How/Why Dell Technical Support Works/sucks: The inside story

There are some companies in the world people love to hate. One can read or hear people rant at the mere mention of the company. One such company is Dell probably coming next only to Microsoft, atleast in the computer world. You just have to look into any Dell related article in Slashdot or Anandtech and see the reader comments to know what I am talking about. What is it about the company that brings fire into people's loins? Some blame it on the decreasing quality of the products attributed to the movement of production to China where as some like to blame it on the technical support that they receive, especially from India. So what is the real story? 

I am an hardware enthusiast with good knowledge of computer hardware and software. I have been programming since 14 and have been building hardware for quite a long time now. I am an Instrumentation and control systems engineer by background. I presently work for a semiconductor company in India. 

After graduation and in desperate need of a job, Dell came to my rescue by calling in people for a walk-in interview for technical support. Knowing that the requirements were in my home turf, I decided to give it a shot. I was pretty upbeat about working for the largest hardware manufacturer in the world and quite excited at the prospect of getting to learn more about hardware. I had about 5 rounds of interview and sailed smoothly into the company. However, one thing threw me off. Hardly any technical questions were asked in the interview. I gathered that they were more interested in my communication skills than anything else. Infact, my knowledge of computers, which I tried to establish to them, did not have any effect on the interviewer. Absolutely no advantage of having known anything about computers. I noticed that anyone who had passable English and knew how to click the mouse made through. This was the first indication that the company did not respect technical knowledge much. Thus began my career in Dell which lasted for about 18 months and ended 8 months ago.

From the time of selection to the point of training, I wondered about the skill set of the people who would work with me. It bothered me quite a bit that language was the only qualification for making it into the company. I wasn't sure how the company intended to turn freshers and non-computing graduates to computer technicians. So the training began and I was quite surprised by the diversity of the crowd. There I was, sitting in between commerce, literature, arts and environmental science students with a few engineers thrown in. There were even part time MBA students. The training went on for about 3 months and I must say I was quite impressed by some of the trainers. They had complete faith in making good technicians out of commerce students and by the end of the training they were better with computers by a magnitude. As for me, I found the the process of listening to all the computer lectures a boring event. I knew almost everything they were teaching. I even knew more than the trainers because the trainers themselves were not engineers but mostly commerce and arts students who have been doing the technical support job for a long time now and had gotten good at it. I enjoyed those moments of training when I was asked to make presentations and by the end I was regularly called in to cover various technologies because the crowd understood me better. Sitting with them gave me an idea of the level they were in and where the trainer was going wrong. I was doing the trainer's job better than the trainer himself. When I asked if I could move in as a trainer I got a cold shoulder stating that I had to complete a minimum of 2 years in the company if I wanted to be a trainer. This was the second indication of lack of respect for my technical knowledge though it was quite out in the open that I could do that job well.

Finally the team of 30 or so finished the training and about 29 cleared the final test and the rest were spread across the many existing teams across the work floor. Only one dropped out of a conscious choice because he believed that he wasn't designed to do such a job. There were about 100 people on a single work floor at any time and easily more than 400 people using the floor in a single day over all the shifts. I took it for granted that everyone in the team I was set to join would know more than me because they have been working in the company for long. I would quite frequently ask questions to my colleagues in my early days. Initially these questions were Dell specific technical questions and most questions were on the policies and procedures of the company. Slowly I realized that my colleagues were not as good with computers as I thought they were. While common issues and policies were handled with breeze, new issues would freak out most of them. As for me, I found common issues boring to handle. I kept looking forward to challenges in new issues. Within a month of being on the floor I had mastered my job and was better than most people in the team. By the end of a call, I made sure that the caller hung up happy with his problem solved. If that didn't happen, I would be quite unhappy with myself. However, when I looked around, I noticed that such was not the attitude in most people. Most of them would be excited to just get done with the call. Not everyone was as enthusiastic as me to fix problems. For many, the job was a simple matter of getting good at using google or searching the database. Many people were frustrated with the job and quite unhappy. The attrition rate in the company was high. The morale was most often low. If someone got a better job he was considered lucky and envied. If someone moved to a similar job in another company, say HP, everyone was curious to know if things were better in the other company. Attrition happened in groups most often.

