Incompetenter, Oh My!

I recently went through a process which is unfortunately pretty common nowadays, working with totally incompetent people over the phone.

I was adding a technological sort of device to my network and in order to get it to work, this company had to send an activation code to the equipment.

It involved adding two rather large numbers to a profile to verify my ownership and then generating the activation signal.

Now some of you may have already decided this is too technological for you, but it really isn't and certainly shouldn't be for the company that does this.

However, after going through a long process with some robotic answering system that kept trying to tell me common solutions to problems (I didn't have a problem) I finally got through to a person, who I'm quite sure was doing this from home and following a script.

In fairness, activations for these add on devices are probably a very small percentage of the calls they get since it only happens once while problems happen constantly

Still my happiness with getting through was misplaced as the person, clearly following a script was unable to enter the information correctly eventually deciding the item must be defective (I'm sure it wasn't) and authorized a replacement.

By the time I had that I had read the on-line forums and knew what they had to do, but when I finally got through to the next customer rep, he wouldn't listen to me, I was a stupid customer after all and said they needed to send a technician to make sure the problem wasn't being caused by my setup.

I agreed to that, but since they have a 24 hour help line called back at a time when it wasn't so busy and found a person working the night shift who was willing to listen to what I said he had to do.

Like magic everything worked and I thanked this guy, who may actually have been more technically capable than the daytime script followers.

However, we hire people and give them scripts to follow, and of course the script is always right, which it probably is, if they do what they have to do correctly.

I imagine this is an attractive job since you can apparently do it from home and if you have a problem can let the customer wait while you consult remotely with a more senior tech, who has to rely on you version of the issue which is likely distorted.

We have achieve a level of incompetent support that is simply amazing and I don't see it getting better.