Even Techs Dread Calling Tech Support – But Sometimes. You Gotta Believe!
Posted on Thu, Dec 24, 2009 @ 09:00 AM
Authored by Michael Gargiullo, Sr. Security Consultant at Pivot Point Security.
Admit it, you hate calling tech support. Everyone does. I don't know a single person who wakes up in the morning hoping for a data center catastrophe that requires opening a ticket with a vendor support system.
Why is that? It's not that you dread finding out you did something stupid to cause the problem... well maybe, but it's really the expectation of what's to come. For me, it usually goes something like this:
The system is down. 
Can we fix it?
No.
Why?
The critical error just says "It's Broken, call support"
Did you reboot it? ...
So we call the support line, press 1 for English, and then wait. We finally get through to a minimum wage employee that reads from a script. If your error isn't in the index of the script, they tell you to reboot. I once had a fortune 500 vendor support person tell me that I had a "Packet Jam" in their low end router product. Now, I've been working in the tech industry for about 15 years, and the only packet jam I know of is the little packets the bodega gives you with your buttered bagel...usually grape flavored.
Back to my point; this week while assisting a customer troubleshooting a product, we came across a new critical error message that there was no documentation for. I offered to call support to see if we could get this decoded and the issue resolved. The gentleman who answered, (I'll call him "M"), asked a few basic questions about the error, then said "Wow, I've never seen that error before. Hang on; let me get one of the backline engineers". Honestly, at this point I really liked this guy. M was either completely new at the tech support game, or he actually cared about what the customer needed.
Within minutes, there was a backline engineer on the phone with us as we tried to diagnose the issue further. The three of us worked on it for about 2 hours. As 5pm neared, I prepped myself for the system being down over night as the techs told me they'd have to examine the logs and the engineer was about to leave for the day. I shipped them a copy of all of the logs and was promised a call back first thing in the morning.
I had just finished an email to the customer explaining the situation when the engineer called me on my cell phone. He said he had spoken with the developers just after we had hung up. They had told him this was a known bug to be fixed in the next service pack. Expecting the normal "the service pack will be released in a week, etc", he surprised me once again by offering the service pack to us now. I was floored and thankful that the service pack was release level code. The engineer emailed me the fix when he got home, we installed it and were back up in no time.
I bring this to you as a story of hope. Yes, calling tech support is usually not a great experience, but this time... these techs... went beyond my expectations. They listened to the issue and really tried to solve the problem. So by the time the engineer asked if we'd be willing to run the yet to be released service pack, I trusted him enough to allow it. Yes, ‘tis the season - you gotta believe!