How should you treat/deal with Technical Support Representatives?

Whenever I have called a tech support person, they never speak fluent English and sound as if they are of Indonesian decent. They always have a heavy accent and I have a feeling that they are actually on the other side of the world from me! I get so frustrated and I do not want to be rude, I end up saying I have a bad connection and deal with the problem myself. It actually has been only with the Microsoft people, I have only called them in regards to activating an XP OS for myself or customers!

I think we should be courteous and before we call them we should prepare all our questions so that we will not spend a lot of time talking to them. So others needing technical support or help will not wait very long.

Well, I've had some excellent and some horrible experiences with technical support representatives. Some don't know what they're doing (I guess because they're new at their line of work) and then some can walk you through resolving problems in a breeze. I know one cannot resist getting frustrated and angry at these people whenever one encounters a technical problem. All i can say is give them a chance to resolve your problem - don't give them a hard time at the onset of the call. Let them walk you through the steps. Otherwise, the more you get irate and unreasonable, and give them a hard time, the more they will not be able to think straight and resolve your problem. When they cannot resolve your issue, or if the problem persists, then that's the time to get demanding and assertive. When one of them starts mistreating you or give you the run-around, that's the time to let hell loose on earth. LOL!

Being a technician myself and doing the whole phone support thing from time to time, I'd have to say you should be patient. Even if they seem to be talking down to you or if they seem not to know what they are talking about, just be patient and work with them. If they seem to be stating the obvious like asking you if the computer is even turned on, just remember these people assume the lowest common denominator, you'd be surprised at the number of people who call during a power outage wondering why their computer has stopped working, I could tell you some interesting stories. If they seem to know alot less then you do about the problem, well this is probably true, but that's what call escallation is for, the jr. ppl take the call first to weed out the easy problems and if the issue is too difficult they pass it up the ladder until it reaches the lowest ranking person who can solve your problem, many call centres have up to five different call escallation levels, so you may end up speaking to five people before you reach the solution, but remember there is a very good reason for this. If you find yourself frustrated with the person just calm down, I understand your frustration, I used to train the employees for a call centre company, some of those people had barely ever touched a computer, they had to be taught alot before they could answer the phone, but even still they were far from technicians. These people basically read from a script, nothing more then that. The best way to deal with TSR's (Technical Support Representatives) is to tell them the problem in as much detail as possible and relay to them all the steps you completed up to the point of calling them, you may end up jumping up the call escallation a couple of rungs just because you had already done what the first few levels do over the phone, but don't be surprised if they still ask you to do things you claim to have done. They get alot of calls from people who claim to have tried something but really didn't.