Frequently asked questions about using PCs at college and dealing with technical support.
Here are some frequently asked questions about using PCs at college and dealing with technical support.
Should I buy? Should I buy new?
Yes and yes. You’ve already spent a king’s ransom (or somebody else has if your child was lucky enough to receive scholarship money) on educating your young charge. Don’t skimp out now. This is the most important learning tool your child will have with them, and the ROI is undeniable. That old PC you’d really like to send them off with does not have the muscle needed, and this is prior to the new requirements being dictated by the three V’s – Video, Violence (spam, malware, et al.) and Vista.
Should I buy a laptop or a desktop?
Laptop. Get a lock and enable biometrics if it comes equipped with fingerprint scanning. With wireless LANs pervasive at most campuses, and libraries resource-constrained, this has become a no-brainer.
Don’t colleges and universities provide guidance on what the approved PC is for their school?
Yes. However, no two schools are alike. The answer varies based views on willingness to assume/not assume liability and risk, and provide support. Some schools (as part of their fees) provide a school-issued PC and on-campus support. Others just say it is advisable students have their own PC when classes start. There are all variety of options in between. These include dealing in person or online with a school’s bookstore, which may or may not be part of the school, and may or may not provide on-campus support.
In my case, our UFL orientation package had a nice discount from Dell if we gave Dell a UFL code when ordering. Rather than deal with the UFL bookstore, and already owning two Dell PCs, we bought not only the PC but also the extended warranty (more on this later) figuring a combination of Dell and UFL’s IT group could support the PC.
What this means for you is that the first thing to find out is which arrangement is the school’s recommended approach to acquiring and getting support for a PC. But before you buy, do some research and ask the following:
* If a school has a deal with a vendor, is it exclusive? This is knowledge you will need for leverage if and when things go wrong.
* Is there on-campus support of the vendor?
– Is the support coming from students working their way through school as part of the school’s IT shop? If so how much training do they get?
– Is support supplied directly by the vendor’s certified on-site technicians?
– If supplied by the vendor, is it outsourced? (Dell’s physical technical support comes from a third party.)
* How long does it take to get an appointment on average if there is a problem?
* Does the school and/or vendor supply a loaner while the faulty PC is being repaired?
* What is the policy about supporting PCs that are no longer under warrantee?
Since schools are constantly taking steps to insure the performance and safety of their networks, and the vast majority of problems are software problems – incompatibility, lack of updating apps by the user, password and ID changing challenges, malicious intrusion related – why should I worry? In fact, college kids seem better prepared to deal with these challenges then you or me. Isn’t my kid covered? Why get involved, especially up front?
The answer is because you must. Ask yourself the following questions:
* How long could I last without a PC, or at least a loaner?
* How often do I back up my critical data?
* Is it down just on my hard drive and/or is it backed up on external storage?
* How often do I run scans for viruses, rootkits, bots, Trojan horses, etc.?
* How much time do I have to spend dealing with a call center to resolve a problem?
* How much responsibility do I wish to assume for installing parts and shipping things back to vendors?
* Do I know where all of the documentation is for dealing with the tech support of a vendor?
* Do I have copies of all of my applications, along with the re-installation software for the operating system? (Dell and others, apparently for cost reasons, no longer ship physical media for rebooting operating systems. They seem to be playing the odds that most problems are not OS- related and are software issues, thus the partitioning on new PCs that enables users to restore their machines to prior safe static state is deemed good enough. Guess what? Not true if you have a hard drive failure.)
* If I am a Windows user, do I really know the impact of Vista on my current device? Microsoft is gearing up its call centers for this tsunami, as are the PC vendors, but whom am I going to call first? Shouldn’t it be the PC vendor, since they know whether my machine is Vista-able?
Now imagine yourself as a college kid. While statistically the probability of a hardware crash may be small, this is not about probability; it is about what happens when it is your child. Need I say more?
OK, so you’ve raised a good point about external storage rather than blind faith about hitting the restore button on the PC. What’s a parent or school to do if the kids refuse or forget to back up their stuff?
Get proactive. PC vendors want to get into the managed services business, and what better place than with large captive audiences? Online storage and security in college environments are bigger priorities than hosted apps. Ask the college or university your child will attend if they plan to offer nightly backup as a managed service. If no, ask why not. Isn’t this the best way to protect the intellectual property of the students?
Ask them if they are planning to require their recommended PC vendors to offer all qualified students free storage for the entire time they are enrolled in school. Why? Because nobody should have to live in fear of being wiped out. Schools have the buying power as enterprises (UFL does $10 million-plus a year with Dell alone) to demand this as a pay-to-play item. Since this is on the horizon most schools have not thought it through. If you copy and paste nothing else from this list, do so with this response, and send it along.
You mentioned earlier about extended warrantee issues, what are they?
Read the fine print. Did you know that most PC vendors give you a very short grace period to return a new PC that turns out to be a lemon? With Dell it is 21 days. (Did I mention my son’s PC was actually not the one we originally ordered which was returned to Dell the day after it arrived because its wireless LAN card would not associate with any wireless LANs)? Under your warrantee and extended one, under various conditions and caveats, you are given permission to have the vendor use you as their remote technician to fix your problem.
