AUSTIN, Texas - The exasperated help-line caller said she
couldn't get her new Dell computer to turn on. Jay Ablinger, a Dell Computer
Corp. technician, made sure the computer was plugged in and then asked the
woman what happened when she pushed the power button.
"I've pushed and pushed on this foot pedal and nothing
happens," the woman replied. "Foot pedal?" the technician
asked. "Yes," the woman said, "this little white foot pedal
with the on switch." The "foot pedal," it turned out, was the
computer's mouse, a hand-operated device that helps to control the
computer's operations.
Personal-computer makers are discovering that it's still a
low-tech world out there. While they are finally having great success
selling PCs to households, they now have to deal with people to whom
monitors and disk drives are a foreign as another language.
"It is rather mystifying to get this nice, beautiful
machine and not know anything about it," says Ed Shuler, a technician
who helps field consumer calls at Dell's headquarters here. "It's going
into unfamiliar territory," adds Gus Kolias, vice president of customer
service and training for Compaq Computer Corp. "People are looking for
a comfort level."
Only two years ago, most calls to PC help lines came from
techies needing help on complex problems. But now, with computer sales to
homes exploding as new "multimedia" functions gain mass appeal, PC
makers say that as many as 70% of their calls come from rank novices. Partly
because of the volume of calls, some computer companies have started
charging help-line users.
The questions are often so basic that they could have been
answered by opening the manual that comes with every machine. One woman
called Dell's toll-free line to ask how to install batteries in her laptop.
When told that the directions were on the first page of the manual, says
Steve Smith, Dell director of technical support, the woman replied angrily,
"I just paid $2,000 for this damn thing, and I'm not going to read a
book."
Indeed, it seems that these buyers rarely refer to a manual
when a phone is at hand. "If there is a book and a phone and they're
side by side, the phone wins time after time," says Craig McQuilkin,
manager of service marketing for AST Research, Inc. in Irvine, Calif.
"It's a phenomenon of people wanting to talk to people."
And do they ever. Compaq's help center in Houston, Texas, is
inundated by some 8,000 consumer calls a day, with inquiries like this one
related by technician John Wolf: "A frustrated customer called, who
said her brand new Contura would not work. She said she had unpacked the
unit, plugged it in, opened it up and sat there for 20 minutes waiting for
something to happen. When asked what happened when she pressed the power
switch, she asked, 'What power switch?'"
Seemingly simple computer features baffle some users. So
many people have called to ask where the "any" key is when
"Press Any Key" flashes on the screen that Compaq is considering
changing the command to "Press Return Key."
Some people can't figure out the mouse. Tamra Eagle, an AST
technical support supervisor, says one customer complained that her mouse
was hard to control with the "dust cover" on. The cover turned out
to be the plastic bag the mouse was packaged in. Dell technician Wayne
Zieschang says one of his customers held the mouse and pointed it at the
screen, all the while clicking madly. The customer got no response because
the mouse works only if it's moved over a flat surface.
Disk drives are another bugaboo. Compaq technician Brent
Sullivan says a customer was having trouble reading word-processing files
from his old diskettes. After troubleshooting for magnets and heat failed to
diagnose the problem, Mr. Sullivan asked what else was being done with the
diskette. The customer's response: "I put a label on the diskette, roll
it into the typewriter..."
At AST, another customer dutifully complied with a
technician's request that she send in a copy of a defective floppy disk. A
letter from the customer arrived a few days later, along with a Xerox copy
of the floppy. And at Dell, a technician advised his customer to put his
troubled floppy back in the drive and "close the door." Asking the
technician to "hold on," the customer put the phone down and was
heard walking over to shut the door to his room. The technician meant the
door to his floppy drive.
The software inside the computer can be equally befuddling.
A Dell customer called to say he couldn't get his computer to fax anything.
After 40 minutes of troubleshooting, the technician discovered the man was
trying to fax a piece of paper by holding it in front of the monitor screen
and hitting the "send" key.
Another Dell customer needed help setting up a new program,
so Dell technician Gary Rock referred him to the local Egghead. "Yeah,
I got me a couple of friends," the customer replied. When told Egghead
was a software store, the man said, "Oh! I thought you meant for me to
find a couple of geeks."
No realizing how fragile computers can be, some people end
up damaging parts beyond repair. A Dell customer called to complain that his
keyboard no longer worked. He had cleaned it, he said, filling up his tub
with soap and water and soaking his keyboard for a day, and then removing
all the keys and washing them individually.
Computers make some people paranoid. A Dell technician,
Morgan Vergara, says he once calmed a man who became enraged because
"his computer had told him he was bad and an invalid." Mr. Vergara
patiently explained that the computer's "bad command" and
"invalid" responses shouldn't be taken personally.
These days PC-help technicians increasingly find themselves
taking on the role of amateur psychologists. Mr. Shuler, the Dell
technician, who once worked as a psychiatric nurse, says he defused a
potential domestic fight by soothingly talking a man through a computer
problem after the man had screamed threats at his wife and children in the
background.
There are also the lonely hearts who seek out human contact,
even if it happens to be a computer techie. One man from New Hampshire calls
Dell every time he experiences a life crisis. He gets a technician to walk
him through some contrived problem with his computer, apparently feeling
uplifted by the process.
"A lot of people want reassurance," says Mr.
Shuler.
