Outsoucing - A Horror Story With a Happy Ending

[PT]

This morning, I turned on my computer, and received an error message:
"NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart". After several attempts at
pressing the "enter" key and getting the same message, rebooting several
times and getting the same message, I called Dell Phone Support.



The technician somewhere in India told me that this was a relatively common
problem, and required reinstalling the file in the I386 folder. He then
went through a long sequence of steps to try to reinstall the file from the
Windows XP reinstallation CD. He kept running into problems, getting the
message "Access denied" when we tried accessing the I386 folder.
Eventually, after about an hour on the phone, he told me that several files
had been corrupted, and the only thing left to do was to re-format the hard
drive, reinstall windows, and try to rebuild the system. I was told that
the process requires about 2 - 3 hours to complete.



I decided to do so using a local computer servicing company which had
previously installed Ghost and made a backup image of my hard drive. I
started out by explaining the NTLDR error message. The following is a
nearly verbatim transcript of our conversation"



Local Tech: "Do you have a floppy in the floppy drive?"



Me: "No --- Wait a minute - yes I do! I guess I should remove it?"



Local Tech: "Yes, then reboot"



Me: "It's booting correctly - Is that what the problem was?"



Local Tech: "Yes - That's the message you get when you try to boot from the
floppy drive - It's a standard cryptic MS error message.



So how to I rate the advice the Dell Indian technician provided?



1.. Not only didn't he know the simple and apparently obvious solution to
what is an extremely common problem - a badly designed Windows XP error
message.


2.. Not only did he waste an hour of my time on a fruitless exercise when
a knowledgeable tech could have solved the problem in ten seconds.


3.. But - if I had blindly followed his advice, I would have at best, lost
all the programs, data files and everything else I've added since purchase.


To summarize - this incident has severely shaken my faith in the quality of
Dell support service, I should mention that when I told the local tech of
the procedure that the Dell support tech had followed, and the
recommendation he gave - the local tech told me "those guys don't know very
much - they just follow scripts, and rush you into replacing equipment and
software."

 

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

If you have a problem with Dell support, then contact
Dell support!

Welcome to Dell Support
http://support.dell.com/home.aspx

Welcome to Dell Community Forums
http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/

--
Carey Frisch
Microsoft MVP
Windows XP - Shell/User

Be Smart! Protect your PC!
http://www.microsoft.com/security/protect/

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


| This morning, I turned on my computer, and received an error message:
| "NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart". After several attempts at
| pressing the "enter" key and getting the same message, rebooting several
| times and getting the same message, I called Dell Phone Support.
|
|
|
| The technician somewhere in India told me that this was a relatively common
| problem, and required reinstalling the file in the I386 folder. He then
| went through a long sequence of steps to try to reinstall the file from the
| Windows XP reinstallation CD. He kept running into problems, getting the
| message "Access denied" when we tried accessing the I386 folder.
| Eventually, after about an hour on the phone, he told me that several files
| had been corrupted, and the only thing left to do was to re-format the hard
| drive, reinstall windows, and try to rebuild the system. I was told that
| the process requires about 2 - 3 hours to complete.
|
|
|
| I decided to do so using a local computer servicing company which had
| previously installed Ghost and made a backup image of my hard drive. I
| started out by explaining the NTLDR error message. The following is a
| nearly verbatim transcript of our conversation"
|
|
|
| Local Tech: "Do you have a floppy in the floppy drive?"
|
|
|
| Me: "No --- Wait a minute - yes I do! I guess I should remove it?"
|
|
|
| Local Tech: "Yes, then reboot"
|
|
|
| Me: "It's booting correctly - Is that what the problem was?"
|
|
|
| Local Tech: "Yes - That's the message you get when you try to boot from the
| floppy drive - It's a standard cryptic MS error message.
|
|
|
| So how to I rate the advice the Dell Indian technician provided?
|
|
|
| 1.. Not only didn't he know the simple and apparently obvious solution to
| what is an extremely common problem - a badly designed Windows XP error
| message.
|
|
| 2.. Not only did he waste an hour of my time on a fruitless exercise when
| a knowledgeable tech could have solved the problem in ten seconds.
|
|
| 3.. But - if I had blindly followed his advice, I would have at best, lost
| all the programs, data files and everything else I've added since purchase.
|
|
| To summarize - this incident has severely shaken my faith in the quality of
| Dell support service, I should mention that when I told the local tech of
| the procedure that the Dell support tech had followed, and the
| recommendation he gave - the local tech told me "those guys don't know very
| much - they just follow scripts, and rush you into replacing equipment and
| software."
|
|
| --
| PT
|
|

