[closeparen]

In high school I worked at a VAR that had partnerships with HP, among others (Cisco, Microsoft, etc). Our partnership gave us access to a special support line where a fluent English speaker picked up quickly, talked to you like you had seen a computer before, didn't enforce a script, and issued a return authorization with minimal hassle.

At that time, only Amazon came close on the consumer side.

[mmooss]

I've seen that option with other major vendors too. It's always worth the extra cost for a business - incidents' internal time to resolution, labor costs, and downtime (which impact user productivity) can drop dramatically.

It also reduces frustration and improves morale for the support staff, who, reasonably, want to deal with professionals.

[halapro]

That gets expensive fast. Most phone support tech is composed of average gents who are given a 60 minutes introduction to the system and wished good luck. So cheap, so many unemployed people to choose from.