Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

When I'm asked what skill is most important for a tech support agent to have, I'll generally reply that it's an ability to figure out what the problem is. It requires some amount of visualizing, and so a familiarity with how computers work is pretty important, but more important still is the ability to communicate with a caller. For example, I hear this far too often:

Caller: "I get through to the first screen and I do everything I always did, but it's not working!"

This statement tells me nothing. This particular caller was adamant that nothing at all had changed and that probably her account had some kind of problem or we were having a problem and not letting her on. By carefully asking questions, I found out that she was getting an error 691, which means that her username and password weren't authenticating properly. The problem was that she'd replaced her username with her actual name, all typed out properly, with capital letters and spaces and all that stuff that you don't put in a username.

And so we find that the "first screen" was the connection window, "everything I always did" was a mistaken belief that she'd always entered her proper name as her username, and "it's not working" was not, in fact, due to an account problem, but due to the ever-present PEBKAC epidemic.

Labels: communication, pebkac