Warranty Service

When you bought your computer, it probably came with a warranty that provides prepaid repair service for at least a year after the purchase date. If your computer is still under warranty, the manufacturer’s support center is the first place to call for help. If your computer was made by a major manu- facturer such as Dell, Lenovo (formerly IBM), or Hewlett-Packard, among others the support center has an extensive set of information about symptoms and solutions, and it also has direct access to the Microsoft Knowledge Base. And depending on the specific terms of your warranty, the support center can sometimes authorize a local service technician to come to your home or office to repair a hardware problem at the company’s expense. And of course, the manufacturer is the expert on any proprietary software that was supplied with the computer. The big computer companies all ship their computers with customized versions of Windows that include features that are slightly different from the generic operating system. As part of their contract with Microsoft, the comp- anies that provide custom versions of Windows are also obligated to provide technical support for their own customers (that’s you). Even if your computer came from a “white box” supplier that assembled the system from parts, the supplier included some kind of warranty with the computer and the software. You paid for that warranty support, so you should use it. You might have to take the computer back to the store or to a local service center, but that’s often better than packing up the whole system and shipping it halfway across the continent.

Try Your Help Desk First (If You Have One)

Many of us don’t have the luxury of access to a formal help desk. Those of us who use the computer at home or in a small business generally don’t have a full-time, in-house support center available to us. In many cases, we are the help desk for many of our friends, relatives, and coworkers. If you do have access to a help desk or other in-house computer support center, or if you subscribe to a commercial computer support service, that’s the first place to call. The people who work in those centers probably know exactly which components and software are in your computer, and they will be among the first to learn about localized problems (like virus infections) that are going around the office and your local network. If somebody else within your company or organization has faced a similar problem, the help desk might already know exactly what you have to do to fix it. And they have access to administrator privileges, diagnostic tools, and other resources that you can’t always reach as a lowly user. If your company has support contracts with Microsoft or the maker of your computer, and with other hardware and software companies, your help desk often has a direct line (or a list of private telephone numbers and e-mail addresses) to support specialists who are assigned to your company’s account. Those specialists often have more experience and skill than the people who take calls from the general run of users. Because your local help desk staff members talk to these people all the time, they can often cut through a lot of bureaucracy and wasted time. If you have access to a help desk, you should call the help desk instead of going directly to an outside support center. Even if the computer is still under warranty, let the help desk handle the problem. In a business with more than three or four computers, there’s almost always somebody responsible for keeping them working properly.

They may not have a title that identifies that part of their job, but that person probably fills the niche of your local help desk. Depending on the size of your organization, the help desk might be one or two people in the same office where you work, an entire department halfway across the continent, or even an independent group that provides computer support under contract. Some help desks prefer to receive requests for assistance by telephone, and others want you to make your initial contact by e-mail. If you’re having a problem with a laptop or other portable com- puter, they might even accept walk-ins. It’s always a good idea to know who to call and how to call them before your computer fills your office with orange smoke (or smoke of any other color, for that matter). These same people are probably responsible for things like maintaining your security programs and installing timely software updates and upgrades. And if they have time, you might convince them to come around and show you how to perform preventive maintenance and optimize your computer’s performance. When you talk to the help desk under non-panic conditions, be sure to let them know that it’s not an emergency, and that they should take care of more immediate problems before they handle your request. The support folks will appreciate this, and the next time you have a real computer crisis, they’ll know that you’re serious. They might even move you to the top of their list ahead of the chronic complainers. It never hurts to have your support people think you’re one of the good guys. Before the computer breaks down, ask your help desk or support center how they prefer to receive trouble reports. Is there a special telephone number or e-mail address? Are there different people to contact for hardware and software problems? Do they need some specific information about your account or your computer’s location or network address? The more you know about how the help desk wants to work, the more you can help them solve your problem for you.

