Author: Clickford, Steven M.

How to “throw away the script” to Technical Support

Clickford, Steven M.

People call technical support and say

“It doesn’t work”

[You’re the genius, you know everything, fix it!]

In reality these people are not as technical as you think. Technical support is not some fantasy, cinematic with Star Wars like CGI projected displays.

They are offices, with generic Herman Miller or Steelcase cubicles, with generation or two old enterprise class desktops probably running Enterprise class Windows 7, and telephones that are DCP or ISDN, two wired landline like terminals functioning as Automatic Call Distribution as the telephone.

When you call a technical support, you go to Tier 1, and depending on your rap sheet with your brand (or vendor) it may route you to a better or worse “agent” because the special PBX and the computer that handles the number and your case history are plugged together.

How do you “throw away the script”?

SPECIFIC INFORMATION REQUIRED

  • When did the issue occur? Was there another incident prior to?
  • What happened at the time of the incident? Did this happen at the same time?
  • Can you reproduce this problem?
  • Can you elaborate the way of reproducing the problem?
  • If this is an Internet provider and you don’t have access to the “internet”, can you “Ping” through a “console”, “terminal” or “command line prompt” to Google’s Well Known IP Address of 8.8.8.8? Do you see success or error messages?
  • If you have any understanding of any technical matters, mention that.

If you can be coherent and explain things in a thought out manner without acting like wishy-washy or “well something is working, but I am not sure, because I dunno something may not work but I do not know for sure” will delay the line of communication to the goal of restoration.

Answer those specifics, you can get to Tier II or III. Tier III for most vendors Tier III is developer, engineers, the VIP circle. They will highly respect you if YOU continue Proper Line of Communication of Specificity. Acting like girl in Clueless back to Tier I in less than New York Second!

 

Assume all call centers are not local. The agent doesn’t now East Manchester, NH to Manchester, California. They don’t have access vital information to the “last mile boxes” or the cell tower, or the code in Office 365. You want the keys to the VIP, you prove yourself to show you know something.

Take responsibility. The Vendor has no right to treat a high schooler full access support if that high schooler minded person cannot explain themself. It’s called advocacy. Consumer class people, under-informed (do not confuse this as under-educated), people living in poor communities, are not fully aware that enterprise class companies are at larger scale and are unfortunately less “neighborly” and is not as fully intelligent to basic levels of technology.

Act like an adult, talk logically, think methodically. Filter yourself. Think about what is going on at the “agent’s” end. Ignore the TV commercials of what contact center looks like. Think boring thoughts. That’s how society works in an Enterprise World.

#EnterpriseYOURself

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Respect the Tech – The Tech Will Respect YOU

Clickford, Steven M.

 

Today, I was with millennial aged professionals who have no regard to understand not even the basics of IP networking. No respect to Cable TV, no respect to wired Ethernet. These people choose ignorance as bliss, and are cutting costs and reliability, by also buying potentially dangerous cable modems with bad security codes. The husband of this unnamed individual called Comcast’s technical support to say that the consumer-grade wireless service working.

I never call non technical people “stupid”, because I could be technically one myself if coders or other engineers that could look down at me in an arrogant way. I am really disappointed that people I respect refuse to understand the abstract; however it could be expected I understand human services from their view. Kinda a one way street.  This is why I am no longer actively involved in IT especially dealing with techs. I am in IS, or Information Services because I respect, the technology, this requires some smarts, no technology that is “simple” is reliable or even secure. It requires a craft, a very skilled knowledge and mixing telephony and data, which historically required a right brain and a left brain. Few people are ambidextrous when it comes to telephony and IP networks being a single technology.

‘To explain this – to be blunt to “dumb it down” takes hours of a “lab”, a room to test the equipment, take apart a documentation and reword it for a user to understand. The way to deliver the information, project notices, updates to the status of the system. This requires some professional business knowledge (most “technical people” moan and whine about), and the mindset of a technical professional, to give that “end user” the most simplest way to do the most on an information system.

CliMG does not advocate slavery-like language such as “end user”, they are not leachers, if you properly educate them and not slam a device forcing them to go on the Internet that may not be relevant to the device. Feature Access Codes can vary from one system to another.

Guide the user to the direction that leads them to their outcome. Instructing them takes more time out of your day, and they’ll be dependent on one way and not be able to learn more. You give them a candy trail help better them.

Men need to be fired. Control Freaks belong in jail. Women need to take control, IT Departments must be disbanded. IS Departments must come back, with a code of ethics, and a focus on the user, and eliminate the 30-year-old-IT-mindset of move-fast-and-break-things. Deploy both a nuts and bolts with business goals. Staff (“end users”) should be able to understand DNS, DHCP, WINS  in one sentence w laymans terms.

IS Departments should have time to allocate, testing devices from a user, and have proper communication and notices, (communications in the information sense is much different than a technician dealing with communications systems, it’s an oxy moron.)

Clickford Media Group is vowing to change this by sunsetting IT and saying hello again to Information Services.

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Is Worship of IP & IT Turning People Away from the NAB Show?

Clickford, Steven M.1 Comment

I came across this video from the Philly chapter of the SMPTE, the ol engineers group down there. This video is basically goes through a bunch of talking points about how the future is here, and you’d better accept-it-or-GTFO. Futurism such as a cashless world, Apple not selling as many iPhones; more people [are holding their noses as they] adopting Windows 10; People are streaming and cutting the cord, and appears to throwing away plastic like vinyl 40 years ago; and elitiest attitudes against Kodak’s reattempting to become relevant again.