 

[spread the word]

if you get any error codes , messages, just do a google.com
search to resolve the error hopefully..just put " " on
either side to search for it only..

by the way the standard answer from india tech support is
do a repair , system restore,, or reinstall. don't they
ever use microsofts reference pages?.

 

[Granny the CDO Troll]

I have worked in the same office for 12 years. I was the
office manager for the first 5 years I was there. Two of
the people I work with have been there the whole time I
have. One is an engineer and the other is a "tech" person.
At least once a month the engineer would go running to the
"tech" person completely panicked because something was
horribly wrong and his pc wouldn't boot. The "tech" person
went running over to see what the problem is and ran back
panicked because the pc wouldn't boot and there was an
ominous message that probably meant the computer is shot.
He called another tech to help solve the problem and at
least once the engineer got a new pc. After the 2nd or 3rd
time this happened, I went over to the engineer's office
and pulled the floppy out of the drive and restarted the
pc. AMAZING! It booted. Wow! I only had to do this 7 or 8
times before the engineer started wising up. I don't know
if the "tech" person ever wised up but I am going to find
out. Thanks for telling your sad tale of tech support. It
made me remember all this and now I am considering sticking
a floppy in the "tech" person's pc tomorrow morning just to
see if he still panics.

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

Yes, the old floppy in the A: drive causing the standard "NTLDR
missing" error message is a very common event. And it has been so for
many years, since the advent of WinNT. In fact, this solution is so
common and so obvious that perhaps the telephone tech simply didn't
want to offend you by suggesting that you could have possibly
overlooked it?


Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH

 

[Bruce Chambers]

Greetings --

That's _too_ easy. How about a screensaver that looks like a
BSOD?

http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/bluescreensaver.shtml


Bruce Chambers
--
Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on
having both at once. -- RAH

 

[anon]

Love your name "Granny the CDO Troll". Thanks for giving
me a laugh, I needed it.

 

[Granny the CDO Troll]

Yeah, it's easy but so is he. He is a little pi**ed off at
me right now so I probably shouldn't install anything till
he cools down. He will know it was me who did it and it
won't help his attitude. But later.....

 

[Granny the CDO Troll]

Well, I am Granny, but Kurttrail called me a CDO Troll. I
kinda like it. It suits me. I need to find a way to fit it
onto a vanity plate. Thanks Kurttrail!

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Don't you know that the first level of tech support, you do not talk with a
techician but a lonely operator who is reading a script! If the script does
not conyain your problem, then they must tell you to re-format the hard
drive, for that is their complete technical knownledge they have: If the
problem is not in the script in front of you, then tell the customer to
reformat/reinstall/recover the hard drive.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

In

The technician somewhere in India told me that this was a relatively
common problem,
....

To summarize - this incident has severely shaken my faith in the
quality of Dell support service,

I'm sorry you had a bad experience, and I'm glad your story had a
happy ending. But why do you attribute the problem to
outsourcing? Do you think that only in India are there people who
don't do their job competently?

There are good technicians and there are bad technicians. There
are also technicians who are excellent in one area, and may know
very little about another area. And you can find all qualities of
technicians in the US, as well as in most other parts of the
world.

