Posted By: Margaret Pozzini

By Jon Swartz, USA TODAYMon Nov 6, 7:00 AM ET

SAN FRANCISCO - Jesse Berrett thought he was getting a bargain when he ordered high-speed Internet and phone service from his Internet service provider in September.

ADVERTISEMENT

if (window.yzq_a == null) document.write("");if (window.yzq_a)
{
yzq_a('p', 'P=IFWPO0LaS.btY2JY0q9MGgQmSDRIwkVQIn8ADRJP&T=1e8dk5v1n%2fX%3d1162879615%2fE%3d57018461%2fR%3dnews%2fK%3d5%2fV%3d1.1%2fW%3d8%2fY%3dYAHOO%2fF%3d1822311899%2fH%3dY2FjaGVoaW50PSJuZXdzIiBjb250ZW50PSJTQU47SW50ZXJuZXQ7c2VydmljZSBwcm92aWRlcjtpdDtoZWxwO1NhbjtJdDtob3VzZTt0ZWNobm9sb2d5O2hvbWU7ZG9sbGFyO1BDcztEVkQ7dmlkZW87SG9tZTtpbnZlc3RtZW50O3ByaW50ZXJzO3NlY3VyaXR5O0NpcmN1aXQ7d2lyZWxlc3MgbmV0d29yaztidXNpbmVzcztjb252ZXJnZW5jZTt2aWNlIHByZXNpZGVudDt3aGl0ZTtjaXJjdWl0O2VCYXk7IiByZWZ1cmw9IiIgdG9waWNzPSIi%2fS%3d1%2fJ%3d8CA949D1');
yzq_a('a', '&U=13a33v057%2fN%3dSfpCAEJe5tQ-%2fC%3d555469.9388392.10231630.2498248%2fD%3dLREC%2fB%3d4063631');
}

What he got instead was customer-support hell.

After he received a modem and plugged it in, Internet service worked sporadically, and crackling sounds marred the phone line, says Berrett. Since then, he has pleaded with support workers, yelled, threatened, lost sleep, vowed to quit the service and banged his phone for emphasis.

For more than six hours, he was transferred or disconnected trying to find someone who could help him. "The more I wanted to reach them, the harder it was to get them on the phone," says Berrett, 40, a teacher at University High School in San Francisco. "It was like a bad relationship."

Eventually, he got the ISP to send a technician to his house. The technician showed up late. The issue is still unresolved.

The tussle to tame technology is not new. With many tech options, getting gadgets to work together isn't easy. Consumers are fumbling through thick manuals, holding on customer-support phone lines, searching for tech experts or driving themselves mad. They're also losing patience, sleep and tempers, says a survey of 2,551 Americans, released today by Harris Interactive and software firm RightNow Technologies.

About 85% of those polled said they've become so flustered, they've ended up swearing, shouting, experiencing chest pains, crying or smashing things. Slightly more than half said not being able to get a live person on the phone was their greatest frustration, according to the Oct. 9-11 survey. Seven out of 10 people polled said representatives weren't trained adequately.

The findings illustrate the growing anxiety of U.S. consumers as they buy more gadgets for home use and expect them to work out of the box. And they reflect the challenges vendors will face during the holiday shopping season, when they are typically deluged with customer-support phone calls.

The potential financial consequences for the multibillion-dollar home-PC and consumer-electronics industries are huge, say tech analysts. The difference between companies boasting superior support and those who stumble translates to revenue and market share during what is traditionally the busiest quarter for tech vendors, says Roger Kay, president of technology consultancy Endpoint Technologies Associates.

If support problems fester, companies face the danger not only of losing customers but of those disgruntled users warning others, Kay says.

"As the Internet has sped up the consumer experience, customer expectations are higher," says Greg Gianforte, CEO of RightNow Technologies, a company that helps Electronic Arts, Nikon and others provide better customer service. "Customer service is not always worse, but that's the perception."

Products provoking the most frustration: PCs, digital cameras and DVD players. Consumers typically have trouble getting them to work together.

Wringing in the new year

Consumer annoyance comes at a time when many are distracted by holiday shopping and travel plans, says Zohar Adner, a stress-release coach in New York.

That might drive some angst-filled customers to want to wring a customer rep's neck instead of ring in the new year, says Tim O'Brien, director of The Institute for Stress Management and Performance Improvement. "Consumers' expectations are colored by impatience: They're always in a hurry, stressed."

