Saturday, February 17, 2007
Complete information
Caller: "It's not working."
Me: "Alright, I'll just need a bit more information to tell where the problem is happening... can you tell me exactly what you're seeing when it's not working?"
Caller: "Nothing. It's just not working."
This is one of those frustrating things that happens on a call. There's a problem, but the caller either won't or can't describe what's happening. In my years doing support, the number of times where it would have been completely accurate to say "there's nothing happening" can be counted on one hand. Having nothing happen and having something happen incorrectly are two different things.
A caller today told me that nothing was happening. As it turned out, what was happening was that he was being prompted for his username and password and he was entering them, but they weren't working. The reason for that was that he had tried setting something up on his own and mistakenly enabled an option that shouldn't have been on. However, this didn't come out till after I'd helped him fix the problem. And I didn't even know what the problem was, I just thought I'd try removing and recreating the account to know that the settings were ok. When I'd done that, he said "oh, that's great! It's working! It wasn't before, but I wasn't sure what to do with this setting and this other setting..."
If he'd just told me that he wasn't getting a response after being prompted for his login information, I would have been able to go straight to the setting that was causing the problem. If he'd said that he just setup the account and it wasn't working, I might not have gone straight to the problem setting, but we still probably would have found it a lot faster.
Why not just say that you tried setting up the account and this one part of it doesn't seem to work? Is it a pride thing? I don't think any less of a person who doesn't know that SSL needs to be unchecked or that authentication needs to be turned on here but off here, or any of the other arcane settings that are confusing to the uninitiated. I do think less of a person who finds some reason not to save his own time by giving us an unhelpful statement about the problem.
"I don't know, it just doesn't work."
Then I don't know, I'm just not sure how to troubleshoot that.
Me: "Alright, I'll just need a bit more information to tell where the problem is happening... can you tell me exactly what you're seeing when it's not working?"
Caller: "Nothing. It's just not working."
This is one of those frustrating things that happens on a call. There's a problem, but the caller either won't or can't describe what's happening. In my years doing support, the number of times where it would have been completely accurate to say "there's nothing happening" can be counted on one hand. Having nothing happen and having something happen incorrectly are two different things.
A caller today told me that nothing was happening. As it turned out, what was happening was that he was being prompted for his username and password and he was entering them, but they weren't working. The reason for that was that he had tried setting something up on his own and mistakenly enabled an option that shouldn't have been on. However, this didn't come out till after I'd helped him fix the problem. And I didn't even know what the problem was, I just thought I'd try removing and recreating the account to know that the settings were ok. When I'd done that, he said "oh, that's great! It's working! It wasn't before, but I wasn't sure what to do with this setting and this other setting..."
If he'd just told me that he wasn't getting a response after being prompted for his login information, I would have been able to go straight to the setting that was causing the problem. If he'd said that he just setup the account and it wasn't working, I might not have gone straight to the problem setting, but we still probably would have found it a lot faster.
Why not just say that you tried setting up the account and this one part of it doesn't seem to work? Is it a pride thing? I don't think any less of a person who doesn't know that SSL needs to be unchecked or that authentication needs to be turned on here but off here, or any of the other arcane settings that are confusing to the uninitiated. I do think less of a person who finds some reason not to save his own time by giving us an unhelpful statement about the problem.
"I don't know, it just doesn't work."
Then I don't know, I'm just not sure how to troubleshoot that.
Labels: information, pride
# posted by Terry @ 6:18 AM 