People were constantly quitting the company in huge numbers and equal numbers were moving in to replace them. Within 6 months, only 10 of the original 30 remained in the company. As my tenure in the company increased, the attrition also seemed to be increasing. I tried to figure out the reason and this is what I concluded: lack of interest in the job. Even if you can force a dog to eat rice, it is always happier eating the beef. People who are not interested in something technical can never sustain in such an environment. They have no motivation from new technologies being released or new issues being encountered. The initial motivation is salary and then it moves on to recognition for work. Some get lucky and move up where as many stay back. Most others continue to take calls year over year and don't get anywhere. Sometimes bad luck, sometimes bad work. I noticed that over a period of time the number of employees waiting to move to managerial positions was increasing dramatically and there weren't enough openings in management to move these people. Many of them quit out of frustration due to lack of growth. No one wanted to take calls for ever. So they quit the job or found similar jobs in other companies where a new environment and the training process would give them relief for sometime until they were ready to move to another company. Another factor contributing to the depression was night shifts. Almost the entire technical support center worked nights. If there were 20 teams supporting a segment by night, there would only be one by the day. And shifts changed every month. So one could never plan for more than a month ahead and many longed for a saturday-sunday weekend with the rest of the country. This added to a lack of social life and a lot of frustration.

So why do most people take up these jobs in the first place? In a country with population over 1 billion, it is quite an arduous task to find a job, let alone find a job of personal preference. In such a situation, a job that is easy to get and one that pays decently is the easiest route to take. People are willing to give up on their interests and take up a job that has nothing to do with what they studied. It makes me question the purpose of education. And once into a company for technical support, the chances of switching from this line of work to another becomes very difficult. Not every stream pays as much. Not many want to take a job based on their qualification at the cost of earning less money. It is a simple matter of human survival at the cost of compromise. Hence the same people keep jumping from one support company to another until they have possibly supported every other computer model out there in the world. So attrition is not a Dell specific problem but an issue with every company providing technical support service. So that brings up the question? Can a company like Dell afford the attrition. The answer is yes. This is so because the alternative is more expensive. I will be getting back to this later.

Almost every aspect of my work at Dell was quantized. Every thing was converted to measurable numbers. Performance appraisals and other benefits were direct reflections of these numbers. There were factors like customer experience - a rating from 1 to 9, 9 being the best and 1 being the least, received from surveys from customers, resolution rate - how much a technician was able to fix problems without having the same customer call back for the next n days, number of calls in a day, average time for a call, number of parts dispatches, number of repeat parts dispatches, cost per dispatch and many more. Each metric had its weightage in the overall scheme of things and this weightage varied depending on company priorities. If the company was in cost cutting mode, part dispatch related metrics would get higher priority. Customer experience was an all time high priority in Dell. This was one aspect of the company I totally liked. The management was genuinely interested in ensuring that customers were satisfied. However the problem lied within how this satisfaction was achieved by misuse of the loop holes in the quantization system.

A lot of them were interested in ensuring that they had good surveys from customers. Also of importance is the fact that customer surveys did not go for all calls that were taken. Surveys were random. Not all end users would be happy about having their inbox flooded with surveys each time they called. Hence this turned out to be a weakness in the system. If a technician was to get a survey for say 1 in 10 calls, then he could avoid being low in customer experience rating merely by taking a lot of calls and hoping that very few surveys went and those that went were positive. And in most cases this actually happened. An average technician could keep solving simple issues while not making the effort to resolve complex issues and then ensuring that he took enough calls to make up for the few complex issues which normally took a lot of time.

At this time I must also add that a lot of people who call are computer illiterates and almost expect a computer usage tutorial over the phone somtimes. Some of them call for the silliest of issues like computer not powering up which turns out be a disconnected power cable from the wall socket. Such calls are like heaven to many technicians because they don't have to rack their brains and get good surveys and do so over a very short call. As for a technically inclined person like me, the real challenge was in solving complex issue by finding root cause and working on it. I had no satisfaction over getting a call that just required me to explain to the end user how to connect a power cable to the wall socket. This difference in attitude cost me a lot in terms of performance. I would spend a lot of time on my calls trying to ensure that every call issue is resolved while others took many calls. In the end an average technician had equal or better numbers than I did. I always wished surveys went out to on every call so that the numerical data was more reliable and a better indication of the true skill of the technician. Over sometime I developed a resistance to this and ignored the system. I enjoyed my work. I was called in many a times to assist complex issues with others and also had the chance to do a lot many technical training sessoions for the rest of the team. Most of my time was spent trying to learn new technologies. If I thought I was at 85 on 100 in computers before joining Dell, I would say that I reached around 90 by the time I quit Dell and most of this improvement happened in the first 6 months after which things got stale.

