That's wild. My few experiences with Microsoft PSS have been uniformly good (and, knock wood, infrequent), even if I've started with an overseas technician. I've always gotten a 'personal' e-mail address that I can reply directly to, and post-incident follow up later on from the tech. The only thing is that I've never had to call except within the context of the partner company where I used to work full time. Maybe they have a different queue for partners?
Our VMWare support was purchased through an HP SKU and I've also always received excellent support from HP's South Asian techs. Again, the few times I've had to call I've gotten a live person on the phone within 3 or 4 minutes - several times with no wait at all. If they need to escalate they do, and if they need to bring in the hardware guys with questions about the EVA they can get someone on the phone immediately. And thinking about the EVA, I do want to throw a shout out to HP's storage support folks. This particular division does not seem to be outsourced, and in my experience are uniformly terrific. If you've got something that stumps the first level folks, you get put through immediately to some seriously high-level storage geeks who work support from their houses. It's almost scary how much they know and how well they know it. I have my beefs with HP, but not with their storage support. From: Erik Goldoff [mailto:egold...@gmail.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 14, 2009 8:14 AM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: Outsourcing Discussion Wow, where to start ? Which scenario to describe ? Try placing a call to Microsoft for support. With my Technet Plus subscription, I get two 'free' support incidents per year. But I have never, NEVER gotten direct contact with any tech support. At best, I have spent 15 to 20 minutes on the phone with someone in the Aisian subcontinent ( India, I think ) whose sole purpose is to gather information based on a script as 'triage' ... unfortunately, this first contact has zero technical skills, and even worse command of the English language. Neither do they explain up front that they are only gathering information and in no way can help. Then, when least convenient ( it seems ) a first level tech from Microsoft calls, usually getting voice mail, and leaves a message. I'm sure it's a message, but most times I can not tell what they are saying, nor what their name is. WHO am I supposed to ask for when I return the call ? No idea, cannot make out the name, and nothing sounds familiar. I finally get through to a live tech, and back to the script. Have to repeat steps I have already gone through, and told the first triage operator that I've done. Have to ask the tech to repeat himself several times since his speech is unintelligible to me. Have to ask him repeatedly to slow down his speech for the same reason. First level tech has NO clue and continues to make beginner suggestions, doesn't listen at all to my feedback. 45 minutes into the call repeats himself asking me to do something he asked 30 minutes ago, but didn't make note of. I ask to be escalated to a supervisor, but from the sound of things, it's like the call center has been trained to transfer the call to the rep sitting next to him and *say* it's a supervisor. At times I wonder how much training the person on the other end of the phone has. It seems zero experience, and probably a week of training, some of which is *supposed* to be phone skills. But repeatedly it seems that the tech rep is only reading from a scripted flow chart and not from any intelligent train of thought. And I don't know why, but in the Aisian subcontinent, they seem to say 'OK' a LOT, even when it's NOT OK. As in , "I would like to remote control your client's system, and make some changes during production hours, and might loose all their data, OK ?" I'm SURE that the hourly rate for outsourcing to a 'third world' country is much, much lower than here in the U.S., and up front looks like an attractive proposition for cutting cost. I'm not so sure that anyone can properly see the potential for disatisified customers, and destruction of brand loyalty that results. Nor do they fully understand the ramifications of not being able to hold an overseas outsource company to SLA contracts, nor guarantee any security of data that they obtain during this process. No one seems concerned with the job loss in the U.S. as a result, nor the impact of U.S. workers losing their jobs and no longer have disposable income to pump into the local economy. Nor do they consider the impact of monetary influx to an unstable region of the world. I will not work with at least one firewall appliance company now due to repeated bad experiences with their overseas outsourced support, when I was a big proponent of their products before the outsourcing. And I refused any further purchases from a large pc and server company for similar support disatisfactions, and seems they brought business line support back to the U.S. even though home/individual consumers are still made to suffer. This barely scratches the surface of my experiences and frustrations with the results of outsourcing. Erik Goldoff IT Consultant Systems, Networks, & Security ________________________________ From: Sherry Abercrombie [mailto:saber...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 8:58 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: Outsourcing Discussion Guys and gals, I've returned to college this fall after about 15 years to finally finish up a degree I started on about 25 years ago. One of my classes this semester is Macro Economics. Last night my professor gave us an essay question for a test next Monday that is potentially 50% or more of our test grade. The topic is on outsourcing and I wanted to toss this out for discussion, input, personal experiences etc etc. The questions I have to answer are: What is the economic justification given for outsourcing? Where is the outsourcing taking place? (Obviously, I'm focusing on the IT field, specifically technical support) What types of jobs are these workers performing? What is the benefit to the business? To foreign workers? I talked with my professor and told her what approach I wanted to take, from the end user perspective, and that I had experienced the tech support being outsourced. She liked that idea a lot. Obviously, I will be looking for other news articles to support my essay. What I'm looking for is thoughts, opinions, personal experiences from an end user perspective, has anyone here been outsourced? What was that like? I'm just taking an informal poll from a group of my peers that I know has had personal experience in some way with this subject. Try to keep it on topic, I did get Stu's OK before sending this, so a big Thanks Stu for the use of these lists to help with my exam. -- Sherry Abercrombie "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C. 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