In-Laws and Other Informal Tech Support

For those of us who can’t call a formal help desk, a friend or relative who is “good with computers” can sometimes provide useful advice and assistance. Don’t expect your nephew to have all the tools that a full-time support center can use, but often an experienced user with a slightly different perspective from your own is all that’s necessary to find and fix a problem. However, it’s important to be aware that some self-defined “computer experts” don’t know much more than you do. You have to trust your own instincts about this, but there are a few common warning signs. For example, if your adviser ignores the text of a Blue Screen error message and immed- iately suggests some kind of major repair, such as reformatting the hard drive or replacing the motherboard, before they try any less destructive methods, or if they somehow seem too enthusiastic about opening up the computer with- out a good reason, you should look for a second opinion before you allow them to perform any potentially destructive “repairs.” Thank your “expert” politely for their help, and take the computer back before they can make the problem more serious than it is already. Remember that you’re asking your friend or cousin for valuable advice and help. If possible, give them something in return mow their lawn or invite them to a nice dinner or something. And have some sympathy if your source of free support works on computers for a living; you’re asking him or her to take on extra work on their own time. Finally, keep in mind that not everyone who works with computers is a Windows guru; someone who is an expert Macintosh or Unix user might never lay hands on a Windows computer. The world’s greatest expert on highly complex structured databases or Java programming is not necessarily the person who can help you recover data from a hard drive with a damaged boot loader. If your cousin or your neighbor tells you that he or she really doesn’t know much about Windows, it’s probably true.

Dealing with Microsoft Tech Support

If you can’t find a solution to a Windows problem in the built-in Help system or the documents in Microsoft’s online Product Solution Centers, you may want to ask Microsoft for one-on-one assistance. Microsoft offers technical support services by telephone, e-mail, and live online one-to-one text messaging. The first couple of support calls for Windows XP are free, but after that, there’s a flat $35-per-request fee, regard- less of the method you use to communicate with them. Other Microsoft products have their own price structures for support services. The two free calls are enough for most people to solve installation and setup problems, but the $35 charge is enough to discourage most users from calling for support when the solution is available from another source, such as the online Knowledge Base or the Help screens built into Windows. Prepaid support contracts and other alternatives to per-call support are also available from Microsoft, but those services are usually more appropriate for large businesses than for smaller organizations and home users. For instructions on reaching tech support for XP and other Microsoft products, go to http://support.microsoft.com. That $35 fee probably means that you won’t call (or e-mail) Microsoft until you have tried everything else you can think of. And that’s how Microsoft wants you to treat their support services: as a last resort. If nothing else can solve a problem, their technicians are ready and waiting to help you. Some people believe that Microsoft and other companies should provide support at no charge; after all, we wouldn’t need to call for help if the products weren’t so flaky. Maybe so, maybe not, but the vast majority of support calls are questions whose relatively simple answers are in the installation guide or the online Help included with the product. It costs companies money to maintain call centers and pay the support people, so it does make business sense to discourage people from treating them as the first place to go for help rather than the last resort. If the call centers can’t solve the problem, or if you can convince the support people that the prob- lem was caused by a bug in the software, you can often convince them to refund the service request fee.

NOTE If your copy of Windows was supplied with your computer, Microsoft doesn’t want to talk to you. Your first point of contact should be the computer manufacturer’s tech sup- port center or website. Some are better than others, but the support centers at major manufacturers like Dell, IBM (now Lenovo), and Hewlett-Packard all have access to the same information resources as the support people at Microsoft, and they should also have detailed information about your computer’s hardware that might make the trouble- shooting process go more quickly. In practice, some manufacturers are a lot worse than others about providing truly helpful software support. If you reach a support center that can’t or won’t help you with a Windows problem, your best bet is probably to post your question on one of the Microsoft support bulletin boards described in article 6.

When you telephone the Microsoft support center, the first person you reach will be a call screener. Call screeners know how to direct your call to the right specialist, and how to take your name and product ID number, but they can’t help solve your technical problem. Be nice to these people; they have the power to direct your call to a hotshot support specialist at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond or a bored contractor in Bangalore. And like that unfortunate incident with the goldfish in the second grade, if you acquire a reputation as an abusive or overly demanding caller, it goes onto your Permanent Record a warning about you will appear at the call center every time you request support on any Microsoft product. The quality of Microsoft’s support varies wildly, depending on the exper- ience of the support technician assigned to your case. Many Microsoft support people are helpful, friendly, and knowledgeable. They will know exactly where to find answers to your questions, or if they don’t, they’ll take it as a challenge to work with you until a solution emerges. Most of the time, Microsoft’s support folks will spend as much time with you as necessary to solve your problem, even if it’s a matter of several hours or more. However, others never move away from the standard scripts they learned during their training. And now that Microsoft has shifted much of their support operation to South Asia, it can sometimes be extremely difficult to cut through very heavy accents and noisy telephone lines to understand exactly what the support people are telling you to do. Support technicians in Asia are often as knowledgeable and helpful as their colleagues in North America and Europe, but the combination of an unfamiliar accent and a bad connection can create an impenetrable barrier. It can be almost painful to try to obtain help by telephone from technicians whose heavily accented English forces you to ask them to repeat almost every sentence.

