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AOL 'Tech' Support

Note: Knight's questions/comments are those displayed in red, while the sources text is black, and AOL internal memos/letters are in purple typeface.

"It has been long thought that the tech department is filled with incompetents who are basically told that all problems should be answered with these choices:

1) Reinstall the software

2) Check your modem strings

3) It's your computer

Can you verify that, or are there actually some people who know what they are doing, as far as AOL is concerned?"

With the tech training in the last year, it's true. My call center had a very high first time fix rate for calls, and mine was 79% before I left...whereas for most it averaged around 40%.

When I was first hired by AOL, they had very good benefits, and also made you take a test...this weeded out 4 of 5 potential workers. Then you had a class, a 3 week one, and they had 3 more tests, and you had to pass all 3, and 90 out of 110 on the tests or higher, to make it.

Well this asshole named *NAME DELETED* decided that this cost the company too much, and it would be cheaper not to teach people how to think, but to just teach them the answers to the 50 top problems that came up every week..then the tests were eliminated...then they hired anyone, even a few who had never used the Internet or a computer before.

So we started getting calls from people who had been told by tech support to format their drive, and then to call back in (someone who obviously wanted his call time down, as you get 7:30 per call). This one poor sucker had been told o delete off windows, get to the DOS prompt, and call back in...when I had him type in "Dir /w" or any command, it said "bad command or file name", so obviously the retarded tech had told him to delete off the folder with command.com in it!

I met people on the floor who said AOL did not support telnet connections, who in dropping to DOS to delete off the temporary Internet files had deleted off windows...

And techs would lie to get their call times down a lot too. Toward the end, they told us we had to do one call 1 resolution..and we were no longer rated for promotion on first time fix rate...so in other words, you had only an incentive to get someone off the phone and telsaved first, solutions were ancillary. There are good techs, but most of them were being fired when I quit...most of them refuse to offer telsave, and tend to be very left-brained..so they hate the transfers Saves send over to have us fix since that queue typically lies to them that we can fix hardware like monitors over the phone, and those calls are long. But most of the new people are relying on the Sherlock AI to do their thinking for them. but I'm sure you know, that for every computer problem there are several answers, and you just have to try a few to get the right one, right? Well, the Sherlock assumes that there is only 1 answer to every problem..and with techs under time pressure, do you think they are going to care if they get it right?

Most common answers are those mentioned above, along with Deleting and Reinstalling AOL, deleting the AOL adapter and rebooting, and then changing the modem string...had gotten calls where some people had put in a modem string that said a swear word and didn't snap when the tech had them put it in..or had some other ridiculous problem. I was successful as a tech cuz I was willing to learn and talked to older techs who had proven themselves beforehand...but the techs on the floor now are little smarter than the members themselves, and just read answers from a screen. We were even told we could no longer send out email to help members anymore..that we could make a request in the near future to have the Philippines call center send one, and the people down there speak tagalog..they just follow screen prompts and are unfamiliar with English...so guess what type of pre-written form advice they send out?

The new Techs are stupid...plain and simple. no training except to classify the caller into 1 of 4 groups, irate, hesitant...etc...and follow the manipulation techniques posted on the pod wall to get them calmed down and send them on their way...not necessarily having to solve the problem. Like a friend mentioned, we (techs) are solely a marketing ploy, not rated for effectiveness anymore...like having a free doctor who gives vague and worthless advice. We were even getting people toward the end who were completely illiterate..and we had to describe what "Start" looked like...and they couldn't find it, didn't want their children who were literate to do it for them (pride I guess), but we couldn't drop them and paid for it by getting longer call times...We were (also) told from the beginning that despite our really being responsible for keeping people on the service, we were considered a money loser...not part of the overall product scheme...hence the invention and need for Telsave, CUC, "Traveller's Advantage", etc....

"I've heard stories of people being told to have the phone company come to their house, dig up their yard, and check the actual phone cables. Have you heard any such tech horror stories?"

