Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

...

Okay, that title was bad even for me. But I have no better ideas right now, so deal with it. Anyway, I have become quite thankful that we don't do in-house support. While I'm fairly certain I've talked to people like this on the phone, just reading a description of meeting them in person somehow chills the blood more, but also entertains perhaps more than the actual experience of talking to them.

If you want to ensure prompt, polite service from tech support staff, this edited email excerpt is a perfect example of how to do it:


I mean, that's just beautiful. It's pleasant, the customer has already tried to check into the issue himself, he expresses appreciation for the service and asks, not demands, but asks to have it activated again.

This is one of those messages that's so perfect that it makes you wish more people reacted the same way.

Labels: oneofthegoodones

To further expand upon Terry's post about the 'know-it-all' customer, I'm going to share a recent encounter I had with a customer. One of THE MOST frustrating things as a technical support person is dealing with a person who's calling you for help but claims to know what they're doing or they second guess everything you do. It's obvious that more than often, these people are totally clueless but feel the need to be in control of the situation so they try and make themselves some sort of faux authority on the issue when it's clear they're clueless. Quite often, they're easily given away when they say things computer educated/literate people just would not say, like 'my server' instead of 'my ISP/provider'. They're two separate things and any semi-computer geek would know this.

Anyway, the call went something like this...

An elderly woman called me up saying her email wasn't working. Usually this is pretty easy to solve, but she didn't want to make it easy for me. After I told her what to do, I'd invariably get the 'Are you sure?! I don't think that will work.'-type comments. Clearly she's calling me for help, so why the fuck are you asking ME if I know what I'm doing?! I'll never understand people like this. The only thing I can think of is that these people need to be in control the whole time and just can't accept that they may not know anything about the issue.

Me: "So please click 'remove' on your email account in Outlook Express."
Caller: "Are you sure? We don't need to do that, do we?"
Me: "Well, actually Outlook Express sometimes messes up settings and more often than not, this is and easy fix. We'll just recreate the account and it should work."
Caller: "Are you sure? I don't think that's necessary."
Me: [wanting to say] "Well than I can't help you and you can fix it yourself!"
Me: "Well, if you want the issue fixed, we need to do this.

In previous versions of this type of call, I've actually given the caller shit for not allowing my job and asked them if they were calling for help. When they invariably answer 'yes', I then point out that I'm there to help them and that they need to trust me and let me do my job or nothing will get done. Usually, it shuts them up pretty quick because they know they've been called on their facade of being more knowledgeable than they really are. I don't know why, but I didn't really give this customer shit like I should have, so it carried on a little more than was needed for my sanity...

Caller: [long hesitant sigh like the world is about to end if we change a setting on her PC] "Ooookay, but I don't think this is going to make things better."

So we went through the malarky of recreating the account and it worked. I asked her if she was able to send and receive and I got this reply:
Caller: "Oh, it works!"

Of course it does. I know what I'm doing. You're calling me for help, right?! Now let me do my fucking job and let me help you. Why second guess me when it's clear you don't know what you're doing and that you do need help?! In fact, what's the point of me even sitting here *trying* to help you if you already know the fix to the problem?!

I wanted to ask her how her humble pie tasted, but I refrained.

Labels: futility

One of the frustrating things about having a massive server problem is that invariably some people assume that their problem is related to our issue and it's not, or we hear the customers describe a problem and assume it's related to our issue and it's not. Some of those will be problems we couldn't have done anything about anyway until our issue was resolved, but others are issues we definitely could have.

Let's look at the know-it-all lady I just talked to! She had a problem receiving mail, but as it turned out her account wasn't one of the affected ones. Her issue was really large email, which was too big for Outlook Express to take in on a dialup connection. One of the oddities of OE is that when it encounters large email, it sometimes prompts the user for their username and password over and over as it stops and restarts its attempt to retrieve the messages. However, the mail server issue we were having was an authentication problem, so when an agent heard this woman's description of the problem, it sounded exactly like the server problem, and let's face it, when everything's broken you don't have time to investigate whether every single problem is actually a user issue or a server issue.