When as a company you are able to effectively quantize information you can work out mathematical formulae that relate most inputs to outputs and chalk out a plan of action to ensure that the targeted outputs (E.g. financial numbers or sales figures) are achieved by modifying the inputs (E.g. Call metrics from support , quality of the product). But this of course comes at the cost of ignoring other things that are not quantizable which could affect the numbers indirectly. I am sure they have even worked out formulae to match attrition with company growth and revenues and other financial metrics. From the company's point of view, considering the volumes, the break even period for an employee is very low. I am not sure how much but it is very very low. This is evident from the fact that I have not seen much action being taken by the company to curb this attrition. They are willing to let go employees which I suspect is only because they break even their investment in training quickly if on an average an employee works for atleast a couple of months. From what I have seen, it looks like Dell doesn't like keeping people for long because they become a liability in terms of increasing pay. This is mainly because there is no drastic difference between the best and the worst technician due to the quantization loop hole. The difference between the employees lie in the work attitude and motivation which cannot be quantized easily. It might not be possible to keep employee morale high for the simple reason of the massive employee count that Dell has to keep satisifed which translates into spending a lot of money. If employee satisfaction was placed over monetary gains , then the company would spend a lot of money to put into effect methods to achieve the employee satisfaction. And these methods might take a long time to reap benefit. It would be very difficult to revamp the whole system and start over from scratch, atleast in the technical support environment. So unless they stop recruiting non-computer engineers and pay the computer engineers really well, which might not be feasible because of the number of people they need to employ to replace and/or fire existing employees, there is no other remedy that I can think off for the situation. When I look at the overall picture I do agree with my friend who suggested that it is first and foremost a recruitment failure, this whole idea that any Tom, Dick and Harry and can be taken and trained in computer troubleshooting. It is just not possible in most cases. Not everyone can be a successfull convert.

One other peculiar thing I noticed in the company is the support levels. There was a point in time in Dell when any issue with the computer would be supported. This would range from hardware issues to operating system issues to third party application issues. During the early days when Dell was not all so popular this was quite feasible. As computers became more and more popular and along with that windows and its problems, most issues that technicians were handling were mostly operating system related issues and security issues like viruses and spyware in the operating system. For a layman who is not aware of the specifics of the computer, it is quite easy to blame everything on the computer and say something like "This computer sucks". One cannot blame the end user most often and not expect him to be aware. The computer is not a life for many and is merely a tool to get the job done. At the same time it is quite easy for the user to blame the manufacturer. Since Dell picks up the operating system for the computer from MIcrosoft for a lower cost than the general public, Microsoft does not support operating system related issues. Dell customers who call on operating system problems on computers that were purchased from Dell are directed by Microsoft to Dell. And Dell has to take the burden of fixing issues with an operating system that they never designed in the first place. Technicians had the additional burden of having to know everything about windows, more than the hardware that was supplied by Dell. And over a period of time as issues became mostly OS and application related, rules were bought in regarding level of support and all OS related support was made paid support. This frustrated a lot of Dell customers who were used to the free support for a long time.

All this has added to the bad reputation that Dell has developed in the recent time. I am not sure how the company is going to overcome all these hurdles. But I do know that they need to do something and do it quick. It is the goal of all comapanies to make as much money as possible. With this in mind, it becomes necessary to be as competitive as possible by providing highest performance for the lowest cost while at the same time making profit. Such goals are feasible only by finding cheaper labor and production costs, thereby necessitating the need to move technical support to places like India and production to places like China. This is unavoidable and inevitable in a global economy. There is no point in cribbing over loss of jobs in the United States by thinking that Indians are making merry. It goes beyond such an outlook on the situation. The whole situation needs to be looked into from the perspective of being humans without land barriers. Once again, it needs to be looked in from the perspective that its a question of human survival, wherever in the world the human might be.