Tech Support is Dead
Since the days of the mainframe, computer users have relied upon tech support organizations to help them to maintain productivity by keeping their hardware, operating systems, and applications working as designed.
The system which has worked for so long is now in jeopardy due to a lack of understanding of the real costs of downtime and lost productivity.
What are the causes of the death of tech support?
Outsourcing
Outsourcing is all the rave in tech support, due to one thing: cost containment.
Company A spends $1M a year on tech support. Company A decides to outsource tech support to Company B for $800k a year.
Company B takes that $800k, allocates $200k of it to profit and overhead, and spends the other $600k to provide tech support for Company A.
Company B then provides $600k/yr worth of tech support to company A. Due to its extensive experience in providing tech support, Company B is able to provide $800k worth of tech support to the users of Company A for this $600k/yr.
Company A now pays only $800k/yr for tech support, which represents a savings of $200k in hard dollars. Company A wins! Right? Not quite.
Let's look at the cost of downtime. When Company A was running its own tech support organization, it understood that a problem that took two hours to fix cost the company two hours of productivity.
Now that Company B is providing tech support, it separates the responsibility for reducing downtime from the responsibility for paying for downtime. Company B is responsible for reducing downtime, but Company A is responsible for paying for downtime.
How motivated is Company B to get those nasty problems solved quickly? After all, they aren't costing Company B any money. In fact, if the problems get bad enough, Company B might be able to go back to Company A for more money to handle the additional call volume....
Offshoring
Offshoring is outsourcing to workers in a foreign country.
With offshoring, you not only get to speak to someone who doesn't care about your problem, you get to speak to someone with whom you do not even share a common language.
I doubt that there is a single IT professional in the first world who has not had the experience of attempting to explain a complex technical issue over the telephone to a person whose command of the English language is limited to dialog from the limited selection of American television programming which socialist governments allow to be broadcast into their third-world countries.
Proponents of offshoring purport to be able to achieve a 30% cost reduction in tech support spending.
Users of offshore tech support realize that this cost reduction is achieved by convincing users to quit placing tech support calls.
Metrics
Metrics help us to achieve business goals by focusing on quantifiable and measurable items.
Unfortunately for the proponents of help desk metrics, tech support is a very human activity which does not adapt itself well to the use of metrics.
The most common metric on a tech support desk is call time. A shorter call time means faster call resolutions. Raises and bonuses are given for exceeding these metrics, and tech support people are terminated for failing to meet these metrics.
Let's take an example of two tech support people: Bob and Doug.
Alice calls into the tech support desk with a problem on her Windows PC. Bob answers the phone. Bob's first question is "Are you up to date with the latest Windows patches?" Alice responds that she is not. Bob then tells her to run Windows update and call back.
Bob's call time: 30 seconds.
Alice calls back to the tech support desk because running Windows Update had no effect on her issue. Doug answers the phone. Doug's first question is "How may I assist you?" Alice responds with an extensive description of her problem. Doug listens carefully and stays on the phone with Alice for 20 minutes while they work the issue to successful resolution.
Doug's call time: 20 minutes.
According to the most utilized metric, Bob is a much better tech support person than Doug! His call times are significantly shorter. Bob is able to handle many more calls per day than Doug is.
Bob gets a raise, a bonus, and a promotion. Doug gets a counseling session with his new manager, Bob.
Automated Support Systems
Automated Support Systems are those
unimaginably annoying and useless telephone systems which attempt to resolve your technical support issues without connecting you with an actual human.
Does this sound familiar? Press 1 if you have a hardware problem. Press 2 is you have a software problem.
Have you
ever found your specific problem listed in the automated system? I haven't. Technology is complex and constantly evolving. By the time problems are put into automated systems, they are usually fixed.
There is a worse thing happening here than the automated systems failing to resolve problems. Every minute that a user is on the phone with one of these machines, the user and the company are losing productive time.
To make matters worse, many organizations make it difficult to press 0 to bypass these automated systems. This lowers the direct cost of tech support, but raises the indirect costs due to lost productivity. Again we improve on what is easily measurable but irrelevant and ignore what is more difficult to measure but immensely more important to the organization.
The Solutions
Tech support from hardware and software vendors is becoming almost non-existent. Tech support from internal organizations is even further down the road to decline.
The solutions for IT users and IT professionals are to rely on tech support resources available on the world wide web.
The Tech FAQ and other tech support web sites are zero-cost resources for IT professionals and end users to resolve their own technical issues.
Every IT professional I know now utilizes Google as their first choice for tech support. Google has no call queues or hold times, and you can filter the results to be English-only.
This is not the optimal solution for maximizing business value from IT, however it is the state of the IT industry in 2005.
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