How did the NAB Show come up?

Continue reading →

Victim describes the sins of IT Professionals

Clickford, Steven M.

 

Sick story, and according to the MISAG’s office, nearly 100 domestic violent complaints in the last 3 calendar years, result in men working in Information Technology (IT). And you wonder why I refuse to be in an abusive industry? Because I am tired myself of emotionally abused. This minifigure was raped and her situation was caught on camera intentionally!

Vulgar language is used in this raw video from BCOP-TV in Copenhagen

Peer to Peer SIP Telephony, Will It Work? Part three

Clickford, Steven M.1 Comment

In a previous post, I kinda lost my luster with SIP and WebRTC is just another technology riped with more failures if compared to dial tone.

In the original experiment, I had tested if I could have SIP telephones work peer to peer without much intervention at say an IP PBX or what. In reality, SIP doesn’t work that well in that form, despite Avaya and Aastra selling similar systems over a decade ago.

The test subjects were

  • A Cisco 2801 Router, using Cisco Call Manager Express 8.5 (functioning more for the Voice Register service)_
  • An Avaya 9650 (intended to be a collection to The Museum)
  • Several Mitel IP phones from a friend of mine in Montana (5330s and 5224 self purchased over 5 years ago. Set to SIP from MiNet because I don’t have a functioning ICP phone system)
  • Aastra 480i IP phones (purchased in 2016 to replace some Cisco phones that was a lost cause)

I finally got the Voice Register (for the purposes of this post, these phones act like POTS phones that plug into an Ethernet switch). I also was able to get FXO to finally work with my consumer Xfinity 1FH trunk.

On the Cisco side, the number goes into the voice port and connects to the Private Line Automatic Ringdown to a hunt-group number of 400, set in the voice-register hunt prompt. Members are SIP extensions as set up in voice-register-dn and voice-register-pool (hardware or phone) tags. Inbound calls work fine, as well as outbound calls as well. This never worked previously. Caller ID works fine and all sets can interpret it. Continue reading →

Peer to Peer SIP Telephony, Will It Work? Part two

Clickford, Steven M.2 Comments

Well over a year later, there is a follow up to an earlier focus on Session Initiation Protocol and can it work just having some SIP phones tied together without the expense of time and resources of having a phone system?

In short, if your router is calling you, that call may be a hopeless outcome.

Basically SIP is the modern-day landline with an IP stack, with a functionality similar to the web. You use Safari or Chrome to go onto say Facebook or The Museum. In the SIP context, the phone is the browser, and the telephone number is the Web address.

Search results in the past say you can use SIP without any proxy, gateway, etc. by zero-ing out the said addresses. Therefore these devices can work by dialing the latter portion of the IP address, so if your IP address are in the 192.168.1.0 range, you could call an IP address of one phone of 192.168.1.13 by dialing 13. This is called “Direct IP Calling”, and should remain for this single use case.

If you have some knowledge on this subject, you may ask, well “what’s wrong with that? Isn’t this part of VoIP?” If you want to have SIP be part of the greater cyber world, it has to be done in the form of Uniform Resource Locators or URLs much like melanie at clickford dot net. or steven dot clickford at clickford dot private. SIP requires a bunch of other Internet protocols to be set up simultaneously. SIP was to allegedly be more of an “open standard” to the already open standard of H323, that was a bit more opaque but SIP is just as guilty.

What does this all mean? Some of the major vendors wanted to put some additional features to work more like an office telephone, since SIP is basically a landline with all the standard 19 features you can currently get from your broadband provider, and if you’re a 90s kid, you had the Baby Bell service when Call Waiting alone was $3 x/month. Essentially to have PBX-like features, the vendors had to get creative and make SIP an open standard to troubleshoot and monitor the quality by keeping the logs easy to read. A lot of the forwarding, ACD, and Camp On like features would be done discretely through making a button called Features, that basically opens up to what appears to be web page with scripts to go back to the phone system to activate some feature.

By theory, Mitel, Avaya (Nortel and legacy Lucent), Cisco can operate phones off their native PBX or Key system, but it’s again it becomes a landline with an IP stack. They can work like a home phone, with a couple more “appearances” that acts like a visual call-waiting, and be able to do basic telephone calls.

Another issue is “ghost calls”. This is often referred to be malicious and cause toll fraud, but for isolated, LAN based SIP telephony, this means if a rogue telephone that doesn’t comply to SIP standards, a phone will ring off the hook for hours, maybe days only because the ringing telephone didn’t get a proper SIP signal or because you are calling it by an IP address, or part of one, this can also cause issues.

In the age of wireless, and the erosion of landlines, SIP has matured to be basically a Landline telephone service to modernize that dial tone for sites with office telephones. It’s great for trunking, in fact the only Internet telephony standard that supports Caller ID systematically. When it comes to phones, if you expect it to do a lot of what you have expected in legacy Nortel, Avaya or heck even Cisco, it’s just as functional as a phone you would’ve bought at Radio Shack, if only they were still around to sell disposable IP phones. But this “open” protocol has it’s downsides, it’s open to 1,001 different issues, quirks and if one phone has an older firmware and has a bug and another phone of the same type with newer ones, this would cause even more headaches, as other centralized VOIP systems, the bugs live in the router, brain or server, and not on the end device.

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