I don't know about the others but most of Microsoft's customer support is out-sourced and most agents are work-from-home and very lightly trained. Mainly, most of the training is "follow the prompts in the software." I'm not really exaggerating there, either. They spend a LOT of time, and I mean days, going over all that LIVE offers so you can sell the customer on what they're getting but very little time going over the actual problems. They even had a whole training section about that Call of Duty service.
It's really training on the job, which sucks for both the customer and the agent. They'll throw fresh agents out to the phones 40 at a time with maybe 2-4 trainers in chat-room backup. It's impossible. Just pray that you get an experienced agent. Even then, though, a lot of agents aren't gamers and all they're doing is reading prompts. I listened to a ghost call of a guy on the phone with this kid for like 45 minutes, walking through all these steps that the software suggested, while I'm thinking, "it's a bloody known bug in Borderlands 2, Gearbox has already issued a statement about it."
One tip, though, is that most of the experienced agents quit phones and move to chat support when they can. With chat support, you have to be cleared for everything; with phones, the first person you speak with is usually not cleared for billing or hardware problems. That's where all the new people start.
