Friday, May 11, 2007
Redundancy and stupidity
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.
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
# posted by Terry @ 10:44 AM 
