Call Centers, Qualifications, and Clowns

Today's New York Times has a very interesting letter-to-the-editor. It's from a college student who works part-time in her university's financial-aid call center. Through this experience she has become very cynical. She reports how supervisors emphasize "staying on script," staying cool no matter how heart-wrenching the problem, and "giving a short wait time" rather than actually resolve the caller's financial aid problems. She basically says the whole thing is a charade whose, possibly unintended, most serious effect is to get people to sign up for a lifetime of debt.

Well, when we call into Cox, use its chat facilities, or post on this forum and engage with Cox's "Social Media Specialists" we're essentially dealing with a call center. And I suspect many of the behind-the-scenes realities are very similar to what the student describes at the financial-aid call center. But there's one very important difference: the financial-aid call center deals almost completely with bureaucratic/administrative issues ("fill in form #xyz"), but Cox's is dealing with a complex technology.

I would be very surprised if, like other corporations, Cox does not try to cut costs by hiring people with minimal technical education to work in these call centers. My previous employer has an IT department with over 100 employees, but only three of them actually have degrees in computer science. The reason was that the employer did not want to pay the salaries required to get people with computer science degrees.

Many of the people working there without such degrees are smart and dedicated. But I can tell you from personal experience there is a world of difference between someone whose technical knowledge of computers is no deeper than knowing how to program macros in Microsoft Word versus someone who's been taught to model mathematically database access times depending on hardware speeds and database configurations, how to set up a domain name service, the history and whys & wherefores of email, the built-in error mechanisms of TCP/IP, and to program in half-a-dozen languages, from assembly languages to C++ to Python. I can also tell you from personal experience that there's a world of difference between IT operations, like my former employer's, that hire minimally qualified people to staff its IT department versus those that spend more to hire people with engineering and computer science degrees who really understand the technology. I can recount faux pas after faux pas at my former employer, where the IT staff was simply too poorly educated and too inexperienced to do a good job.

Also, let me add, that at a company like Cox perhaps 90% of all tech-support calls really do not require lots of technical knowledge to resolve. For such instances I have no problem with Cox hiring people without much technical education to staff such jobs. But in a technical industry, there's always strong temptation to go beyond the limits of one's own knowledge and either try to solve problems one is not qualified to solve, or to make up technical "explanations" that are just wrong and waste the time of both the support agent and customer. Here lies the transition from tech support to clown support: when someone doesn't know enough to know what they don't know, then they become a clown in a tragedy. (Here play Canio's arietta from Pagliacci.)

Which brings me to the quality of Cox technical support. Do you know what are Cox's requirements for IT support positions? Do you have any experience where Cox's support people showed evidence of at least undergraduate training in computer science? Do you have any experience with Cox tech support where the agent clearly was not technically qualified to address your issue? What's been your experience?

Mine has not been good.