If the remote access system isn’t up to the job they should have local IT people on-site. Very frustrating all around, I imagine.
No need for the aggression towards those recounting their experience here though. You did ask the question, after all. Sounds like you just wanted to vent rather than hear experiences, which is understandable.
Doesn’t change the fact that you seem to have experienced crappy IT support.
-Brightly- Hey ! I know- why not write to Cecil Adams and ask him ?!
I routinely ask for 2nd Tier Tech Support. The 1st Tier people don’t want to do it because I suspect they get a bad mark on their report/file/whatever if they are unable to satisfy the caller and instead have to kick it up to 2nd Tier.
I. Do. Not. Give. A Fuck. It is not my job to worry about their job. It is my job to pay for support and get it from an intelligent, motivated, thoughtful open-minded Tech Support person.
Recently I went through a period of Cellular Phone Hell.[sup]tm[/sup] This involved four new Verizon PDA type phones, no less than 8 Tech Support calls over the space of two weeks or so.
Everyone but one employee was focused, interested and pretty well trained on Tech Support. People understood the frustration and guided me towards options to try to figure it out sitting in my home. It did involve swapping units out and even those in-store situations were handled professionally. Eventually, they wrote into my notes, " Let Cartooniverse go into a store and pick out a brand new PDA type of phone, of any brand, and give it to him. Activate it and send the boy home. "
I ought to write a letter. I really should. I’ve encountered tons of what our esteemed Biggirl has and it’s maddening in the extreme. If you do not want to go into Phone Tech Support, then just don’t. If you do, then for god’s sake get some basic psychology training so you can manage the caller AND the call successfully.
Cartooniverse
Yeup, you are correct. Sorry IT guys for being so bitchy but DANGIT, I am sooo frustrated!
We do have an on-site guy but he’s on vacation. Still, we are instructed to call the help desk and not go to the on-site guy since it is the help desk’s option to send the on-site guy to your desk.
Again-- sorry for exploding on you guys here. You are not the ones making me wanna hang myself at my desk.
A question for you ITs: Did any of you get any customer service training? Because, as I said upthread, people are dumb wherever you go and in all of my CS jobs we learned not only how to fix the problems but how to deal with the people and IT guys really, really don’t seem to know how to deal with people-- stupid or not.
When I call Dell, I expect a script. I expect to have to explain the problem then have support ask me if the computer is plugged in, if it is on, if all the cables are securely plugged. I DO NOT expect sighs, the sucking of teeth and condescension. But I get it.
Here at work I expect those things even less. We are a small company of professionals and I expect to be treated as such. When I get attitude it makes me fucking angry. So when I came here to vent and encountered— condescension, well, it made me fucking angry.
So my fellow Dopers of the IT persuasion, talk to your bretheren and ask them to at least wait for the stupidity BEFORE you start treating your customers like idiots.
P.S. I STILL want to drive into Manhattan and beat the snot out of the IT guys over there.
The short answer to your question is “No.”
IME, your typical IT person isn’t very intelligent, has a smug attitude about most things, and looks down upon people who don’t appear to know as much about computers as they allegedly do. They’re often oblivious as to how they make the person they’re trying to help feel and won’t get it even if you beat them with the concept as if it’s a baseball bat.
Then they become managers of help desks and later IT departments. Because they don’t understand the concept of the “bedside manner at all costs,” they don’t notice it in their subordinates.
Those who understand this aren’t in IT (system support) jobs for long and become consultants of some sort.
I think every hospital on the continent went through this game about 15 years ago. At least back then, you could set the Windows 95/98 shell to be the 3270 emulator so the PC would boot to a mainframe prompt.
Back to the users. There’s a reason we do things like telling users who say they can’t get a login box to unplug their LAN cable, swap the ends around and plug it back in. Simply put, users will lie to us. If we ask them to check the connection’s plugged in, they’ll either grunt and suggest that we’re idiots for thinking the cable might be loose, or they’ll look at it from four feet away and say it’s good, even though it’s loose and/or in the phone jack.
Who was the idiot that decided to use RJ-45 jacks and plugs for office phones and Ethernet? Bring me his head!