And so her issue lingered a bit until we'd mostly fixed things on our side, when she called back. When I talked to her, I checked her email account and noticed a couple of very large emails. I also noticed that her email account didn't appear to have been on the problem mail server.

I let her know that our issues appear to have been resolved, and her issue at the time appeared to be a couple of really big messages. The woman protested, saying that they were just paintings and that they'll be fine and that the problem was probably still on our end. I let her know that the messages were too big to easily come in via OE on a dialup connection, and that even if they did they'd take hours. She again repeated that they'd be fine, they were just paintings, and they've always come in alright.

This starts to get exasperating. When the problem is very clear but the caller refuses to accept that it might be the issue and assumes some knowledge that they can't possibly have yet, I often find I have to get a bit more blunt.

Me: "You haven't actually seen these emails yet, so I'm not sure how you can be sure that they're paintings that will come in properly when they seem to be too big."
Caller: "I know it. They're paintings. They're always paintings. They've always come in properly before."
Me: "The larger of these two problem emails is an MP3 file, which means it's a music file."
Caller: "Oh. It's not a painting?"
Me: "No. It's a music file."
Caller: "What's the other large file?"
Me: "It's an MPEG, which means it appears to be a movie."
Caller: "Is it a movie with paintings?"
Me: "I'm not sure. I don't really have a way to view it from here."
Caller: "Oh. OK. Can you delete it?"

Yes, yes I can. And I hope this has proved something to you: when you assume, you make an ass out of ume, which is apparently a species of Asian plum in the family Rosaceae.

Labels: assume, communication

OurCompany had a major mail server crash this weekend, but humorously that hasn't stopped a slew of customers with affected email addresses from emailing us in from those problem email addresses. The issue is that people can't login to check their email, but since sending email out doesn't always require you to login, they're still able to get messages out. Some folks have apparently realized this and have emailed in from an address that isn't affected, like an unaffected email address with us, or a Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail, etc. email account. Some others haven't. They send in an email, and we're dutifully replied, but those users won't see our reply until after the problem's fixed up. On top of that, it's great to see lucid, elaborate messages like this:

hello please fix this

regards,
'
customer@ourcompany.com

I'll get right on that.

Labels: communication

Me: "Tech support, Terry speaking."
Caller: "Hello, Terry speaking!"

Let me stop you right there: don't say that. It's not funny, witty, or charming in any way. It's not even close to being funny.

And that reminds me of one of the first "jokes" I heard when I started doing tech support:

Me: "Now you'll need to open My Computer."
Caller: "How can I do that? I'm nowhere near you!"
Me: "..."
Caller: "You're not laughing."
Me: "It wasn't funny."

Admittedly, I wouldn't respond that way to everyone, but this was a caller who was going to be able to take the joke, and so I considered it worthwhile... even so, I heard that line often enough that I changed the way I phrased my instructions.

Labels: communication, humor

I've touched on this in the past about people feeling somehow they're exempt from SYSTEM WIDE issues. We make it clear in our phone message that they get to hear before they call that there's issues that are not their fault before they reach us. Now admittedly, our email system isn't the best and sometimes it will go down. Actually, it goes down far too often - but that's not why I'm here. I'm here to vent about our usership....

I don't get why people go dumb when it comes to computers. A very intelligent person will develop a mental handicap when dealing with computers and this is often the case. Classic example:
Caller - "Yeah, I just heard your message and pretty much had my question answered for me but I just wanted to confirm this email issue is system-wide?
Me - "Yep. That's what the message says."
Caller - "Oh, well I thought so but wasn't sure and wanted to reaffirm that it wasn't something I was doing wrong."
Me - "Well like the message says, it's on our end and we're working on it."
Caller - "So I'll just have to wait it out?"
Me - "Yes, just like the message states, we don't have an ETA at this moment but are working on getting it repaired ASAP."
Caller - "Oh [they're always jovial] okay! Sorry for waisting your time."

