Complain about a product or service

The Decline of Proteva

This account of life in Proteva tech support was written by an experienced technician who spent several years with Proteva during the period of its greatest growth. The writer, whose identity is being withheld, now has an excellent position with a respected high-tech firm. The writer's account has been edited slightly for brevity and style.

I was first directed to your page about six months ago by another former tech at Proteva. As I read through the complaints I could only shake my head knowing what was really happening on the other end. I truly feel sorry for the customers that purchase anything from them.

A little background about my stay at Proteva ...

I started with them when they were known as MicroProfessionals Computers. This was around late 1993. When I first joined the tech support department I was grilled on what I knew about the current operating systems -- DOS and Windows 3.1.

The main goal was to get the customer up and running. It didn't matter how long it took. Kindness, patience and understanding were mandatory when talking with customers. The call didn't end until all the customer's questions were answered. I truly enjoyed my job and I think I still have some of the letters that customers wrote to me and the owners praising my work.

The pay was low ($6.00/hr) but I was doing what I wanted to do. The quality of the parts that they used were about average but every computer was built from scratch by six guys in a different part of the building. Every computer was tested before being boxed and shipped. So if it was DOA it was because of some serious mishandling during shipping.

Quotas Imposed

As time went by the owners separated from their parent company and Microprofessionals was on its own. The owners started imposing quotas on the builders. The quotas weren't unachievable but they didn't seem to care about computers being tested anymore. However if a computer was DOA the owners didn't seem to remember saying anything about not testing the computers and the builder would be held accountable for the incident.

A little later things really started to change. We were about to move to a larger building in Posen. The parts started to become sub par. There was one time when tech support was asked to test returned parts so they could be used in new computers. So in these "new" computers were sound cards, modems, and CD-ROM drives that were over a year old and supposedly bad.

After moving they began to expand. A deal was hammered out with Home Shopping Network. New techs and builders were hired. The only problem was that the majority of the people hired had never actually seen a computer. Only a handful of the computers that were built were actually tested. So when a customer received a dead computer we knew that it was because of the people building it.

Quality Declines

The quality of the parts used moved to an all-time low. And we thought that it was hilarious that computers being built for HSN normally had generic parts such as no-name modems and motherboards that I wouldn't even look twice at, no matter how cheap it was.

Needless to say HSN was not happy about the number of complaints coming from their customers. To soothe their worries Proteva (as it was now called) started sending techs down to Clearwater, Florida to sit with the HSN techs and answer questions. I didn't really see the point in this but a free trip to Florida was a free trip.

The attitude from management towards the customer was very hostile now. Before, if a customer didn't want to do the work on a computer him/her self we would arrange to have the computer brought back and worked on.

This was now discouraged. We were to try and talk them into working on or replacing the part themselves. This was not easy as I personally spoke with people that actually didn't know what a screwdriver was and one person that I had to describe what an electrical outlet looked like and what it was used for.

Calls Build Up

Needless to say the calls for help started building up at an alarming rate. We used what was known as the queue. It would have 45 problems per page and it was not unusual to have 10 or even 20 pages of problems in them. At the time HSN only had about 6 or so techs working each shift that handled problem calls for everything that they sold and we had about 10 or so for the two shifts that we had. Out of the total 20 techs that we had, only six actually knew how to diagnose a computer problem.

Proteva's answer to this problem wasn't to start hiring more people that knew what they were doing but rather to impose a quota on the techs. They had to stay above whatever number was mentioned for that week or they could be fired.

Calls were monitored to see if techs were wasting time on answering questions that didn't pertain to the original problem. The result of that was techs telling the customers to call back if they had another question instead of just answering it. The solved problems would be looked over not for documentation or verification that the problem was solved correctly but to see how much time was spent on a customer.

For the complaints that you received saying that the tech couldn't help them, this is the reason why. Either the tech didn't know how to fix the problem or the fix would have taken to long and it would be passed on to a later time.

10 Minutes Max

In the end we were told flat out that we were to spend no more then 10 minutes with any one customer no matter what. Also, even from the beginning, it was a no-no to allow on-site service. It was considered too costly to the company. In the several years that I was there, I was only allowed to offer on-site service once. This was only because the customer would have it no other way.

The techs that knew junk parts when they saw them would laugh at some of the things that were being sold. We felt sorry for the people buying some of the junk that they put together. Some of the configurations that we could barely get to stay stable were being sent out to the masses of new computer users.

We knew that the owners were milking a cash cow for all it was worth. We begin jumping ship not long after the announcement was made to hire an outsourcing company to "help us out". Even they had problems keeping up with the amount of calls coming in from angry customers.

"Watch Me Walk"

I left the company after I was told that my call count was too low and I was spending too much time with the customers. I was reminded that the owners were watching me. I told the tech manager that they could watch me walk out the door, that I was quitting.

Leaving was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

When I heard that they filed for bankruptcy I figured that was the end of Proteva and that the world would now be a better place to live. However it seems that they were bought out by someone else and the name lives on. The worst thing is that the owners that were in charge then are still in charge. The management structure there hasn't changed at all. We are all scratching our heads as to how this could be.

I wish I would have known about you before. I once wrote a letter to the FTC in 1997 telling them about how Proteva were taking apart returned computers, putting the parts back into stock and later using those parts in new computers. We thought that was a little on the shady side and I've heard that several employees have written different agencies about the practice but nothing was ever done until ConsumerAffairs.Com began publishing customers' complaints.