Swapping the ends around forces them to actually look at it, double-check that they’re using Jack #3 and push the plugs in until they click. (Jacks 1 and 2 on the block are for phones, and Jack 4 is the printer VLAN) About a third of the time, the users will say “the prongy thing’s missing on one end” at which point we realize that yes, they do have a bad cable that won’t stay plugged in. For the other two thirds, it’s <click> <click> and the light next to the jack turns green and all is well. Yeah, that cable was plugged in properly befre you called…
Above all else, a plea to users: If something’s not working, let us know exactly what the error is. Screenshots are fantastic. If you say “I can’t log in!” our response will be "Which of our 1800 Unix servers, 425 Oracle databases, or fifteen mainframes can’t you log into?
Do you know I tried to get a screenshot of my “impossible” problem? IT has disabled this function on all computers.
That’s going to calm things down nicely I can feel my fellow geeks/nerds/IT folk start to stir, push their glasses up their nose and start to get all defensive.
There is some truth in what you say though. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. There is also a lot of broad strokes as well though. You seem to have worked in places with very bad IT support. I’d guess either very small or very large companies. Both are mostly poorly supported IME. One for lack of people and the other for mostly money reasons.
My company( a large company with presence of ~2000 in Ireland) could easily farm out their support and save money but they want the local on site support and want added value for it. Our first level support are trained very well and aren’t tied down by stupid scripts and idiotic SLA’s that are all about making reports and figures look good. Instead the targets are about how our non-IT staff are served by us and how they view the service we provide. It’s a nice place(I’m 2nd/3rd level depending on the problem) to work and the message that comes from management is to try your best to make people’s work day easier and more profitable as that’s what’s keeps us in a job.
I have worked in IBM and saw the complete opposite culture in their internal IT and also in their support desks for their customers. Ireland has one of the main IBM call centers for North America/Europe and the Middle East. A lot of the support given was very bad IMO and very close to your description.
Some nerds/geeks can be very arrogant when it comes to technical problems others can come across as such but not mean it al all.
In this morning’s non-productive installment of Please Mr. IT Guy, Fix My Computer our beleaguered heroine was instructed to call the help desk “the next time it happens.”
The next time it happened angry, frustrated Biggirl called the help desk. No one answered the phone. She left a message. Another 2 hours pass and it happens again. Biggirl calls the help desk. No one answers. Biggirl leaves another message, this time wondering if they are seeing her extension and not picking up the phone. Because if this is the case, why was Biggirl instructed to “call the next time it happens”?
Our beleaguered heroine is thinking of shooting some heroine to prevent her from going on a wild bullet shooting spree.
If you have any influence with your company I have one word for you…outsource. Unless your core business is IT of course…in which case you might want to convince the powers that be to switch to go into alpaca farming or something like that…
-XT
Nah, we’re a bunch of MBAs and CPAs.
I’m gonna wait for our on site guy to come back from vacation and do the forbidden thing-- go directly to him.
How do you reboot an alpaca?
Kick it in the ass a second time?
Sounds like you have an IT version of the same thing the IT people are complaining about.
Sucks, doesn’t it? Trust me when I say we all feel your pain. Repeatedly. Through the entire day. There are lovely people we deal with. From what you said, you’d be one of them, one of the people I depend on to keep facilities working.
There are also complete morons.
I’m sorry you have to deal with one on the IT side.
OK–I’ll go ahead and add my $0.02 worth, even though everyone (especially Biggirl) may fell like they were gypped.
I’ve worked in IT since the early 90s. First selling computers to home consumers and businesses (and occasionally doing trouble-shooting and training), then a stint in Desktop support that included manning a help desk phone one day a week, then graduating to 2nd/3rd level support and server management. I have had experiences with users similar to those related in the previous posts in this thread by IT people.
I’ve never called a user a liar (and hope I’ve never implied that!), but there are certainly situations where I was incredulous at the problem being reported and said as much. If I was handling the call described in the OP, my reaction might very well have been “Well, that’s freakin’ weird!” or something similar. IMO, Biggirl has gotten a very poor IT service person who should be (at least) reprimanded. And if the organization has disabled screen-shots, they all ought to be taken to a remedial trouble-shooting course…I absolutely rely on that as a trouble-shooting tool.