Yes, this is the official company line about being disconnected. It's a lie, too. AOL doesn't have enough phone lines or modems to answer and keep on most of the calls..and if you'll check, the global.org , after a "mysterious" update sometimes while getting off of AOL, will get bigger and you'll receive tons of disconnects. then the standard line is either 1. your modem's software needs to be updated, 2. you have thunderstorms in your area, 3. your phone line has too much noise, have your phone company check it out. I even took a three way call with a phone company tech and a member one time, and his phone lines were fine, he could connect to an ISP other than AOL at 52,000 no problem, but on AOL only 26,400...meaning it was AOL’s fault. the company guy told me he had the ability to check the line speed, and it sounded as if he was telling me the truth.

When AOL was telling people a year ago that low line speeds were due to the phone lines being of copper cable in their areas, I believed it..until I went to a friend's house and watched him sign onto AOL with an X2 modem at 26,400 and a disconnect, too...but he signed onto Earthlink at 44,000 no problem. So obviously AOL didn't have enough lines and was disconnecting people or having them connect at a lower speed. With me, I was using a USR 56k/V.90 modem, and had the same problem, until I read on the 'net about a site that said that if your ISP hadn't truly updated their v.90 software, it would disconnect you...so add in s32=66 to the modem init. line...and I tried that, got through at 52K also every time I tried...meaning that AOL was pulling some crap here, too! So it is AOL lying, I'm suspecting again.

...in some areas, AOL’s web servers have cached so much onto them they simply cannot get to any web sites not already cached..so there were entire area codes no one could get into the web at all. We'd have some area codes call in for days...no matter what we would change, nada..AOL works through a proxy server on AOL 3 and 4, and we were told that if everyone held down the control button and pressed reload, it would shut down the servers.....so not to give that recommendation out too much....AOL 5.0 uses ppp, so it might decline with problems there..and is why they are pushing it despite the problems..that and stock price!

I personally think AOL is purposely committing insurance like fraud...you know, charge people for something they never will actually get.

"I've been reading the newsgroups, and getting mail from AOL members, for almost a year and a half now. When a pattern starts emerging, you can't blame the members anymore. AOL has to be at fault."

Yes, exactly! That's what kept pissing me off...NYC has been in the red (more than 50% of it's lines being down) for almost a year...and they still wanted us to lie and tell the people we were working on fixing the problem. Yeah, right. A full freaking year? With no change?

Why doesn't any of this surprise me? Could it be because AOL has a long history of lying to customers, neglecting actual repair needs and improvements, and blaming the user for problems? Nah, couldn't be...(that last part was sarcastic, for those who can't tell) Well, do you have a few tech stories showing AOLamers to be the morons we know them to be?

Certainly. Okay, two stories:

The first is from a team lead at AOL...a mentor or trainer on your team, who answers phone calls and tends to know more than other people.

He had a call from a woman who had just installed AOL 3.0. The lady had complained that after wards her screen kept flickering. He had been helping her trying to find out the cause of the problem, and during it she kept saying "ahh" "ouch " etc, and it sounded like she was flinching each time.

He asked her why she was making the sounds, and she said that there were sparks flying out of her computer and almost hitting her. He asked her if the screen was flickering each time it sparked, and she said yes. Apparently, when she sat down to work on the computer, she had poured herself some coffee but had accidentally spilled a lot of it onto the computer, and it was shorting out!

He had to fight with her a little to do it, but he had her shut down the computer and told her to wait until it was dry, and to call a computer repair person.

Second story...I had a call form a guy who was just plain obnoxious. He was complaining that his AOL wasn't working that the graphics were fuzzy and unclear...usually this just requires purging the main.idx cache and then increasing it back up to 20 mb after signing on to AOL. Well the guy hadn't listened to the voice prompt and turned on his computer...so we had to wait 3 minutes while he went into another room, got by his computer, plugged it in, and then turned it on.....

When it finished booting, he really started to kvetch, and when he double clicked AOL, he started practically screaming...her couldn't find any of the icons, kept yelling about how blurry it was for another three minutes...then started to lightly chuckle.."oh dear, I forgot to put on my glasses! Oh there they are, everything is fine, sorry about that."

The fucking moron didn't even take telsave, either.....7 minutes wasted.

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