I personally don’t hire anyone who has no customer service experience, as in, an actual job working with the public (or at least internal customers). Neither does our helpdesk (I’m operations–we work fairly closely with the helpdesk and their users). Customer service skills in these two areas are crucial, as I’m sure you’ll agree. You can teach tech skills pretty easily at this level, but customer service skills are either hard-won through experience, or innate (an actual talent for handling people.) You can try to train customer service skills into someone, but if they don’t have the personality for it, it’s like trying to teach a cat to polka.
Yoiks… And here we are, we provide an enhanced printscreen app in our base image that makes it simple for users to snag screenshots, select arbitrary portions, and copy them into emails or other documents.
Let me guess… your IT department is so uptight and clueless that they’ve also made it imposible for you to double-click the clock down in the bottom-right corner of the screen? (A classic sign of a department that can’t be bothered to set a usable access policy.)
Ha! They had to re-enable that on my computer because our ancient database program (Foxpro) will not let you change the date on letters, you have to change the date on the computer.
But that’s just me and a handful of others. We are supposedly getting a newer database program. This’ll make IT happy as they can disable access to the clock too.
Hey Biggie:
If tech people were to dial the sarcasm back to 7 would you attend an unpaid monthly technical class? One hour, every month where you learn what the “trouble windows” mean and why the “CPU” might be sounding funny.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year,
Your Technical Services Team
Sarcasm I can deal with. Nastiness, not so much. I’d sure would take a beginners tech class, especially if it’s for free. I’m not sure what that has to do with this thread, though.
You know something Viscoso? Now that I’ve thought about it a while, that sounds like an excellent idea. Why don’t employers give basic techie knowledge classes to employees? My company gives classes in Excel and Word and stuff like that, why not on how your computer actually runs?
I suspect they really don’t want us to know.
I speak for my brothers and sisters in tech support: we want you to learn this shit. Ask us. We might be awkward but we want peace.
Yours truly,
Every Tech Guy in the Entire World
Oh, I didn’t mean the IT guys don’t want us to know, I mean the employers don’t want us to know.
If you feel that I thought of you or treated you like an idiot after you called, then I failed at my job. My boss would agree. I treat everyone with the respect I would want to be treated with. Often, they are very disrespectful to me, but I know it’s most often because they are frustrated. Usually, they are very apologetic when I have fixed their problem.
It’s true that certain forms of idiocy chap my hide, but I will hold my tongue till after the call. The person you describe in your OP would not last on our helpdesk.
We are in the midst of a survey at our company, where we e-mail every 5th caller and ask them to participate and tell us how we are doing. We’ve seen some of the data and the results are very positive.
Imagine the ‘check oil’ light comes on in your car. You go ‘oh, needs more oil? Lemme see…I have some cooking oil! Let’s put that in!’.
Sounds preposterous, right? What kind of idiot puts cooking oil in their car? Well, it only sounds stupid because cars have been around a lot longer than computers. But really, randomly clicking the annoying boxes to make them go away is just as stupid as putting the cooking oil in your car to make the light go away. Basic computer skills should become just as commonsense as basic car maintenance skills. Those annoying boxes are often the computer version of the info lights on your dashboard.
That’s why my bosses put me in front of the computer and don’t let me deal with the clients! 
(okay, really, it’s just because I’m one of the grunts who just does what she’s told to do, they let me out to the clients the few times someone higher in the chain isn’t available)
Oh, they want you to know. They just don’t want to pay for you to learn it.
Back when I was the IT manager at a small company, I did this. We had a series of brown-bag lunch sessions for anyone who wanted to come, where I gave hour-long presentations on some computer topic. Not just Word and Excel, but stuff like, “Here is the difference between ‘memory’ and ‘storage’” and “This is why we need to know X”. People liked it, and it seemed to make our lives easier.
That was easy to do at a small company with about 100 computer users. Organizing something like that for a 15,000-person company, with all the budgeting and so on, would be a kick to the crotch. But, I agree that it pays dividends for everybody, especially IT.
I work in IT (non-technical) and the biggest problem we have is the freekin’ helpdesk. They don’t get enough information for a tech to tell what the problem is, let alone work it. Do you tech-types out there have the same problem?
Absolutely–it’s the biggest problem we face at my organization as 3rd level support. Half the calls are mis-diagnosed entirely by the help desk staff, and (almost) none of them have all the information we need. Many times they get logged to us without going through 2nd level (field techs) for troubleshooting and analysis. And I can’t even begin to count the number of times that a call gets logged repeatedly even though we’ve given the help desk boneheads all the tools and instructions they need to resolve the issue themselves!
See, I think this issue feeds the OP’s gripe. If technicians are looking at lame-ass descriptions or inadequate triage or what have you, day after day, ticket after ticket, they just might slip into the “boy who cried wolf” syndrome and assume that nothing is as it seems. Not that that’s a green-light for calling people stupid or liars, but I can understand how they’d be conditioned to at least think that way sometimes.
