Suckerfish on the Side of Your Whale

In an email:

"Our friends keep to email us some tube like something to open pictures but not work to open. I wonder if you know what is wrong."

Beanfields?

No, seriously, I have absolutely no idea.

Labels: communication

Here are some of my more memorable responses to fairly common questions that I ask customers. Many of the questions have had more than one interesting response, so this is almost like a bonus feature! And I'm sure some of my coworkers will remind me of some winners, or I'll remember other winners, so I might actually update this list. And some of my favorite answers are weird non-sequiturs.

Question: Which email program do you use?
"Outlet."
"Incredible Mail."
"Point seven."

Question: Which version of Windows do you have?
"87."
"2000 XP."
"2000 Millenium Edition."
"6."
"No."
"Glass."

Question: What program do you use to look at web sites?
"Internet Exploder."
"Microsoft."
"Email."

Labels: communication

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

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

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

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

Me: "Which version of Windows are you using?"
Caller: "It's Windows EX Professional 2004/2002."

Labels: communication

A woman called today to let me know that she was having trouble with her connection.

Me: "Alright, what kind of trouble are you having?"
Caller: "My desktop icons take forever to load! I know that I've got dialup, but this is ridiculous!"
Me: "How quickly your desktop icons load doesn't have anything to do with your internet connection, though. You'll notice that those have to come up before you ever connect to the internet. If you're finding that they're loading slowly, it would be because the computer is starting slowly."
Caller: "Oh. Well, the real reason I'm calling is that Windows Messenger keeps signing in!"

After helping her find the option to uncheck so that Messenger didn't sign in automatically every time, she had this to say:

Caller: "Great! Now the real reason I'm calling is--"

Let me stop her there. This is a small thing, but it's frustrating. If you're calling with more than one issue, then don't announce that this next one is the "real reason" unless it's the last one. Why not? We generally budget our time to make sure that we're wrapping up your account properly before the next call comes in, and when you introduce an issue as "the real reason I'm calling", you convey the impression that once we've solved that, you'll be on your way. If not, that's fine, but it'd be nice if you didn't create that false expectation.

Caller: "Great! Now the real reason I'm calling is that I left my computer on for a few days, and Outlook wasn't finding email, but I restarted it this morning and it worked fine."
Me: "OK."
Caller: "What would cause that?"

What would cause what? You restarted your computer after it'd been on for several days, and stuff worked. Sounds like normal computer behavior so far.

Me: "So it's working fine now?"
Caller: "Yes, but it wasn't before!"
Me: "A lot of things that are having problems can be cleared up by restarting the computer, and if it's working now then it seems like your mail program just needed the computer to restart."
Caller: "Oh, that's good! Now, the real reason I'm calling--"

...that's infuriating...

Caller: "--is that my computer keeps saying something about virtual memory problems. What does that mean?"
Me: "Did it go away after you'd restarted?"
Caller: "Yeah, it did."
Me: "OK, then I wouldn't worry about it too much. If it comes back, you might need to talk to a computer technician, but if you've restarted and it's taken care of the problem, then I'd imagine you'll be fine."
Caller: "OK, thanks!"

And the call ended.

So she didn't really have much in the way of connection issues, and I didn't really do much of anything. Mostly, I just affirmed that restarting your computer sometimes is a good thing.

But the real reason I'm typing out this post is that the way you communicate affects the way people perceive you. I will always try to help everyone the same way, no matter how nice or obnoxious, smart or not so smart, knowledgeable or green, but it would be naive to think that I'm not affected.

Labels: communication

Caller: "I am going to be planing trees and I would like to know where the cables are so I don't dig into them."
Me: "OK... you'll probably have to call Bell Canada for that, unless you've got your complete phone service with us. I can check if you want to give me your phone number."
Caller: "It's xxx-xxx-xxxx."
Me: "We don't have any accounts under that phone number. Do you have Internet service with us?"
Caller: "No, look, this isn't about service, this is about how I want to plant my trees."
Me: "Right, but if you don't have phone service with us, then that means we don't own your phone lines, so we can't tell you where to dig. If you don't have phone service with us, you probably have to talk to Bell."
Caller: "I did talk to Bell, but no one seems to know who I should talk to!"
Me: "Do you have any service with us?"
Caller: "I have Bell for my phones and Sympatico for my Internet."
Me: "OK, so why have you called OurCompany?"
Caller: "Because I need to know where to dig!!"
Me: "Sir... this is OurCompany. I don't work for Bell. You have Bell phone service and Bell Internet service. I don't understand why you called OurCompany."
Caller: "Well, why do I have your phone number?"
Me: "I have no idea."
Caller: "So who should I talk to?"
Me: "You should call Bell."
Caller: "And how do I get them to tell me where to dig so I can plant my trees?"
Me: "I would just ask."
Caller: "I tried that and they didn't seem to know what I was talking about!"