It's fine that you get one or maybe two of these a day, but when your whole day is filled with idiots like these, you become very bitter. People wonder why tech people are so disenfranchised. This is the reason why. We become answering machines to repeat what has already been told to them - over and over and over again and again, and again, and again, and....

Wouldn't you be bitter too?

Caller: "So do I always use webmail first?"
Me: "First before what?"
Caller: "I dunno."
Me: "... then yes."

That exchange came at the end of the customer asking me if he should use webmail first, and me asking what he'd be doing next. He didn't understand other ways of checking email, and he didn't know what he'd be doing after webmail, so I just concluded that yes, he should always use webmail first.

Labels: communication, futility

The company that I work for provides wireless internet service, among other things. Our wireless service gets sent out from towers, and wireless customers have antennae that receive the signal and direct it to their router or computer. What's always amazed me is that a lot of our wireless customers refer to the service as "satellite", and insist on doing so, even if we repeatedly refer to it as wireless, and even if we gently correct them.

It's another example of people just not knowing the proper term, much like how lots of folks refer to their desktop as the "screen saver". One person I talked to today explained to me that no, it's satellite, she's seen the satellite over on Main Street (or whatever the street was called; I've forgotten). I didn't think it was worth pointing out that by definition a satellite is something that's in orbit, so I don't think she'd see it on Main Street.

This kind of confusion isn't really a big deal. It sometimes leads to frustrating confusion, but usually it just makes me shake my head that some people will resist learning the correct term, which can in turn make their own lives easier as the next time that they call me they'll be able to more clearly explain their issues and get a quicker resolution.

Labels: communication

I was talking to one of my former coworkers, Marcus, and he asked if OurCompany installs any software. Usually we don't. He had been talking to a woman who used to be our customer, and she was saying that she kept seeing stuff from OurCompany when she was checking her email with her new provider. Marcus asked a few more questions and figured that what she was seeing was just old email that she'd received on her email address from OurCompany. Obviously, that email stays there, even if you change providers. I mean, you can delete it if you want to, but why would you? Anyway, she was probably just seeing that it said OurCompany somewhere on her computer and panicking.

Fast forward 30 seconds. I get a call, which turns out to be from the same woman, who's describing the exact same problem to me. Now, at the time, I didn't realize that the woman was the one that Marcus was just talking to. She said that she kept seeing stuff from OurCompany. I checked for old accounts, and there weren't any, so I asked where she was seeing it, and she just said "when my email comes up", so I figured she just wasn't connected when she was opening her email program, and was being prompted to pick a connection.

I don't know for sure which is the case, because this woman couldn't really describe a problem to me. Repeating that "it just comes up on my screen!!" isn't really helpful from a tech point of view. I hope she either doesn't call us back or, if she does, that she's got some kind of newly discovered descriptive ability.

Following her call, I got two more winners. The first was a caller who didn't realize that after he connected to the internet, he needed to do something. He connected, then just sat looking at the screen for 15 minutes, expecting something to happen. I let him know that he needed to open Internet Explorer or something else. Once you connect, you have to tell the computer what you're doing. And after that, the next caller needed to be told that she had to be connected to the internet to check her email. "But why? I'm checking my email, not going on the internet!!"

Good times.

Labels: communication, pebkac

I realize that not everyone is "computer-savvy", but I've actually gotten calls like these.

Well this explains a lot. Sadly, I think they need to add nationality to the list of transcended boundaries, as it does not appear to only affect Americans.

Yesterday, a caller got really frustrated at me, and she almost had a good point. Her contention: her monitor was working fine before she called, and now it isn't.

As any good statistician knows, the fact that one event follows another does not necessarily mean that the first caused the second. In this case, it's a bit more complicated than "you messed up my monitor!" Let me explain.

