[TriLUG] Earthlink Tech Support

Corey Mutter corey at mutternet.com
Wed Feb 23 22:15:38 EST 2005


Joel Ebel wrote:
> For anyone wondering what the quality of Earthlink's tech support is, or 
> anyone just looking for a joke, here's a rather hilarious exchange I had 
> today with Earthlink's tech support chat system.
[snip trying to explain the concept of 'your server is on a SORBS 
blacklist' to a first-level tech-support employee]

I have some (secondhand) tales from the Other Side; my wife used to 
actually do first-level ISP tech support. The company was named Shadow 
Solutions, and was in the shopping center with Stay Online at 54/55. 
(They're out of business now AFAIK; probably just as well).

What this company did was outsourced tech support for 100+ little ISPs 
all around the country. Employees were not allowed to admit that they 
did not work directly for the ISP. (The actual ISP was referred to as 
the 'business office', when customers asked about billing etc.) Fun, 
fun, fun when a customer asked 'where is that business office? Down by 
Broad & High?' (in a city, of course, where she'd never been)

Of course, you never knew about known issues, escalation involved 
contacting the actual ISP, etc.

You were REQUIRED to follow the script - it didn't matter if you knew 
what the problem was. You were also required to hang up after 15 minutes 
(I believe that had to do with the payment structure between the ISPs 
and Shadow).

This works (for our usual, race-to-the-bottom values of 'works') when 
95% of the calls involve 'what do you mean, my computer has to be 
plugged into a phone line?', as tends to be the case for level 1 ISP 
tech support.

This doesn't lessen the pain for those of us with the 5% of calls that 
are actual ISP problems, though. As other posters have said, working 
your way to escalation can be an art form.

Corey



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