Heightening anxiety are cumbersome technical manuals and the limited customer-support resources of some companies that treat their service centers as afterthoughts, Adner says. It also doesn't help when the engineers and designers of some products assume that if they understand how gizmos work, so should everyone else.

Electronic Arts (ERTS), publisher of Madden NFL 07 and other popular video games, takes pains to ensure product development makes future versions of games even easier to play, says Boyd Beasley, senior director of customer support. What's more, it relies heavily on automated responses posted on its website and phone system to handle tens of millions of customer queries this year. It fielded 1 million such queries in 2001.

"We do as much as we can," Beasley says.

But for every user-friendly product, such as Apple's (AAPL) iPod or the Sony (SNE) PlayStation, there are scores of head-scratching tech products.

"The PC, Web and mobile industries need to do a better job," says Ben Shneiderman, a professor at the University of Maryland who specializes in human-computer interaction. "Home stereos and VCRs once frustrated consumers before vendors made designs simpler. The same is occurring with computing devices. But this is a tougher evolution because advances in technology are so fast."

The benefits of simple, elegant products extend beyond goodwill from customers. Companies that excel in usability can improve their return on such investment more than 10,000 times, estimates Randolph Bias, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin's School of Information and co-author of Cost-Justifying Usability.

The landscape, in turn, has created a "great opportunity" for vendors to shine in customer support and pick up customers, Gianforte says.

Apple and Sony generally earn high marks for support because their technicians understand their products well and tend to be long-term employees, tech analyst Kay says.

Many companies have taken to posting solutions to frequently asked questions, in the order of importance, on their websites. That has eliminated customer-service calls by 50% to 70%, Gianforte says. Others make information on overnight shipping and gift-wrapping more prominent during the holiday season, he says.

At the least, companies should immediately respond to customers' e-mail, letting clients know that they are working on the problem, Gianforte says. (Only 42% of those polled by Harris said their e-mail or phone calls were answered promptly.)

A cottage industry

Shortcomings in customer support have spawned a cottage industry of handy, tech-savvy men and women who visit homes to help consumers with their devices - like doctors making house calls. They usually charge by the hour.

On a national scale, consumer-electronics chains see a clear economic opportunity, as TV, audio and video technologies converge and can be interconnected. They typically charge flat rates of $100 to $250, depending on the task. Among them:

• CompUSA will soon announce enhanced tech support for consumers and small businesses with PCs, printers, digital cameras, iPods, MP3s, external hard drives and software. It's also bolstering computer-security options for consumers bedeviled by viruses and spyware, a company spokeswoman says.

• In September, Circuit City Stores (CC) unfurled Firedog, in which technicians help consumers hook up their PC, TV, DVD or music system, regardless of where they bought it, on the same wireless network, among other things. Technicians can also install a home theater.

The new push into services is considered an important element in the success of Circuit City's digital TV business, one of its hottest-selling consumer-electronics items. Sales of its high-margin flat-panel TVs vaulted 100% in the past six quarters.

"The convergence of different technology requires a fair degree of service to make it all work together," says Marc Sieger, senior vice president for services at Circuit City. "We view this as a $20 billion market that is highly fragmented."

• Best Buy's (BBY) 24-hour Geek Squad is an army of more than 11,000 white-shirted men and women with black snap-on ties who help do everything from installing home-theater systems to programming remote controls. Best Buy makes millions in revenue annually from repair, installation and delivery services, most of which comes from computer-related services.

Last month, the company opened a 165,000-square-foot computer-repair center near Louisville to expedite the repair of consumer PCs.

With the prospect of more charges for fixing already expensive gear, most consumers would be resentful. But Gideon Orbach, 34, a chiropractor in New York, says he could only wish he was near the center.

Almost from the moment he bought a $1,400 laptop from a major PC maker late last year, its circuit board was acting up. After 15 calls to the PC maker's tech support hotline and shipping the laptop to a facility in Tennessee, the problem deepened. The "repaired" laptop came back with a different Windows (MSFT) operating system that was incompatible with all of Orbach's software. Exasperated, he eventually bought a Macintosh and sold the forlorn laptop for a loss on eBay.

"If I can cut into (the vendor's) market share by one computer with my story, it will make my day," the soft-spoken Orbach says.

Orbach could vent, as other fretful consumers have. Or he could simply heed stress-management expert O'Brien's advice. O'Brien recommends the QTIP approach, "Quit taking it personally."

The information reported above is property of Yahoo! inc. and reprinted or modified with legitimate permission.