Re: [Hampshire] ISPs (again): Recommendation and warning

Ottavio Caruso wrote:
> On Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:33:11 +0000, "Sean Gibbins"
> <sean@???> said:
>
>
>> Yeah, smart techies cost money and that's where they are making the
>> savings I guess.
>>
>
> That's not rue. I have a top of the range salary as a tier 1 support,
> yet I am incompetent...
>
>

Hehe - that may be the case for you Ottavio, but I suspect it is the
exception rather than the rule.

Some of the people I have dealt with on first line support have
struggled with basic competencies - manners, simple communications,
reading from the card that tells them what to say - and I can't imagine
that they are highly paid to be honest.

Generally it's a position that sees a rapid turnover of staff, with
anyone who is remotely competent and ambitious moving on as quickly as
possible to a more varied and better paid job. Only people who can
handle the tedium of answering a phone to (often difficult) customers
all day long stick around otherwise, and one of the challenges facing
good service desk manager is to retain the staff, and with them their
skills and experience.

One of the excellent things about AAISP was the fact that the support
staff /did/ seem to stick around and /did/ know what they were talking
about; I suspect that they rotated around various aspects of the
day-to-day running of the service since, as someone else mentioned, it
was not uncommon for the boss to answer a support call. AAISP are a
relatively small company charging a relatively high price for an 8Mb
ADSL MAX connection.

Sky on the other hand are a large company charging considerably less for
pretty much the same service, and I have yet to experience anything
remotely impressive about the first or second line of support.

I suspect the model is:
- keep it simple
- discourage the punters from stuffing up their config and bothering the
support staff
- pay a few smart guys to run the service efficiently in the background

Sean