Saturday, March 17, 2007
Just... but... you... argh!!
Oh good, another reason to post. And it's not even 11am as I start to type this!
One of the most important skills for a tech support agent to have is the ability to figure out what's actually happening based on what the caller is telling you. In ideal situations, the caller is telling you exactly what's happening and you can proceed accordingly. In most real life cases, the caller isn't familiar with the terminology or isn't sure what's actually happening, and so they try the best they can. From there, it's usually not too hard to mentally translate what they're saying into what they're actually seeing.
However, the outright omission of information can be a problem sometimes. For example, one caller earlier today told me that her computer was connected, but it wasn't behaving the way a connected computer normally does. She said that the computer was indicating that it was connected, and I'd been having her click the OurCompany icon each time to make sure that the computer was establishing its link.
The problem is that the caller was clicking the icon, and nothing was happening because the shortcut was broken, and then she was seeing that the local area connection was indicating that it was connected, so she assumed that she was. Since she didn't sound like she was doing anything wrong, I didn't bother checking the usage logs to see if she was successfully re-establishing the connection each time.
This was a case of the caller sounding like she was following my instructions but probably not realizing that what she was looking at and what was happening weren't actually what I was talking about. Consequently, an issue that should have taken 5-10 minutes to resolve took 41 minutes.
Oh well. At least we both learned something.
One of the most important skills for a tech support agent to have is the ability to figure out what's actually happening based on what the caller is telling you. In ideal situations, the caller is telling you exactly what's happening and you can proceed accordingly. In most real life cases, the caller isn't familiar with the terminology or isn't sure what's actually happening, and so they try the best they can. From there, it's usually not too hard to mentally translate what they're saying into what they're actually seeing.
However, the outright omission of information can be a problem sometimes. For example, one caller earlier today told me that her computer was connected, but it wasn't behaving the way a connected computer normally does. She said that the computer was indicating that it was connected, and I'd been having her click the OurCompany icon each time to make sure that the computer was establishing its link.
The problem is that the caller was clicking the icon, and nothing was happening because the shortcut was broken, and then she was seeing that the local area connection was indicating that it was connected, so she assumed that she was. Since she didn't sound like she was doing anything wrong, I didn't bother checking the usage logs to see if she was successfully re-establishing the connection each time.
This was a case of the caller sounding like she was following my instructions but probably not realizing that what she was looking at and what was happening weren't actually what I was talking about. Consequently, an issue that should have taken 5-10 minutes to resolve took 41 minutes.
Oh well. At least we both learned something.
Labels: communication, futility
# posted by Terry @ 7:50 AM 