The caller was having connection problems. After a couple of basic steps, things still weren't working, so I had her open a command prompt to try to ping a couple of sites. By default, the command prompt is a black window with grey text. The caller couldn't read the grey text, so I asked her to turn up the brightness on her monitor. She wasn't sure how to do that, so I explained that her monitor will probably have a few buttons on the front, and those buttons would allow her to change her monitor's settings.

Now, in retrospect, maybe that was a mistake. People sometimes get frustrated with tech agents who refuse to help them with anything outside of the immediate problem that they'd called in about, but this story is a perfect example of why we often won't help.

The caller said that she couldn't make out the items on the monitor's menu. This tells me one of two things: either the monitor's color is fading (remember that she also couldn't read the command prompt) or her eyesight is. I let her know that if she couldn't read the command prompt, we were at a bit of an impasse, and if she could turn up the brightness, we could proceed.

Perhaps I should have approached things differently and explicitly said "don't mess around with settings you can't read", but before too long the caller said she couldn't make out anything on her screen. Apparently she'd found the pincushion setting, as she said that the top and bottom of her screen were narrow and the middle was fat... then she said that the color was screwed up, then she said that the monitor menu was completely black. This also offers up two possibilities that I can think of: the monitor is shot or she managed to change a setting that affects the monitor's menu.

Now, in my experience, most monitors will let you change settings, but those settings won't change the way that the monitor's menu displays. There's a reason for that: if you render it illegible, you're screwed. I suppose if she changed something like the monitor's display timing, it might have made even the menu unreadable, but usually if a monitor can't do a timing setting, it reverts on its own.

Anyway, the point is that her monitor ended up being messed up, but I didn't ask her to mess with settings she can't read. Blindly pushing buttons is often a bad idea. Making educated guesses is fine, but it's hard to make those kinds of decisions about things that you can't read. One of two things appears to be at fault: she changed stuff, or she's got a dead/dying monitor.

She was pretty upset by the end of it, blaming me for making her change stuff, and I can see why she'd think that, but if she replays events in her mind, she'll realize that I didn't ask her to fiddle around. I didn't discourage her either, but it was entirely her doing. The alternative was for us to be stymied and unable to do anything, so I thought that if she was comfortable trying to adjust the brightness it was fine to let her try.

Obviously in the future I'll be more abrupt. "Can't read the text? OK, call back when you can. Thankshaveanicedaybye."

Labels: communication, pebkac

In addition to the fact that I haven't posted here for a while, I also am posting about something I haven't gotten in a while: spam. I actually got a piece of it recently. On the plus side, it was hilarious:

"you can seduce fishwife with tremendous?"

Uh... I can honestly say I'm not sure.

Windows does this stupid thing in Control Panel whereby it won't show all of the icons you need to get to and you have to switch it from 'category view' to 'classic view'. One of the simplest ways (IMO) to get to 'Network Connections' is via the classic view of Control Panel and clicking on this icon.

Honestly, this is one of my most favourite responses from customers when asking them what it says in the upper left hand of control panel...
Me - "So does it say switch to category view or switch to classic view in the upper right hand of Control Panel?" [wait for minutes while they find what I'm talking about]
Customer - "Yes. It does."
Me - "Well which does it say? Switch to category view or switch to classic view?"
Customer - "Yes."

Finally, after getting them to tell me it says 'switch to category view', they then seem to think you've somehow added 'click on switch to category view' when you told them to leave it alone if that's what it says and suddenly, they're in classic view and totally lost. Fun stuff.

File under LISTEN and click!

I'm thoroughly people cannot do things on a computer and listen at the same time simply due to the sheer amount of people who get you to repeat what you've just said after you've had them perform an action. For example:
Me: "Could you please click on Control Panel and go to Network Connections?"
Caller: "So I'm on Control Panel. Where do you want me to go again?!"
Me: "Network Connections."
Caller: "Okay, I'm there. Where next?"
Me: "Click on 'create a new connection' and hit next."
Caller: "So I'm at 'create a new connection'. What do you want me to do now, again!?"

