Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

Sometimes, our company will need to send people noticed about their account. The vast majority of our customers read the notice, respond to it, and are on their merry way. Our system tends to save a lot of time for the customers and us, since the customers rarely need to call to update simple things about their account, and if it's an urgent message, they can deal with it from their computer. They don't have to call us, possibly wait on hold, and spend time explaining things to an agent. Of course, some people don't feel comfortable answering yes or no questions on the Internet, so they call us anyway. I don't understand that, but it's fine with me.

Then there are the people who feel so hugely inconvenienced by seeing a notice page that they call us to complain at us for a while. I always find this amazing, if only because they tend to complain for longer than it would take to read and respond to the notice. Personally, I'd rather use my time a bit more efficiently, but I guess that's me and my whole "common sense" approach to things.

On a sometimes related note, people will often exaggerate their problem when they call technical support, perhaps out of a belief that we'll try harder to help the customer if they've been struggling for longer or with a more difficult issue or something like that. I know that for me, and probably most support agents out there, I'm going to try and solve your issue no matter how long you've been working at it. It's been 80 seconds? OK, let's take a look and get you going again. It's been two and a half months? OK, let's take a look and get you going again. The thing is that computer problems are rarely going to be any different based on how much time you've let lapse until doing something about it, so if you didn't enter your password when you tried to connect the first time, and you didn't enter it on the second or third try, and you've left it alone for three days, hoping it'll work on its own, the thing is that the problem is still exactly the same when you finally call us about it as it was the first time.

Now let's bring those two elements together into one fun caller!

Caller: "I've been pissing around with your damn notice for an hour and it's blocking me and I'm really upset!"
Me: "OK, what's the trouble that you're having with it?"
Caller: "It won't go away!"
Me: "Right. It'll stay there till you confirm that things look ok on that notice."
Caller: "I've been trying to do this for an hour and it doesn't work!"

I look at the log files. He initially connected about five minutes ago, completed the notice two minutes after that, then finally disconnected to call me. The instructions on the notice explicitly say that once you've completed the notice, you need to disconnect, and you're done. So he isn't having a problem, he's successfully carried out the instructions, and he's calling to complain. Total time spent on his hour-long problem: 4 minutes.

Me: "Sir, I can see from the log files that you connected five minutes ago, completed the notice, and as per the last step of the notice, you disconnected about a minute ago. That means you're finished."
Caller: "But I'm in a hurry!"
Me: "OK."
Caller: "And that notice slowed me down!"
Me: "Well, I'd imagine I'm only slowing you down more. Now that you've completed the notice, I'd suggest you connect again and proceed with whatever you want to do."
Caller: "Fine!"