Hi, my name is BP and I work in customer service,
First of all, for those of you who don’t know me (probably most of you), I am a student at a large public university in Indiana, and also work full time for a company that makes mail-sorting equipment. I work in the “Technical Operations” department. Basically, we do all of the installs of new equipment, client training, and take phone calls for problems (of course).
I am in school again (I took a couple years off), and because of this my job has been reduced to taking calls. I simply can’t travel any longer and my schedule doesn’t permit me to continue teaching our various training programs. Now that you have the necessary (ok, maybe not that necessary) background, I can continue.
For those of you who don’t already know this, the mail industry has to be the most mundane and flat out boring industry on the face of the earth. I mean, “innovation” takes on an entirely new meaning when used in our industry.
“Innovative” in our industry:
-
describes a new device that prints meter stamps 2,000 pieces per hour faster than the previous one!
-
can be used to describe the new feature on our machine that allows us to print tray-tags “on the fly”! (Don’t even ask me to explain this, just go with it)
-
shows how our printers put little bars on pieces of mail much clearer than our competitions!
Uhh… I’m nearly falling asleep describing these “innovations”, so I’ll move on. Anyway, as one might expect, when you work within a company that works with a boring and dull subject, you get boring and dull people… both working for and purchasing from the company.
What this means to me is, I get calls from these particular types of people constantly. Herein lies the problem. For example:
Me: “Hello, this is Mike.”
Client: “Hi, I’m Mr. Dick Hole and I’m having a problem.”
Me: “Ok, what’s going on?”
Client: “Well, the machine was running mail, and then it just stopped printing barcodes.”
Me: “Ok, go on.”
Client: “…”
Me: “Hello?”
Client: “Uhhh, what do I do?”
Me: “Well, I can’t really see your machine right now, because you are in [insert_random_city_here] and I am in Indiana, so if you could just describe the situation that would really help”
Client: “Uhhh, I just did.”
Me: “Ok, in order for me to help you, I have to know every detail about what has happened. Therefore, you need to relay to me everything that you know about the problem.”
Client: “Well, that’s all I know, it just stopped printing.”
Ad infinitum…
For fuck’s sake, do these people think I’m a mind reader? They want me to come up with the right answer, out of a potential 1,000,000,000,000,000 possible problems. These people that call are supposedly the technicians that are supposed to care for and service the machine. They call me without even having looked at the problem or a potential cure. They call me, expecting me to just hand out a mystical answer from my grab bag of knowledge.
So I grudgingly go through the same steps:
- Ask them what they have done so far (invariably the answer is “nothing”)
- Ask them exactly what they were doing prior to this happening (invariably the answer is “I don’t know”
- Ask them if they’ve performed the regular maintenance for that problem (invariably the answer is “Oh, of course, we take care of this machine perfectly”)
Anyway, this rant has gone on long enough… I hear people bitch about customer service people quite a bit (probably with good reason), however, did anyone ever stop to think about the questions they are asking? Contrary to the popular phrase, there IS such a thing as a stupid question.
BP
PS - As a clarification, the customer service I work in isn’t the “look in the database for an answer” type. We have to really know the equipment and how to deal with nearly every problem that may occur… and we have to have this knowledge ready to go at all times. So it isn’t a “Gateway Technical Support” type of atmosphere.