NOTE The people who run many offshore call centers want you to feel comfortable with their support people, so they instruct them to use “Western” names, such as “Richard” instead of Rajeesh or “Irene” instead of Indira. They also instruct them to drop refer- ences to American sports into the conversation. It’s almost never successful. If someone asks you about a basketball or baseball game, I recommend shifting the conversation to last week’s cricket match.

The cost is the same for all three types of support telephone, e-mail, and text chat so you can choose the one that seems most comfortable to you. E-mail and text offer the advantage of a printed record of the information provided by the support representative, but voice calls can often go more quickly because you don’t have to wait as long for answers to your questions. The time lag between responses in e-mail and chat often gives the impression that the same technician is handling several conversations at the same time. When you telephone or exchange messages with Microsoft (or any other product support center), it’s important to know how to make the system work to your advantage. Here are some things to remember:

Before you call, gather all the information the support person might need, including the version of Windows, the latest service pack you have installed, and the Product ID number of your copy of Windows (right- click My Computer, and choose Properties from the pop-up menu to see the ID number in the General tab of the System Properties window). If you can’t get far enough in Windows to view the Product ID number, you will need the Product Key printed on the original plastic case or paper sleeve that contained the Windows CD. Make a list of all the things you have already tried and the numbers of any Knowledge Base articles that seem to apply to this problem. As soon as you’re connected to a support person (not the call screener who answers your call), ask for their full name, e-mail address, and a direct telephone number. You won’t always get all three (many support people won’t give out their full names to protect their privacy), but if you explain that you want to know how to reach them if the telephone or messaging system drops your call, most people will give you their contact information. Keep a copy of this information on paper. If you talk to any- body else during your call, remember to get the same information for each of them. Ask for your case number or “trouble ticket number.” If you have to talk to another technician, the case number gives them a way to read the pre- vious tech’s notes on your problem. If you become convinced that the person taking your call can’t help you, ask to “escalate” the call to the next level. If the first support person won’t do it, insist that they transfer your call to a supervisor. This won’t happen often, but it can sometimes be useful. If the technician puts you on hold several times to ask somebody else about your problem, ask to talk to that person. Be nice. If a support call has lasted an hour or more with no end in sight, ask the technician if you’re going past his or her quitting time, and if so, offer to let them either call you back the next day or pass you to some- body else, so they can go home. Remember that the people you’re call- ing might be in a different time zone, continent, or country, or be working an odd shift, so it might be going-home time for them when it’s early afternoon on your time.

There is another way to reach Microsoft support staff without paying for a support request. Many product support specialists and experienced users monitor the Microsoft newsgroups (described in article 6), and often post replies to questions almost as soon as they are posted.

NOTE As an alternative to Microsoft’s support services, you can request help from a third- party “Microsoft Partner” support center that charges by the minute for telephone support. To find links to a list of these support service providers, go to http://support. microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx and follow the links to your version of Windows XP. Look for the “Partners” section with links to support services that have been approved by Microsoft. One such service is www.ingenio.com/documents/partner/microsoft/support/ getadvice.asp. These time-based services are often a better deal than Microsoft’s flat-rate service for questions with simple answers, but if you have a complicated or particularly obscure problem that will take more than just a few minutes to solve, it’s probably better to call Microsoft.

Other Vendors’ Tech Support

Most of the same methods for getting the most out of Microsoft technical support will also work with other companies. Just about every supplier of computer hardware and software provides some kind of support for their products. Some offer toll-free telephone lines and their own knowledge bases, online bulletins, or discussion boards, but many companies don’t supply any kind of free telephone support. They will only accept questions by e-mail. As a general rule, the number of tech support options increases along with the price of the product. If you’re calling a tech support center that charges by the hour (or by the minute) for the time you spend talking to a technician, do everything you can to save time before you place the call. Gather all the paperwork related to the product, and note the version number, release number, and serial number. If it’s a hardware problem, remove the screws from the case so you can lift it off without wasting a lot of time. One sign that a tech support center is overloaded is a very long wait to reach a live person.