That having been said, I’ve found that there are different types of users out there:
[ol]
[li]Clueless users[/li][li]Users who want to get the problem solved[/li][li]Users who want me to solve the problem for them[/li][li]Users who know enough to be dangerous.[/li][/ol]
In my expereince, all users suffer from a problem that prevents them from taking down, in detail, everything associated with the error condition they are experiencing. Error messages are not noted or written down (yes, I need to know exactly what the message said!), time of the error isn’t known, what steps were being taken when the error occurred isn’t known, etc. The more information I have up front, the quicker I’ll be able to resolve the issue for you. However, it may take a couple of iterations (or more) in some cases even if everything goes perfectly.
The problem with Clueless Users is they have a hard time comprehending the technology, and so can’t help me do my job. They can be difficult to work with at times because of this, but just require a little more attention and time to work things out. As long as they can follow directions, I’m OK with these folks.
Users who want to get the problem solved are my favorites. They usually have at least half of a clue, can navigate around the screen OK, and understand most of what I’m talking about. They may not have gotten the information I need the first time the error occurs but, by golly, they’ll make sure I have it the next time! When I ask them to try something, I feel confident that they will, and will report back accurately what difference any changes we made have had on the issue.
Users who want me to solve the problem are pretty bad. They won’t make the effort to note the error message or take a screen shot. They seem annoyed when I contact them for more information. Often, these are the folks that, when asked for more info via phone or e-mail, will ignore the request until the problem recurs, then will send a nast note to me (or worse, my manager) asking why the problem isn’t fixed yet. Often when I do contact them, they tell me they’re busy and don’t have time. Well, sorry…if you don’t have time for me, I don’t have time for you, either!
Users who know enough to be dangerous are the worst kind. All the IT folks in this thread know the type: they think they know about computers, but usually don’t. They try to anticipate what I am going to say, and race ahead without listening to my instructions. As mentioned up-thread a couple of times, they’ve often mucked with their computers in some way, and caused their own problems, then expect me to bail them out. Except that when I try to do that, they don’t admit to what they’ve done and it takes 5 times longer than it should.
Anyone in IT should recognize these user types, and can generally identify them on the other end of the phone within the first 3 or 4 sentences of the conversation. A good IT person will do just that, and work to the level at the other end, not be condescending or rude (until after the caller has hung up! 
), and try in good faith to identify and correct the problem as quickly as possible. Yes, sometimes even after identifying the user type it’s still necessary to ask the obligatory “Did you reboot?” or “Are you sure the printer is turned on?” or “Please check to make sure the cable connections are tight” because the obvious is sometimes over looked. Hell–I’ve done it before and needed to be reminded!
I don’t know if any of this helps, Biggirl. You’ve got a bad egg there in my opinion, and you should let management know.
ETA–Holy crap! That got a LOT longer than I intended!!
Mike
mikemo that is spot on! I run into those same classes of users here. We do support for our particular software, and email/hosting support.
About IT support not getting customer service training?
I was hired for my customer service skills, as were many of the people I worked with. We were then given the relevant training in the IT side. Now it was ISP helpdesk, so were were initially only dealing with 56k dialup modems and the various ways they could screw up, but it was eventually expanded into DSL support and some small network support.
That’s pretty par for the course over here. The people are hired for their people skills, then given the tech training. It tends to work out better than hiring people for their tech skills and then trying to train customer service into them.
I should have mentioned that I’ve worked in IT in 4 different organizations now, and it’s all pretty much held true so far. I’ve also spoken with numerous other IT professionals and think the user types are pretty universal.
I should also mention that I’ve also experienced the caller end of help desks, when calling the various vendors that we use for support. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I don’t even answer the 1st level questions–the ones who are obviously working from a script. I ask to be immediately routed to 2nd level support.
BTW–some of you may recognize one of my previous employers…a little ice cream company called Ben & Jerry’s. 
This is my problem too, pretty much with every issue that needs to be handled.
User: I have an error message on my screen.
Me: What does it say?
User: I don’t know, I don’t understand it.
Me: Can you read it to me?
User: It’s just a whole bunch of computer stuff I don’t get.
Me: Can you just read it to me one word at a time?
User: I don’t know, I think you’ll just need to come look at it.
Me: …
If only everyone did that…my company does, for our first-line helpdesk people. But if your problem is difficult and has to be escalated to 2nd or 3rd level? You pays your money (figuratively) and you takes your chances. Most managers of 2nd/3rd level people have started trying to make sure whoever they hire for those positions are customer-friendly (or at least customer-neutral), but there are still some old-timers in there… :eek: :mad: