NTL Broadband Support

[Fugazi68]

To be honest I am not worried whether the suppor centre is in India the UK or Outer Mongolia. My issue is that the person I talked to clearly had no idea what the problem was.

She talked me doggedly through the script, refusing to listen to what the problem actually was. It took me a good few minutes to convince her that my modem didn't have a synch light and she was talking about a different model. The problem was that my cable modem was not getting its network address from the NTL network, this had been happening randomly on and off for about 3 days. And still I spent a good 40 mintutes rebooting my modem, PC and possibly kettle to try and get it to work.

It eventually did work, at which point I asked her if she had done anything at her end, at which point she helpfully talked me through the script. She may have done something at her end I have no idea, and if she did and that has sorted the problem then it's all well and good.

The issue I have is that I have no confidence in the technical ability of NTL's technical support. I am an IT Professional, I've worked in Support roles, Run a Support desk fixed anything you can think of from simple PC's to Wide Area Networks and am now writing applications for an international company. If someone of my ability cannot communicate technically with a tech support person, I don't hold out much hope.

NTL if you are going to employ tech support people for broadband, employ someone who has some understanding of how it all works. That when your modem wont initialise properly it's not going to be a problem with the PC. If your modem can't receive an IP address from the NTL network rebooting your PC isn't going to help.

At this moment in time I am connected and all is well, but have no idea how long that will last, I have been connected on and off since Wednesday. I don't know if what she did fixed the problem, or it just happened to reconnect while we were on the phone, and I dread having to call back if it goes off again.

I'd like to stress that I don't blame the poor girl on the end of the phone, it's not her fault. The issue is that NTL has employed a non technical person to fill a technical role. Following a script to try and fix a problem is only going to work some of the time, I would also suggest that the script isn't adeqaute.

I'm going to stop ranting now I could go on for pages and pages.

Take care

John

[handyman]

Its the same with all large tech support IMHO. At freeserve (wanadoo/orange) they hired a girl with very little english and who had never seen a pc before let alone used or supported one.

One thing that is good is the rise in take up of ITIL. This encourages IT tech support departments to have technical and business knowledge and also encourages proactive internal tech support as opposed to simply out sourcing.

Hope fully this will enable more uk based tech support and a rise in the level of support they can ofer.

Originally Posted by handyman

Its the same with all large tech support IMHO. At freeserve (wanadoo/orange) they hired a girl with very little english and who had never seen a pc before let alone used or supported one.

One thing that is good is the rise in take up of ITIL. This encourages IT tech support departments to have technical and business knowledge and also encourages proactive internal tech support as opposed to simply out sourcing.

Hope fully this will enable more uk based tech support and a rise in the level of support they can ofer.

Good post handyman, your link made interesting reading

[handyman]

Originally Posted by atlantis

Good post handyman, your link made interesting reading

I can't even see if the link worked. It's my own site and I'm blocked by the i-web firewall again. Damn I have to many passwords.

[Fugazi68]

ITIL is a great idea, we have been looking at it work. It is all about costs I suppose, our management are forever trying to outsource the IT department, the usual argument stops it though, once they realise it would cost more to outsource and maintain the level of service they decide against it. Until some other bright spark thinks of it again.

Personally all I want it to be confident that the call centre I talk to know a bit, preferably more than I do about what they are supporting. The script seems to allow a completely non technical person to answer some low level technical questions. In my opinion a script should be delivered by someone who has the technical knowledge to understand what they are asking and draw their own conclusions. Without that all you have is a script, you may as well be talking to an answering machine.

Anyway I'm alot more chilled out now

[quadplay]

Yes, yes, yes!

Please, send these thoughts to the people responsible for ntl Technical Support. It's outsourced to IBM these days, and until someone points this kind of thing out to them it's not going to get any better. You can either write to ntl's head office (the address is on your bill) or directly to the outsourced technical support department:

ntl Technical Support
Matrix Court
Llansamlet
Swansea
SA7 9BB

[handyman]

Outsourcing achieves only one thing and thats to make the support KPI focused.