If you have to listen to bad music and “your call is impor- tant to us” announcements for more than about five minutes, try using another way to ask for help such as e-mail or an online forum. You can also try calling back at another time of day; late morning and early afternoon are often the best times. If the company offers round-the-clock support, it’s often much easier to get through late at night. Monday mornings and the days after holidays are the worst times to call, especially for consumer products that have a habit of breaking over the weekend. Many companies have moved their support centers overseas; your call to a California area code might reach somebody in India or the Philippines. This is not always a bad thing; tech support gigs often pay very well by local standards, so they attract smart people with strong computer skills. The quality of an offshore support center can be every bit as good as one in North America. Wherever they are located, good tech support people are worth every penny (or Rupee) their employers pay them. They are calm and friendly, they know the product inside and out, and they will stay with you until the problem has been solved. But too many support centers measure their success by the number of calls each agent handles during a shift rather than the number of problems actually solved, so the agents are under intense pressure to get rid of each caller within just a few minutes. When you’re talking to one of those sweatshops disguised as support centers, you will probably receive an all-purpose answer intended to make you go away, unless your question is on their list of common problems (and it won’t be, if you have done some research before calling). Here are some of the most common “go away and stop bothering me” answers provided by incompetent support centers:

Install the software again. Check all the cables. You’re using an obsolete version; install the new release. Reinstall Windows. Nobody has ever had that problem before. It must be your fault. Oh, they all do that. We’ll fix it in the next release. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature. We don’t support that; it’s Microsoft’s fault. I can’t help you. (If you’re talking to a software company.) It’s not our fault. It’s a hard- ware problem. I can’t help you.(If you’re talking to a hardware company.) It’s not our fault. It’s a soft- ware problem. I can’t help you. (Without running any kind of diagnostic test.) It’s a bad drive (or video card, or motherboard, or some other component). Give me a credit card number, and we’ll send you a new one. Reboot the computer. You never know; maybe the problem will go away.

Of course, any of these might be a legitimate answer to your question. You should have tried some of them, like restarting the computer and check- ing the cables before you made the call. But if you sense that the support person seems to be giving you an all-purpose answer, it’s time to insist that they escalate the call to someone who can give you some real help. If it becomes obvious that the first-line support person can’t help you, explain that you understand that they are expected to get rid of each caller as quickly as possible, but you want a real solution to your problem. Ask them to transfer your call to somebody who has more experience with the product. And make it absolutely clear that you will not go away or allow them to end the call until the problem has been fixed. If you can politely keep control of the call, your chances of receiving real help are a lot better. Working in a bad support center is a high-stress job. The support agents don’t always receive adequate training, and their supervisors are constantly pushing them to turn over calls as fast as possible. And most of the callers are upset because their computers have died, they’ve been waiting too long for somebody to answer, they don’t really understand what has gone wrong, and first two places they called told them to call somebody else. Too many callers are rude, arrogant, or both, or they blame the support person for causing the problem in the first place.

So it’s better to treat the people taking your calls with sympathy rather than abuse. You want the technician to think he’s on your side so he will concentrate on solving your problem instead of making you go away. Let him (or her, as the case may be) feel that the two of you are a team, facing the evil problem together. Your call should be the one call that day that the support person actually enjoyed, because she had to analyze an interesting problem and maybe even learned something new in the process.

Don’t Be Afraid to Escalate

In the last section, I talked about escalating a service call. This is an impor- tant word and concept; it pays to learn how to use it. In almost every support center, the people who take incoming calls are at the bottom of a pyramid that might have two, three, or even more higher levels. The people at each level have more experience and more knowledge about the products they support than the levels below them. As a result, your chances of reaching somebody who can actually provide help should increase as you move up the line. Give the first-tier person a chance to solve your problem before you give up on him or her. But if it’s clear that you have gotten as much as you can from that person, politely ask to escalate the problem to the next level. In most call centers, a support agent must honor a request to escalate. If yours refuses, or tells you that they can’t do that, ask for a supervisor. Remember, you want to keep control of the call, rather than letting the technician run the show. When you reach the next level, don’t assume that the new person has been listening to your earlier conversation. There’s probably a written summary on the computer screen in front of the second-tier person, but it’s entirely possible that the person who originally took your call did not under- stand your problem well enough to describe it in the incident summary. You should offer to start over from the beginning, and describe all of your symptoms and unsuccessful attempts to solve the problem. When you get to the second or third level, it’s likely that you’re talking to somebody who actually knows how the product in question works, and how to fix (or work around) most of the known problems. At this level, the easy problems have already been solved, so the job is generally more challenging (and more interesting) than talking to people who don’t know how to use the CTRL key or open a Windows menu. If you are dealing with an obscure problem, these are the people who will know how to fix it; if you have discov- ered a new and exciting bug in the product that nobody has reported before, these folks honestly want to know about it.

