Fran's Blog

It really is amazing what a difference to a service technical support makes and whether the team actually know what they are talking about. Recently I have had to contact 2 company support teams. One for Netgear, the other for Be Internet.

I contacted Netgear because my router was playing up. I wrote full details of the issue and what I had tried to fix the issue. A day later I received a message to reset my router etc. in fact, I was run through exactly what I had said I had done over about 7 messages before they misdiagnosed the issue and blamed it on my homeplug adaptors which the router wasn’t finding. In this case, they didn’t even try to read my initial message, but took me through the script they had and came up with an issue so wrong, as a normal user, I would have ended up with the router still faulty and sending back a second set of homeplug adaptors. I ended up having to suggest it was the router and they replaced it, as it was still under warranty (the adaptors were not) I received a new one, and it’s all good now.

Fast forward to this weekend. My broadband went down. A rare issue for my provider Be. I had forgotten I’d requested a change in my service requiring a different setup on my router. I called, waited a short time, then I got a chirpy Czech (I think) man who had read my message that my router wouldn’t get an IP address. I confessed that I did not have the original Be router, but one made by Netgear. He replied “we don’t support that router, but I know it well, so I can guide you”. See the difference? He went off piste! He actually surfs the internet and uses the products! In about 2 minutes I was back up and running. No ignoring my email and asking me whether my router was on, he’d done his homework before he diagnosed and fixed the issue. And they are consistently like this!

There are a lot of people out there who know how to use a product, and it’s this which makes the difference, not the quality of the script, because that 5% of the time when there really is an issue, you may need to actually know what you are talking about.

I just moved home about 2 weeks ago now. It’s lovely, we’re having a smashing time. In typical “that is so Francis” fashion I had the broadband installed as we moved in. “Fantastic” I thought. But alas the line is noisy etc. and giving me about a 50th of the speed. “No worries” I thought as I started a conversation with my trusty ISP. We tried a few things, none really worked, so I decided to call them. And so the story begins.

It was 12am, I thought “best get this sorted sooner rather than later”, so, slightly drunk, I decided to call. The young lad took me through the steps. He reeled them out “Is the box plugged in and switched on?”, “is the phone line plugged in?”. I closed my eyes and patiently waited until he got through the list of stock questions before getting to the advanced stuff.

Through the easy questions my mind harked back to Scott Hanselmann’s suggestion of Fizzbin. The idea is that it is a Tech Support handshake. Like saying “I know tech, I have checked the obvious problems like the unit being on,I know the lingo”. The conversation could go something more like:

“Hi, Internet Tech Support…what’s your issue?”
“Fizzbin.”
“You have an IP?”
“No. Your DHCP isn’t passing out IPs. Am I banned?”
“Looks like your MAC is xxxx, you’ve been running a torrent?”
“Yes, I’ll stop.”
“Cool. You’re un-banned. Fizzbin.”
“Sweet. Catch you later.”

(Courtesy of Scott H)

Though I fear my technical support guy had no clue about technical stuff. It’s now been elevated to his superiors, whatever that means.