second line of support could have solved their problem easily.

This actually just happened earlier this week.

Tech Level 1 isn't meant to do anything more than filter out 95% of the 
problems that people encounter. 

~Matt

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