Wait! The Last Person Told Me Something Different

Don’t be surprised if you receive contradictory information from different peo- ple. It’s possible that the first person you reach (or the first two or three people) has never seen the problem before, and it’s not written up in any of their reference material, so they’re telling you to try some generic solutions hoping that one of them will work. The next person up the chain has a different favorite all-purpose technique, so they’ll tell you to try that one. When you finally get to somebody with more experience with the product in question, that person might know about an approach that has not been revealed to the rest of the tech support staff. All of the same rules apply when you talk to second- or third-tier support people: keep careful notes about your conversations, explain the symptoms and what you’ve already tried, and treat the technician as a partner in your battle against the computer. With their help, you should eventually find a solution to the problem.

E-mail, Bulletin Boards, and Other Ways to Avoid Talking to You

Many computer hardware and software manufacturers hate providing live technical support to their customers. Dedicated staff, special telephone lines, live message centers, and internal information resources all increase the cost of a product without producing any apparent compensating revenue. Even if a manufacturer charges for support requests, it’s never more than a break- even deal. So the big companies all spend money and other resources to create alternatives to those expensive one-on-one telephone call centers. Some of them provide detailed manuals and other documentation. Others, including Microsoft, have publishing departments that sell separate manuals that really should come with the product. Many companies have created online FAQ lists and knowledge bases that allow the product staff to write about known problems just once and supply the information to an unlimited number of users without the need for individual hand-holding. And as yet another way to save money, they also establish online forums or bulletin boards that encourage their users to provide free support to “other members of the WhizBang 901 community.” If you have been reading this article from front to back, you already know about these services (if you’re reading the article from back to front, hang on; you’ll get to that information soon). Even e-mail, which allows a single person (or a small group of people) to handle many queries at one time, is a lot more efficient and cost-effective for the support center than voice telephone calls. It’s true that e-mail at some companies can be a black hole where questions go in, but nothing ever comes out, but I’m trying to be optimistic you should expect to receive an answer to your first e-mail within 24 hours or less (except on weekends). As long as the manufacturers offer those alternative support channels, you might as well take advantage of them. If you can solve a problem using information you find in FAQs, e-mail, or bulletin boards, go ahead and do it.

Making Tech Support Work for You

In a perfect world, no one would ever need to call for support. The computer would work perfectly every time you turn it on. But this world is far from perfect, so every computer user should know how to get the most out of a support center. For that matter, the same methods also apply to other forms of customer support; feel free to use them when your refrigerator stops making ice. Whenever you call for help, remember these important points:

Your objective is to solve a specific problem. The support representa- tive’s objective might be to get you to go away quickly. Don’t give up control of the call. Keep track of the time and date of your call, and the name of each per- son you talk to. Note the length of time you waited for somebody to answer the tele- phone, and how long you were placed on hold. This can be useful if you have to complain later. Remember to ask for an incident or case number. This will speed things up the next time you call about the same problem.

You have paid for support, either as part of the cost of the product, or on a per-incident or a per-minute basis. Don’t let the support representative off the hook until your problem has been solved. Be nice to everybody you talk to. Don’t blame the support people. They didn’t cause the problem. If the person handling your call can’t help you, escalate to the next level. Keep careful notes. If you see the same problem again on another com- puter, you shouldn’t have to place a second call to solve it. If you receive particularly awful service, write a letter to the head of the department, or write to the president of the company. Make sure to include all the horrible details, including the time and date of the call and the names of the people involved. On the other hand, if you receive very good service, write a letter to the company that provided the service, letting them know that you appreci- ate their excellent service and support. Be sure to include the names of the people who provided the great service; this will make them look good to their bosses. Writing a positive letter will remind the company that somebody does notice when they provide quality service and sup- port. Remember that an actual letter, on paper, will attract more atten- tion than either a telephone call or an e-mail message. You can probably find the company’s address on their website; send the letter to the corpo- rate office or directly to the head of the company, and let them pass it along to the right department (possibly with their own “attaboy” note attached). Keep your sense of humor. Don’t let bad service get under your skin. Remember your experience good or bad when you’re ready to buy a new widget or a new software product. Reward good service with your repeat business.