Computer hardware and software is not self-healing. No matter how intuitive the product is supposed to be, sooner or later a user needs to call technical support to get a question answered.
Silicon Prairie thought it would be instructive to learn how long it takes to get useful support via the technical support phone lines. We’ve all heard horror stories about the person who was disconnected after being on hold for an hour. Therefore, we set out to investigate just how efficient these phone support lines are.
We called various technical support phone lines during normal business hours and asked a similar question to each technical support representative.
Our goal was to investigate three issues:
-How long it takes to speak to a real person, as opposed to voice mail or a recording
-How many people we need to speak with before we get to the person who can answer our question
-How long it takes to contact the “right” person who can answer our question
Here are the results, all from calls conducted during the first week of August 1998. We called each company once, at approximately the same time of day.(11 a.m. CST)
Microsoft. The first person spoke to us after 1 minute and 58 seconds. He requested all our registration information (even though we had already registered with Microsoft’s Web site) and sent us to an engineer who was able to answer the question. Total time before we reached the right person was 10 minutes and 32 seconds.
Gateway. The first person spoke to us after 3 minutes and 41 seconds and told us we had to hang-up and call a different number. We did and received a busy signal 16 times before we got through. After 3 minutes and 16 seconds, we were connected to someone who put us in a “queue” for another 13 minutes and 8 seconds. The person who picked-up at this point was able to solve our problem. Total time before we reached the right person was 27 minutes and 23 seconds.
NetObjects. The first person spoke to us after 2 minutes and 18 seconds. He took our registration information (again, we had submitted this information previously via the Web site) and sent us to an engineer, who picked-up after 17 seconds. Total time before we reached the right person was 5 minutes and 7 seconds.
Allaire. The first person spoke to us after 4 minutes and 11 seconds. This was the technical support representative we needed to speak with. However, she said she would check on our question and answer it via e-mail. More than three weeks later, we have not yet received any response.
Caveats
We acknowledge that one call is not a statistically significant, scientific survey. Rather, this experiment gives an average computer user a sense of how major computer companies handle technical support.
To put these results into perspective, we wanted to compare these results with those of customer service lines in other industries. We called telephone, cable and gas companies in the Boston area to see how long it would take to get a question answered in those respective fields. Here’s what happened:
Telephone. After pressing many option buttons on our phone, the first customer service representative spoke to us after 8 minutes and 42 seconds. That person connected us to another representative who said that the person who could help us wasn’t there and would call us back. After three weeks, we have not heard back from the telephone company.
Cable. We spoke to a customer service representative after 2 minutes and 23 seconds. She connected us to a customer service queue that turned into a busy signal and we were eventually disconnected. This happened three more times, even though we told the original operator what happened previously. We finally gave up.
Gas. We never spoke to a customer service representative. We were instructed to press a particular button and when we did, we were disconnected. This happened 14 times over 30 minutes before we gave up.
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What are your experiences with technical support? Let us know.
