this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2025
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Oh man, my workplace switched to an external IT support company, InfoSys, which pulls basically the same scam.
When you open a ticket, they immediately write something underneath – typically a question that's already answered in the ticket – because it shows up in their statistics as low response times.
Then they'll do shit like split up your ticket into three new tickets for no good reason.
And if you happen to be on holiday for a few days and therefore don't respond, they'll close your tickets due to inactivity.
Then you have to open a new ticket and link to the old ticket, if you can still access it, and then re-answer the same braindead questions again.
Basically, if it's something you can solve yourself, you should, because it will take more time to communicate back and forth with InfoSys.
Fuck! So THAT'S why! I had wondered why the fuck companies would quickly restate my problem "just to confirm" and then take several days to respond after that 🤦🤬
I work in IT and in similar systems, the reason from my perspective to do this is when a ticket comes in a timer will start ticking. Whenever the ball isn't in our court that timer is cancelled. If i set status "pending user" and throw a dumb question it is paused. If more than 10% or whatever amount was agreed on when the contract was signed our company has to pay for not living up to expectations.
There's a lot of rule bending to make this work in our favour.
Of course different providers will use different metrics like how long before the ticket was handled etc.
Online retailers, too. Item goes from ordered to processing to shipping in a half hour. Takes a week or more to go from shipping to shipped.
Item can’t be cancelled without a restock fee if it’s in shipping — which is fine (I guess) if the item takes the provided time estimate to arrive.
Thanks for the name. Though in this case it's more the pattern you should watch out for.
Yeah, I think, it's important to name and shame, because they actively avoid providing the service that they advertise, but I do also expect this to be a common pattern in the industry. If you actually solved problems and did so permanently, you'd be out of business very quickly. External support providers have an inherent interest for things to work as badly as possible, so long as it does not get their contract cancelled.
Naw, PEBKAC and ID10T issues provide an unlimited supply of tickets. Support is a gravy train even when done effectively.
Well, yeah, you might just get pushed out by competitors who supposedly have much lower cost per solved ticket...
Require condition of solved for payment, in the contract?
Then you get other side-effects, like them ignoring or infinitely delaying tickets that are harder to solve. It's a somewhat universal rule of capitalism: As soon as there is a metric for success, the goal is to game that metric as much as possible, because that maximizes the supposed success while minimizing costs.
You can try to define multiple metrics to make this more difficult. And you can set a higher target value than necessary, so that even with the gaming, it's still within an acceptable margin.
But IMHO it's still better to just treat it as a cost of doing business than to invest lots of money to try to make it measurable in an attempt to reduce the money spent.