Yeah, maybe that's because you've called a completely random company to tell you where your phone lines are, a company that you don't have service with and have never had service with, and you're expecting positive results for some reason. You know, like you've done just now.

Labels: communication, genius

Me: "OK, so now you'll want to try going to a couple of different web sites to make sure that everything with the connection is working properly."
Caller: "OK."

And then there was silence.

I waited about four minutes. The guy was a bit older and sounded rather green, so I assumed he was just taking some time to enter the site in. However, after four minutes, I realized I hadn't heard any typing or other noises indicating success or failure.

Me: "Were you able to get to those sites?"
Caller: "Oh!"

And then there was typing.

I wish that was the first time in the call that we'd had this little incident, but it was the fifth. Often I'd ask him to click on something, or open a window, or read something, and he'd say "OK" and just.... not do it. I'd prompt him again and then it'd get done.

Last night, a friend asked me why IT workers always seem to be bitter and short-tempered. I can't speak for all of them, but stuff like this conversation can really wear out your patience with people.

Labels: communication

I answered the phone today and spoke the usual greeting, complete with my name.

Caller: "Who's speaking?"
Me: "My name is Terry."
Caller: "Jay?"
Me: "No, it's Terry."
Caller: "Jay?"
Me: "No sir, my name is Terry. What can I help you with?"
Caller: "You're Jay?"
Me: "No, my name is Terry. T-E-R-R-Y."
Caller: "Oh. OK. Well, Jay, I'm having trouble with my email..."

He had spoken to a guy named Jay earlier in the day, so after the call I relayed that part of the conversation to Jay.

Jay: "Ha, that's funny. Yesterday he called me Greg."

Labels: communication, memory

If you're talking to a tech support agent and that agent tells you she's going to try and look up some information to help with your problem, there are some things you can do that'll be counterproductive. The best thing to do is probably to sit tight and wait till the tech finds whatever she's looking for. An example of a bad thing to do would be reading everything on your screen. Odds are that if the tech needed to know about what's on your screen she'd ask you, and that if she asked you to wait while she looks something up, you aren't going to speed things up by asking questions.

And continuing with our ongoing series, sometimes users don't have the terminology down when they're trying to describe a problem. Take this gem:

Caller: "I use YourCompany, right? And I'm also with Microsoft as my head. Now if I have spam through you, is that good enough?"

... what?

Labels: communication

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.

Labels: communication, futility

Sure it did.

That's what I usually think whenever someone calls in and says something like this:

Caller: "Yeah, for some reason my modem's setup page just came up. All on its own. I didn't do anything to it."

I mean, it might be just the way the caller says, but because most modems only bring up their setup pages when you reset them, and because most modems require you to push in a difficult-to-reach button for about 7 seconds to reset them, and most importantly, when you sound so damn defensive right off the bat, it's hard not to assume that you are, for some reason, trying to ensure that I don't know that you've tried resetting the modem on your own.

I don't care if you have tried resetting the modem. I don't know why you'd bother, but it really doesn't matter to me. I do care about people lying about the problem and what might have caused it, because that sort of thing makes the problem much harder to fix sometimes.

If you reset your modem because you thought it would help something, just say so. You're going to have to run the risk that I'm a bit of a jerk (I am, but not when I'm at work). You're also going to get your problem fixed much, much more quickly.

Labels: communication, lying

Caller: "I can't get into Outlook Express!"
Me: "What happens when you try?"
Caller: "OK, I can get into Outlook, I just can't access my old emails! They were on the old computer, which got fried."
Me: "Alright, so those old emails are stored on the older computer. If you can access the hard drive, you'll be able to retrieve and probably export those messages to the new computer."
Caller: "Oh, no, I don't care about that, I just want to be able to check my email on this computer."
Me: "So you need to have Outlook Express setup to check new email on this computer?"
Caller: "Yes, exactly."

Yes, exactly, indeed.

Labels: communication