You then forget the quality and its all average call time, this can be achieved by throwing cheap script based support at it in numbers. What you end up with is a swollen dept that has twice the amount of staff required and costs more. If tech support departments advertised at £17000 then they would attract better quality staff in the first place. As the support would be better then you would in the long run be identifying problmes sooner and be able to get better data to fix the problems thus reducing the incidents and reducing the inbound calls.

As I stated above to many IT depts are now working reactivly to increasing demand without trying to fix the underlying issues.

[Bambi]

Originally Posted by handyman

If tech support departments advertised at £17000 then they would attract better quality staff in the first place.

I enquired recently about a tech-support role going within the company where I work. The basic pay was £12,750 + no benefits, now compare that to the pay of a warehouse person within same company, £17,500 + overtime + bonus.

Its no wonder you have idiots on the end of the phone if the idiots in the warehouse are anything to go by. ALso every school leaver these days has a prety good understanding of computers and is willing to work for £12k a year.

[Fugazi68]

Thanks for the Address Jimbo, I will write to them hope others do too.

Bambi I think there is an all round misunderstanding across the industry about the difference between a helpdesk and tech support. No vaguely quilified or experienced person would work in tech support for 12.5k. Now a helpdesk (script based with non technical people) maybe that would be 12.5k.

The company I work for thinks it has a helpdesk and complains at paying around 17k for new starters, when what they actualy have is tech support, where 17k is an absolute minimum.

It's difficult to get round, Company management have a basic misunderstanding of these things. It's confusing all round because the people applying arn't quite sure whats being asked for either. I had one poor boy apply for the job, we went through the inverview and all was well, I had explained that there was a test to do at the end. He excused himself asking if he could use the toilet and I never saw him again.

I don't have an answer for all this, only the hope that it will improve.

John

[simpsonsFAN]

Originally Posted by Fugazi68

It took me a good few minutes to convince her that my modem didn't have a synch light and she was talking about a different model.

All NTL modems have the "sync" light, so does yours.

Also it seams you called NTLs tech support, which is in india and is basically for people who havent setup their PC properly, or carnt get there NTL webmail to work (basically, its for the tech illiterate). They really carnt be expected to deal with the more complex service. issues

You should probably have called customour services, which is based in the UK and (as the name says) deals with service issues. They would have been able to diagnose your problem and either fix it on the spot, or book an engeneer if the problem continues.

-Chris

[mmm]

Originally Posted by simpsonsFAN

All NTL modems have the "sync" light, so does yours.

My TJ210 doesn't have a "sync" light - is this the same as the "cable" light?

[50420]

Originally Posted by simpsonsFAN

All NTL modems have the "sync" light, so does yours.

-Chris

if you mean NTL branded modems, then yes, they all have that synch light. but ntl have supplied teryon and surfboard modems in the past too... neither have a synch light.

[quadplay]

Originally Posted by simpsonsFAN

All NTL modems have the "sync" light, so does yours.

Sorry Chris, but that's completely wrong. Only the Ambit manufactured modems have a Sync light. The 3com, Motorola and Terayon modems do not.

Also it seams you called NTLs tech support, which is in india and is basically for people who havent setup their PC properly, or carnt get there NTL webmail to work (basically, its for the tech illiterate). They really carnt be expected to deal with the more complex service. issues

Not quite true. Technical Support is in Swansea as well as India. Both sites are trained on various issues surrounding the ntl Broadband product.

You should probably have called customour services, which is based in the UK and (as the name says) deals with service issues. They would have been able to diagnose your problem and either fix it on the spot, or book an engeneer if the problem continues.

Not true at all. Customer Services deal with billing, package changes, etc. Ask them a technical question about broadband and they'll tell you to call Technical Support.

[Rik]

Its all very well to moan and groan about the people in Tech Support, but what I would like to know is, what is the training like at NTL? is it non existant, good, im geniunely interested, how often do the Tech Support folk get the training and information they so badly need as a lot of companies dont seem bothered in keeping there employess up to date.

I used to work for one of the leading networking (NIC mainly) manus and their training was absymal.

So dont blame Tech Support folk all the time, thats just not fair!

[hairport]

Originally Posted by jimbo

You can either write to ntl's head office (the address is on your bill) or directly to the outsourced technical support department:

I've already done all that but don't expect a reply... I've been waiting two weeks so far!