Did I not just tell you what to do? Why do I have to repeat it 3 times before you 'get' it?! I don't understand people's reluctance to do what you're telling them to do. People seem to either have this giant mistrust of what we're doing or that they're going to break something if they go beyond the action we've just told them to perform. Intelligent people instantaneously turn idiotic/brain dead when you put them in front of a computer and it blows my mind. They go blind. They go deaf. They lose all concept of understanding language in general.

I can't count the number of people who have told me something like 'File' isn't in the menu on a Windows machine when I full well know it's there and they INSIST I'm wrong - that somehow, their machine is special and different to everyone else's. Unless it's a Mac or Linux and I'm telling you to look for things in Windows, it is not. Your PC isn't special. It's designed like every other one out there - to work in a standardized fashion. Don't feel insulted if we get a little edgy when you can't find what we know is there because you're blind, deaf and brain dead.

Listen to what we say and you will be fine. Don't second guess us. Don't feel as though if you do what we say something may go wrong. You're calling us for help and we're providing that service, so STFU and do as we say and the world will be safer. Thank you.

Further to my post yesterday, one of the most infuriating things for a tech agent is when a customer calls in for help and then makes sounds of grudging acceptance when they're asked to do something. An example:

Me: "Alright, now we'll want to unplug that filter."
Caller: SIGH..."OK, fine."

If my request isn't too onerous, your majesty. Seriously, you're calling us for help, and we're not usually asking you to do anything too difficult. If you don't want to perform the troubleshooting steps, please feel free to hang up and call back when you are. If you do want some help, stow the 'tude and follow along.

And then there's another thing: saying you know what you're doing because of all your experience. OK, fine, I guess that invalidates whatever we know. Obviously our experience matters less. Let's look at an example from earlier today:

Caller: "I've been working with computers since 1995. I think I know what I'm doing."

Good for you. I've been working with computers since 1986, but my vast experience with a C64 playing the seahorse game doesn't necessarily mean much to troubleshooting your issue. More importantly, I've got a bunch of training and experience doing tech support, and I have access to a bunch of resources for troubleshooting, some of which you've got too (Google) and some which you don't.

You might know what you're doing when it comes to web design or setting up your printer or whatever your experience is in, but if it's not relevant to what we're doing right now, then don't bother bringing it up with an air of self-importance. You're not going to make me any more willing to help you, but you might make me less so.

Labels: communication

I may have posted this before (I'm not up for hunting through all the previous posts right now), but it's a timeless truth, so I feel it should be said regardless: Think before you say stuff to people. Specifically here, think before you say stuff to the tech support worker who's trying to help you.

Here's an example of a common yet unhelpful thing to say: "I've been working at this all day!" OK, good. Hey, guess what? I've been at my job all day, too! Do you care more about treating me with respect than you did before? I wouldn't. I wouldn't because I would expect me to do my job at roughly the same level no matter how long I'd been at it that day. Similarly, I expect you to still be a rational and polite person no matter how long your computer's been having some kind of problem for.

And another one: "I've called x times now!" Well, now that you've met the magic threshold, we'll start the real troubleshooting! Before you say something like that to a tech agent, think about this: you're still calling with some kind of issue, and the agent is still going to try and fix that problem, no matter how many times you've called. The number of times you've called that day is not directly relevant to the tech worker's job.

I understand that you get frustrated when an issue isn't quickly fixed, and the nature of calling a company means that there's often no one person that you can call in to yell at. Everyone gets frustrated sometimes, but please, consider whether or not what you're saying is actually going to help or not. And if it's not going to, then please, bite your tongue, describe the problem, and let me get on with helping you.

Labels: communication

A customer called back after hanging up on an agent.

"Sorry, my chin hit the hang up button."