The only problem I have with this kind of outsourcing is if I get
someone on the phone who has such a strong accent that I can't
understand them. That makes him unable to help me no matter how
much he knows. But I've occasionally run into problems like this
even with technicians located in the United States.

 

[t.cruise]

For the most part, if you have a problem that's other than something basic,
first level support of most major PC makers isn't very good, outsourced or
not. Many tech people in the first support level have little PC knowledge,
and answer problems by typing key words and phrases, and searching a
database, the same as most of us would at Google or the news groups. If
they don't find an answer, many use the phrase: You'll have to reinstall.
Let's face it, the average decent tech person charges between $40 an hour at
the low end, to more than $150 an hour on the high end. Dell and the other
Major PC makers are not paying first level support people anything near $40
an hour. Ergo, an employee with limited PC knowledge, a dependence on the
databases for answers, and the "You'll have to reinstall" if the database
doesn't find a fix. This is a generalization of course, but for the most
part it's true. You can find the answers to many problems faster in the
news groups than by speaking to a first level support tech person. My
problem with outsourcing is that sometimes there's a language barrier that
can't be overcome. My one call with a Dell East Indian led to this
interchange regarding a CD that was missing in my initial shipment, which
tech support had said they'd send to me immediately, and it hadn't arrived
yet:

Me: If you sent the CD, which method of shipping did you use?

Dell: Regular Mail

Me: Do you mean that it was sent using the postal service

Dell: Yes

Me: Was it sent Priority Mail?

Dell: Regular Mail

Me: The U.S. Postal Service doesn't have a classification Regular Mail.
Was it sent Priority Mail or a different class?

Dell: It was sent Regular Mail

Me: (getting frustrated) Did you hear what I just said to you? There is no
such classification as Regular Mail. If it was sent using the postal
service, what class was it sent?

Dell: Regular Mail.

Me: May I please speak with your supervisor?

Dell: I am the head of this department.

At that point I gave up. The missing CD arrived the next day, not by the
U.S. Postal Service, but by UPS Second Day Air.

 

[PT]

Actually, this was the third experience I've had along these lines.

The first was with the flat screen monitor which came with my computer. I
couldn't get the brightness nor contrast controls to function. After
spending an hour with the Indian tech, they sent me a replacement monitor.
The replacement (which was made in Mexico) was an exact duplicate of the
original (which was made in China). The replacement had the exact same
difficulty. I have reluctantly learned to love it.

The second was a problem with a dial-up modem. I can't even recall the
problem, but once again I spent an hour on the phone with India, with a
replacement modem as the solution. In the time between the phone call and
the modem's arrival, I figured out the solution to the problem - some simple
WinXP setting which was suggested by one of the people in this group. So I
sent the replacement back.

 

[cquirke (MVP Win9x)]

This morning, I turned on my computer, and received an error message:
"NTLDR is missing. Press any key to restart".

Local Tech: "Do you have a floppy in the floppy drive?"
Me: "No --- Wait a minute - yes I do! I guess I should remove it?"
Local Tech: "Yes, then reboot"
Me: "It's booting correctly - Is that what the problem was?"

Local Tech: "Yes - That's the message you get when you try to boot from the
floppy drive - It's a standard cryptic MS error message.

So how to I rate the advice the Dell Indian technician provided?

To summarize - this incident has severely shaken my faith in the quality of
Dell support service,

As well it should, for two reasons:
- Dell are only responsable for Dell's PC; your data is fodder
- phone support will always be unable to "see" everything

This is not an outsourcing issue, BTW.

The problem (and other problems besides) could be avoided by:

1) NOT leaving the PC to boot A: before C:, duhh (hint: Boot virus)
2) NOT placing a useless "look for NTLDR" boot sector on 1.44M

The system builder (or you) can do (1); MS can do (2). What's the
point of trying to boot an OS that won't fit on diskette anyway?

--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -

Tech Support: The guys who follow the
'Parade of New Products' with a shovel.