Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Computers Customer support Customer support The title of the article I chose is “Get the Help You Need.” It is an article that I found in the latest issue of PC World. It is written by Jeff Bertolucci and is in the June 2001 issue. This article begins with a story about Virginia Gudgel, who is a Technical Support representative for an internet service provider. She tells how MCI Internet laid down some ground rules for handling customer support. These rules are supposed to get the customer off the phone in five minutes. Getting the customer off the phone to keep call volume down does not do the customer any good. This is an all too common story when calling technical support. Your PC, printer, or internet connection go bad, and you waste thirty minutes listening to Barry Manilow’s greatest hits, and once someone does answer, you get rushed off the phone by a tech who hasn’t solved your problem. There are even examples of extreme cases like people who have had to wait on hold for hours and speak to ten different people before getting anywhere. PC World ran a Reliability and Service survey over the past several years of approximately 10,000 people. The most significant change was in the number of customers who never reached a satisfactory solution to their problem. In 1998, 6.6 percent of home users said their problem was never resolved. By 2000, this figure reached 8.3 percent. Over the same time period, the proportion of home users who were very satisfied with the service they received went from 62 percent in 1998 to just 49 percent in 2000. The reason for all of this bad customer service is the high cost of quality service. A vendor spends anywhere from $10 to $15 to handle a typical tech support call. To the vendors, phone support is just a money pit. With all the competition in the PC industry and the low cost of purchasing a PC, vendors are trying to cut costs to stay competitive. The low wages and high stress level of being a PC support employee has created a shortage in people who can provide adequate tech support. The average salary of a tech support employee is $8.50 an hour. These jobs have been compared to a sweatshop. A good solution for the vendor is to provide web based chat between the customer and support rep. This costs half as much as phone support, at about $5 to $7 an incident, because a rep can handle multiple requests at once. Another great way for vendors to try and help the consumer fix their problem is to have online FAQ s and troubleshooting tips. This is the most cost effective way to help the customer at about $1 or less per incident. While web based support might save the PC companies money, it has been a disappointment to many users. The most costly form of technical support is on site service calls. Vendors will do anything to not have to dispatch the truck. A new type of technical support is the remote control technology that Dell, Gateway, IBM, and other manufacturers now use. This technology allows a technician to access your system over an internet connection and obtain information about your PC. In most cases it also lets support reps run diagnostic tests on a PC and download patches or update drivers that may solve a software problem. During this whole process, the user can chat with the technician. The bottom line with this is that some people will always prefer to talk and some people would rather just find their solution on the web. If the web is a more effective medium, more people will choose it. Customer service is a very important part of the computer industry. As a future employee of the IS/IT industry I know that I will need to call technical support to get help sometimes. Many companies need to improve their technical support and as of right now, this is not happening. I would rather wait on the phone twice as long and talk to an experienced technician who knows what they are talking about then be in the same place after hanging up the phone with someone who knows nothing. Bibliography: Word Count: 737
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