tech support

At work, we have a helpdesk that serves the whole company, from sales and marketing to engineering and operations. Sometimes the person on the other side of the line knows less about my system than I do, and sometimes he/she is really helpful in solving my problem.

While I was waiting for a helpdesk guy to debug my frozen Xsession a couple of days ago, I was thinking that a good optimization for a helpdesk/tech support system might be some kind of user categorization.

From what I hear, there are usually several "tiers" of tech support. The first tier consists of people reading from scripts and following flowcharts. If the problem doesn't fit in the flowchart or is otherwise too complex, the customer is escalated to the next tier. The frustrating thing about this is that every time I call with a new problem, I have to convince the first tier people that I know what I'm talking about, so they'll escalate me up. Ideally, I should get credit for not asking stupid questions, and get automatically escalated when I call again.

Companies store all kinds of information about users anyway, why shouldn't they store a couple extra bits of data which describe the user's level of technical expertise? Let's take DSL as an example. If a user calls up her ISP and says that she can't ping the gateway, she should get some "techie-points" and the call should probably be routed to someone who actually knows what ping is. She should get bonus points for having run traceroute and having correctly rebooted all applicable hardware, and so on. Net result: tech-savvy users have good customer support experiences, companies don't waste knowledgeable support resources on clueless users, and everybody wins.

I wonder if Speakeasy does this already. The only reason I would think not is that I've never talked to a support person there who didn't know what he/she was talking about.