Think of this as that lemon you bought from the car dealer can’t be returned less than a month after you drove it off the lot, and now you have the wonderful opportunity of having the car manufacturer send you parts so their remote technicians can walk you through installing and testing them. I wish I could come up with a product based on this model, especially when I can charge extra under many conditions. There are other little “gotcha” items too numerous to discuss that you really need to read before you purchase. Go online to the vendor you are considering. There is no substitute to being an educated consumer.
You said you have some tips on resolving and/or escalating problems. What are they?
This entire experience has inspired me to make remediation of product problems, and advising vendors on ways to become more customer-friendly, in experience and not just by declaration, a core part of my consulting practice and possibly the topic of a small handbook. (E-mail me if you’d like to discuss your challenges in depth). That said, below are a few pointers almost all of which are useful not just when dealing with IT issues related to yourself or your child, but also anytime you are engaged with remote technical support:
* Have all of your documentation easily accessible for when you finally get past the automated attendant and reach a technician. Otherwise you are just asking for more delays. Make sure you have any and all discs for various apps available so you can ask questions if need be.
* Set a time limit on:
– How long you are willing to invest in “resolving your issue” in total. Understand this means time to get things working and time to re-install software, OS and apps, and all of the updates.
– How long you are willing to give a technician before you escalate the problem, based on your view, and not theirs, of whether you are making progress. Do not let the technician make you go through steps you have already tried. Document all error messages you received. Support people are trained to go in a certain order. This can be an excruciating waste of your time.
* Document everyone you spoke to, for how long and where they left you in resolving your problem.
* Don’t lose your temper. Call centers deal with angry people all the time. Other than venting and making you feel good, it will only slow down the process of reaching resolution.
* If you reach an impasse and choose to escalate:
– Always ask for not just a supervisor, but for one who is empowered to make a decision regarding your specific issue. This is critical, since call centers are no longer judged on just how fast they get you off the phone but also on how often they can resolve an issue in one call. Resolution means them making a decision. The first person you speak to may not be empowered to negotiate with you or override company policies, and the second might not be either. Insist on getting to somebody who can make a decision. It turns out, for instance, that Dell has 16,000 support people and 1,000 are empowered to make sure that people like you and me don’t ever converse with the VP of Customer Experience. I was never directed to such a person, and only learned of their existence from the aforementioned VP.
– Know before you speak to the next person up the line precisely what will make you satisfied. This is about you getting what you want and is convenient for you, and not about what is convenient for the vendor.
– Know what is in the fine print of your purchase agreement so you can articulate your reasons as to why they should bend the rules if that is what is necessary.
* When somebody says they are sorry, tell them that while you appreciate their sympathy they are wasting precious time that would be better spent fixing your problem.
* If you can’t understand the support person ask for somebody else, immediately.
* Always, always get a call-back number and e-mail address.
* Never hang up without the name and badge number of the supervisor of the person you spoke with if you did not get satisfaction, and the time you spoke to them. If you do get satisfaction, it is always good to e-mail the supervisor that you were happy with their employee because you never know when that person may come in handy again.
* If you are not getting satisfaction – that is, you feel you have been wronged and company policies are an obstacle – don’t:
– Threaten that you will take your business elsewhere, because the reality is they really don’t care
– Threaten to go to the press, since the likelihood of them caring about your particular problem is very low unless you have uncovered some truly fatal flaw in a vendor’s products or practices and have all of the documentation.
* If you are not getting satisfaction, and this is for the college problems, do:
– Find out who the responsible party is for supervising support, and/or vendor relations, depending on the way in which your PC was purchased and is being supported. A call to the president’s office will get you the needed contact information.
– Call the responsible party. Do not e-mail. The mission of the IT people at colleges and universities is to make sure there are no surprises for anyone in the community, whether they are enterprise users or students. While vendors like to segment the enterprise from the student users, administrators don’t see it that way – there are enormous consequences when students are unhappy, especially given the viral nature of their communications. The last thing a school wants is angry parents. All of these institutions now have active chat lines for parents, and what vendors seem to fail to appreciate is just how lethal the combination of student-to-student, student-to-parent, parent-to-parent, and student-and-parent-to-school, can be to a company’s brand. The landscape of IT is littered with tarnished brands which underestimated the speed at which a brand can be diminished and the cost of trying to repair the damage. Colleges and universities have lots of issues with all of their vendors, and are always looking for leverage. They love a well-documented horror story.
– Find out from the institution’s relationship manager who on the vendor side is responsible for their account. Call (don’t e-mail) them. They can be your advocate.
– When all else fails, get the name of the VP of Customer Service. Call their secretary. Be courteous. Be brief. State your case and what you want, and ask when you can expect to be contacted. If you are not contacted (very rare indeed if you do this correctly), call back.
* As a backup, become familiar with www.realhuman.com, and find a computer services company near where your child goes to school who can provide the kind of service you believe they need.
* Be prepared for trench warfare over time frames that are unacceptable for not just kids in college, but for any business as well. If you are correct, stick to your guns.
All of this is not a guarantee for success, since we all know there are no guarantees in life, but it can’t hurt.
Peter Bernstein is President of Peter A. Bernstein Associates.
