91–100 of 107 posts
Clever headline. Almost makes you think the NYTimes is telling the truth. But the places I've worked, the desire was always to resolve the phone calls one and done. Get the answer, get them resolved so they don't have to call back. The conspiracy theory the NYT is cooking up is clickbait.
Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers had no idea what they were doing b…
> For example Comcast has on demand, but once you watch a show you have to literally go back and search for the TV show name again before you can watch the next episode. Netflix and HBO are similarly terrible. There's no way for me to click on an actor's name and see all the films he's been in, nor navigate and see a studio's corpus. This sort of thing should be table stakes, but for some reason it's not.
Wow. I forgot you used to be able to do this in Netflix. Back in try days when they were slinging DVDs. This also worked on the Apple TV. But I. Don't have an ATV so I'm not able to verify its still that way.
I'm using Netflix on a PS3. It's pretty but functionally useless.
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Microsoft still does though it hasn't been $195 in quite some time. The offering you're thinking of is called Professional Pay-Per-Incident (instead of Premier). Current price is $499 though you're guaranteed to spend virtually the entirety of your incident on the phone with an outsourcer in India. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/offerprophone
Most of the Premier engineers are in India as well. If they're outsourced, they are a very good outsourcer. I have had many good experiences with them.
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My guess is that the general audience / user base simply doesn't care. It's similar to the experience I had when I had to look for a replacement for rdio, which was closing down last year. I was shocked to learn how inferior and lacking all other services were - yet rdio was the one that had to close shop. One of the most obvious issues is the fact that you can't filter/browse releases by label on any service but rdi…
On Spotify you can search for labels like this: label:Stax
Clever headline. Almost makes you think the NYTimes is telling the truth. But the places I've worked, the desire was always to resolve the phone calls one and done. Get the answer, get them resolved so they don't have to call back. The conspiracy theory the NYT is cooking up is clickbait.
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Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies used. Some of the smaller companies paid on per a call resolution basis. The other's just had large contracts for us to help them no matter how many calls we got. It was a major problem when customers called in for simple questions that were outside of what we…
> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)
I looked up the javascript/JQUERY in the docs and hacked together a front end that took notes off a checklist that then generated a note that users could put into the ticketing system.
To clarify what was happening. They had 2 apps that were separate. One was the one that allowed us to log into their modems etc. This is where we wrote the notes for the client. It was just a text field that we could write what we did on the ticket. That was all. Most people didn't write good notes, so the company got tired of that and developed a second app. Which was basically a html form with check boxes that you could work through. At the end of the work flow there was a button which generated text based on what you checked off. "Answered customer call about MODEM SUPPORT. Customer claims INTERNET NOT WORKING."
Basically something like that. We then copied the text it generated and pasted it into the other software which was on their account. So when I say it took them 4 months to develop the call flow and note taking app. I literally mean 12 call flows with about 4-6 check boxes that generate text to copy and paste into the other one.
The issue is they had the call flow you want to go through on the top, say MODEM DEAD or something. After you took in the customers information in those fields: name, phone number, company, problem, etc. If the customer was leading you down the wrong path, and it was actually internet being slow not modem dead(which happened all the time). Then you could have to change call flows by selecting the right one from a drop down box. What happened then is it cleared the entire form of all the information you had placed in it. Their name, number, all your previous steps everything.
So all I did was hack together a duplicate version of this that when you changed call flows it kept your notes and said ---> changed call flows to ---> and then let you paste all that information, so if the call was 10 minutes because of this, it was noted. So am I saying I am an awesome hacker, hell no, but it isn't hard to make check boxes on a form print out words to copy and paste, why did it take them that long to do it. When I first started there they told me they had just started working on it in my training.
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> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)
He said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this. There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on. A prototype is great but the…
It's worse when you have the exact problem laid out and the customer support guy knows less about the product than you do. Two years ago, I talked to the Dell Customer Support about my failing hard drive and showed him the tests I ran to verify it. He: What do you mean by failing hard drive? Is it not booting? I showed him bad sectors in my hard drive. He: Is the problem solved? I: No! You have done literally nothing…
The rep kept trying to get me to reinstall the OS since "if that's the problem, they'd have to charge me for it". Never mind that the installer wouldn't run... After about 15 minutes of this back and forth with him trying to prove that nothing was wrong and me showing the SMART status, he finally went in back and asked someone who told him to take it in.
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I subscribe to netflix once a year and binge watch all my favorite shows during the holidays. I tried staying subscribed to them, but their UI is so bad I never know what is new and what isn't. Why can't they have a list of newly added shows that isn't a huge picture. I don't enjoy horizontal scrolling.
Instantwatcher.com is your answer, with direct links to watch on netflix.
Coming from a tech support background. I used to be a top performer at a support company and set most of the records for call times etc. I was hated by most of my peers, and many of my supervisors because I set numbers to low for most of the other teams and they were under preforming. I am not saying this to brag but to state how awful most support workers are. Most of my co-workers had no idea what they were doing b…
I found that the quicker I answered questions the more questions I received. A kind of Jevons Paradox for tech support? :)