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Long time reader, first time poster... I suppose this may fit in more with co-irkers, but the topic works here...
See, I'm working as a contractor for Company N, and my team is currently contracted to company P, which is a multi-national maker of generi-brand laptops.
P has decided that, rather than hiring their servers from company Z, they'd rather do their own hosting. Makes sense, of course; you're a computer company, I should hope you can run a server or two, yes?
But all their tech support is run out of China. Whereas all their sales types and non-technical people are, well, global. With large concentrations of them scattered about the US (and Canada, and Mexico, and Brazil, and the UK, and Sweden, and, etc. you get the idea)
So my team was hired to do support for some users in the area. P happened to have a largish office in the immediate vicinity, so they gave us a chunk of cube-space, set us up with phones, and had us migrate the local folks and then work doing remote support.
Now we're seeing a few things. First, people are just falling-over-themselves grateful to get an english-speaking voice. Second, we're like... tier infinity support. The buck stops here, or if not here, we can see it from our desks.
Second, the chinese helpdesk doesn't wanna work.
Any ticket, ever, gets passed to us. We were hired for the americas, we're doing global. We were hired for the migration, we're getting, say, 'screen is pink'.
And the best of it is the way these trouble tickets come in. The helpdesk gets a call, they go through their convoluted machinations, and eventually work out some excuse to dump it on us, and in the ticket (we're using Remedy) they describe the problem.
Some of my favorites:
* User push the buttom and then she met the hourglass.
* User unable to get the locations, so edit the .ini file, but fail [Added bonus! The user didn't touch the ini file]
* User tel number 863483632431 [some string of random digits that doesn't equal a working phone number in any country anywhere, ever.]
After getting told, sometimes repeatedly, that we support the americas, and that the newly-set-up euro-asia desk is handling that chunk of the globe, we started seeing a lot of tickets like this:
* US user unable to do the migrate, username [obviously chinese] tel number 86-XXXXXXXXXX [86 is China's own country code]
Priorities never get old, with tickets like this one:
* (urgent)User mail delayed, please call ASAP [for a european ticket submitted after all of europe has gone to bed, and in stark contrast to the next one]
*User unable to get email, start program causes crash, user will come to war room on Monday [when it's tuesday, meaning at least 6 days delay, and the user is completely unable to do anything with their computer except solitaire]
...and those are all really good....
But the one that truly takes the cake, is this one:
* User can't
...and yes, that was the entire ticket.
Still, with in-company support like this, my team looks like solid GOLD.
See, I'm working as a contractor for Company N, and my team is currently contracted to company P, which is a multi-national maker of generi-brand laptops.
P has decided that, rather than hiring their servers from company Z, they'd rather do their own hosting. Makes sense, of course; you're a computer company, I should hope you can run a server or two, yes?
But all their tech support is run out of China. Whereas all their sales types and non-technical people are, well, global. With large concentrations of them scattered about the US (and Canada, and Mexico, and Brazil, and the UK, and Sweden, and, etc. you get the idea)
So my team was hired to do support for some users in the area. P happened to have a largish office in the immediate vicinity, so they gave us a chunk of cube-space, set us up with phones, and had us migrate the local folks and then work doing remote support.
Now we're seeing a few things. First, people are just falling-over-themselves grateful to get an english-speaking voice. Second, we're like... tier infinity support. The buck stops here, or if not here, we can see it from our desks.
Second, the chinese helpdesk doesn't wanna work.
Any ticket, ever, gets passed to us. We were hired for the americas, we're doing global. We were hired for the migration, we're getting, say, 'screen is pink'.
And the best of it is the way these trouble tickets come in. The helpdesk gets a call, they go through their convoluted machinations, and eventually work out some excuse to dump it on us, and in the ticket (we're using Remedy) they describe the problem.
Some of my favorites:
* User push the buttom and then she met the hourglass.
* User unable to get the locations, so edit the .ini file, but fail [Added bonus! The user didn't touch the ini file]
* User tel number 863483632431 [some string of random digits that doesn't equal a working phone number in any country anywhere, ever.]
After getting told, sometimes repeatedly, that we support the americas, and that the newly-set-up euro-asia desk is handling that chunk of the globe, we started seeing a lot of tickets like this:
* US user unable to do the migrate, username [obviously chinese] tel number 86-XXXXXXXXXX [86 is China's own country code]
Priorities never get old, with tickets like this one:
* (urgent)User mail delayed, please call ASAP [for a european ticket submitted after all of europe has gone to bed, and in stark contrast to the next one]
*User unable to get email, start program causes crash, user will come to war room on Monday [when it's tuesday, meaning at least 6 days delay, and the user is completely unable to do anything with their computer except solitaire]
...and those are all really good....
But the one that truly takes the cake, is this one:
* User can't
...and yes, that was the entire ticket.
Still, with in-company support like this, my team looks like solid GOLD.
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