Worst. Support. Ever.
My officemate's husband's all-in-one (printer, copier, scanner, fax), is scanning yellow, I took a look at it, but I couldn't make it not scan yellow (without making it black and white), so after getting some info from downtown, I called HP.
Naturally, the number provided by downtown was the sales office, and they tell me to call tech support.
Tech support is a nice man in India named "Carlos", who troubleshoots a printer issue with me for 2 hours. I keep interrupting to explain that it's a scanner issue. The printer works fine, no problems, it's only when scanning or copying we have the yellow issue. He acts confused, says it's an all-in-one, one unit, and continues troubleshooting it as a printer issue.
Finally he finds the problem! It's scanning yellow because I'm low on ink… at which point I lose my temper. Before I continue, I should probably explain what I mean by "scan yellow". I mean, anything that should be white, is canary yellow. Putting nothing in the scanner is canary yellow. A blank sheet of paper is canary yellow... if I scan, if I copy (which automatically prints a copy without the computer even being involved), it's all Canary Yellow. Of course I'm low on ink now, I have three sheets covered in yellow ink in front of me, in addition to numerous regularly printed test pages. Thinking back, I maybe should not have used so many big words… "inconceivable" may have been beyond "Carlos".
After I yell at him, he's ready to send me a replacement (after lecturing me that I will just have the same problem unless I replace the ink), but wants my credit card as collateral, in case I don't send back the unit.
I have to interrupt him to say, "Yeah… That's NOT going to happen, I have a Purchase Order Number."
But he couldn't find that purchase order, so wouldn't do it without my credit card. Long story short, after checking with downtown that the purchase order was correct, I did manage to call back and get someone in Canada, who laughed at the ink theory of my problem, and didn't even need any additional numbers to find the account (though he did ask how to spell "Pima").
Guess if you get a Canadian they might not be the worst support ever… but wow that guy was bad. Sadly, I'm pretty sure he worked for the same company I was laid off from 6 months ago.
And here I thought I was done being mean to poor Indians... I really don't have anything against them.
Naturally, the number provided by downtown was the sales office, and they tell me to call tech support.
Tech support is a nice man in India named "Carlos", who troubleshoots a printer issue with me for 2 hours. I keep interrupting to explain that it's a scanner issue. The printer works fine, no problems, it's only when scanning or copying we have the yellow issue. He acts confused, says it's an all-in-one, one unit, and continues troubleshooting it as a printer issue.
Finally he finds the problem! It's scanning yellow because I'm low on ink… at which point I lose my temper. Before I continue, I should probably explain what I mean by "scan yellow". I mean, anything that should be white, is canary yellow. Putting nothing in the scanner is canary yellow. A blank sheet of paper is canary yellow... if I scan, if I copy (which automatically prints a copy without the computer even being involved), it's all Canary Yellow. Of course I'm low on ink now, I have three sheets covered in yellow ink in front of me, in addition to numerous regularly printed test pages. Thinking back, I maybe should not have used so many big words… "inconceivable" may have been beyond "Carlos".
After I yell at him, he's ready to send me a replacement (after lecturing me that I will just have the same problem unless I replace the ink), but wants my credit card as collateral, in case I don't send back the unit.
I have to interrupt him to say, "Yeah… That's NOT going to happen, I have a Purchase Order Number."
But he couldn't find that purchase order, so wouldn't do it without my credit card. Long story short, after checking with downtown that the purchase order was correct, I did manage to call back and get someone in Canada, who laughed at the ink theory of my problem, and didn't even need any additional numbers to find the account (though he did ask how to spell "Pima").
Guess if you get a Canadian they might not be the worst support ever… but wow that guy was bad. Sadly, I'm pretty sure he worked for the same company I was laid off from 6 months ago.
And here I thought I was done being mean to poor Indians... I really don't have anything against them.
posted by Tam @ 8:43 PM
2 Comments:
At April 26, 2006 4:14 AM,
Anonymous said…
I've come to hate HP, and Dell, b/c of the way they've outsourced their entire crucial tech support arm to incompetents in India. I've dealt with this sort of thing myself with H-P, spent literally *hours* trying to explain basic things to "John" or "Cindy" or "Robert" who is, of course, in somewhere like Hyderabad, India. I've resolved to never buy from these companies again, and will instead support their competitors. (They're getting angry letters from me explaining why, of course.)
Many of them speak English there, but the tech support people in India are missing something far more important than language-- a basic, underlying cultural capacity to see eye-to-eye with a North American with a detailed problem, the kind of understanding that comes from a shared culture and a shared experience within it. Language is the most minor factor here. They're also seemingly incapable of thinking for themselves-- they read from the same damn script and can't step outside of it to think.
What really makes me angry, though, is the BS. I can only barely tolerate the incompetence and cluelessness among the Indian tech support staff, what I *cannot* at all tolerate is the misrepresentation of their identities and their knowledge. When they get stumped by something, rather than saying, "I don't know," they BS for hours, like they did with you, trying to pretend they're smarter than they actually are. I hate it even more when they take on North American names and pretend to be from the US or Canada. I HATE this.
I'm generally a nice, generous person who almost never yells, even at Indian call center workers who waste hours of my time, but when (on top of the incompetence) they try to BS me, I get REALLY MEAN. For the first time in years I really got angry and yelled at "Bruce" a few weeks ago who tried to pretend he was from Chicago (even had a folksy Midwestern accent), but I busted him with a few simple questions basic to any Chicagoan, and he admitted he was actually in India. I felt kinda bad afterward, but I considered it a lesson in proper social behavior.
I'm beginning to get very angry about this whole outsourcing trend in general. In addition to the incompetent call center workers, the back office work done in India is shoddy, and the programming is substandard at best. They take jobs from the US and Canada and do lousy work with them. (And Bush is trying to basically hand over a few hundred nuclear weapons to this country? I once supported Bush but now consider him to be quite possibly the worst President in US history.) There's a good reason that labor in the US and Canada is more expensive-- we do strong work here, and you can't cut corners with it.
At November 06, 2006 10:26 PM,
Anonymous said…
I have a sma;; reply for you. Have you ever worked in Hp Support. You haven't... I have worked. When you call Hp for an issue u think the person at other end has the resolution for your issue but honestly speaking HP resoures cannot even resolve 20 % of the issues. It's the hardwork of the ppl who work there 13 hours a day to give you the resolution. You say Indians dont know anything.. what a joke, 50 % of the Americans calling to HP support dont even know the difference between a USB cable and a power cable. So better check where u stand before commenting on others ....
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