[discostu]

The reason most tech support is hunt and peck is because the customers don’t know how to usefully describe the problem. 90% of all support calls the info you get out of the customer is “it’s not working”, they can’t describe the symptoms, they can’t describe what changed (usually they say nothing which is almost certainly BS), most of the time they don’t even know what “working” actually means. This leaves the guy on the phone flying completely blind so they have to start with the big obvious ones and slowly work their way through a 20 questions-esque narrowing down of a problem that almost always boils down to you changed a setting you shouldn’t have, or you got some malware.

[MarkL]

The reason most tech support is hunt and peck is because the customers don’t know how to usefully describe the problem. 90% of all support calls the info you get out of the customer is “it’s not working”, they can’t describe the symptoms, they can’t describe what changed (usually they say nothing which is almost certainly BS), most of the time they don’t even know what “working” actually means. This leaves the guy on the phone flying completely blind so they have to start with the big obvious ones and slowly work their way through a 20 questions-esque narrowing down of a problem that almost always boils down to you changed a setting you shouldn’t have, or you got some malware.

Absolutely correct. As someone who spends quite a bit of time doing "level 3 support," I call this sort of customer a "what color is the check engine light" customer.

Unfortunately, all too often those sorts of customers are my company's level1 and level2 support personnel.

Mark