You know, they sell books about this sort of thing. Why wait?
Are you serious? If so I’d like to clarify if you mean outsource(as in hiring a local consulting company) or offshoring(having most stuff go through a helpdesk outside the US, with escalation to tier 2 or 3 necessary to get an on-site resource). I’ve had the most useless helpdesk/desktop support offshore teams. Finding a good company who can either have, or deliver, an on-site resource within an hour or so might be good, but I’d recommend against the offshoring. I took my laptop home suspended instead of shut down one day and when I tried to tunnel back to the corporate network it confused the domain servers to have a computer with two Active Directory entries. Apparently one of the computers I was connected to(an Exchange or IM server I believe) was making requests on my behalf and they were failing so the account was being locked after 3 bad attempts. I started getting locked out of everything, I couldn’t get IM, or email, or even log into my laptop. I went back and forth with the helpdesk(offshored to India) for a couple days(during a critical project window) before I was able to escalate the ticket to on-shore resources. They would unlock the account for me,which was good for about three hours of productivity, and give me five minutes of lecturing about not typoing my password. “That’s the only reason an account gets locked out sir.”
Tier 3 was unable to diagnose the problem, but they verified it was occuring due to a server making an authentication request with incorrect data and put in a work around. When tier 4 followed up later they were able to fix it. Both tier 3 and 4 are on-shore, in-house teams, and both laughed their heads off when I told them “thank you for believing me when I said I wasn’t typoing my password.”
In my experience, the weirder the problem, the worse an outsourced/offshored solution is.
Enjoy,
Steven
a) If you’re wondering why your corporate employers do not see the need to train incoming employees in the fundamentals of how the computer works, well yes budgetary concerns is part of it, but often enough the problem is that the people calling the shots don’t know how to use a computer themselves. Many of them do not realize the extent to which they are unable to do so, while at the same time accurately assuming that the average new employee knows at least as much as they do.
b) Those of us who do tech support don’t always realize the extent to which the nouns and verbs we use and understand are not a major part of how you comprehend your own computer. You end-user folks, on the other hand, are just as bad about assuming that tech support people, since they “know all about computers”, surely must understand your workflow and all the aspects of the computer that you do, in fact, know about. Both forms of miscommunication tend to cause IT folks to get frustrated and stop listening to you —
IT: OK, where did you save this file?
You: In Word, in this months’ budget
IT: No [stupid twit], not ‘what application were you in’, what path did you save it to?
You: [path? like C-colon-backslash-whatever? I don’t mess with that!] I do not know what you mean. We don’t save to ‘paths’, we just click the blue file for this month’s budget and give it a name
IT: Well where the heck is this month’s budget? What disk is it on, do you [even] know that?
You: Disk? [as in, like, burn to CD? surely he doesn’t mean floppies!] We don’t save our work on disks, it goes on the computer
IT: [yeesh, maybe you saved it inside the mouse? or maybe it’s between the “e” and “r” keys on your keyboard? saved it “on the computer”] Tell me exactly, click for click, how you go about saving a file “in your budget”
You: Well first I open my template and then
IT: What template?
You: [and they pay you to do this??] Right here, next to ‘Internet Explorer’, below ‘My Computer’!
IT: [Oh, must be a shortcut to a read-only document or a document with a Save-As macro?] What does it go to?
You: It goes to new budget forms [duh!]
IT: [sigh…] Can you right-click it and tell me if you see a “Show Original” button?
You: No, when I right-click it I get a bunch of stuff like “Open” and “Send To”, do you want me to read them all?
IT: [this is hopeless, why do they let morons use computers?] Umm, just wait there I’ll come down myself
I’m in the helpdesk at my work, and in general I’m known for getting the right information and doing proper troubleshooting if I have to send it up to 2nd level. However, there are a LOT of people who call in who refuse to answer our questions, saying “just send something to second level for me”.
Trying to say that they need a bit more information for them to be able to best assist you when calling back will get you yelled at or snotted at. At that point I just send it up with an internal comment stating that I had tried to ask this, this, this and this (to show that I had the right train of thought) but that the client repeatedly refused to answer my questions. Our calls are recorded so I have proof. 
[sub]It really sucks sometimes, being a competent help desk employee. I work damn hard at doing troubleshooting before sending something up. I then document what I did using complete sentences, proper grammar, different (short) paragraphs to break it up visually, etc. … and then I see absolutely DEPLORABLE tickets that my co-workers sent up. :mad:[/sub]
Seconded. Our current offshore team are basically shell-scripts-on-a-chair. They can answer the phone or spot an icon going red in a monitoring system, but that is about it. We receive tickets that aren’t just factually incorrect, but completely incomprehensible.
Which of course means that the end users hoard phone extensions for senior IT personnel and circumvent the helpdesk completely - not that I blame them, mind. But end users are rarely very qualified in locating root causes for problems and the senior people don’t really have the time to do it for them, so conflicts of interest is pretty much inevitable. The end user is annoyed - (s)he’s talking to a supposed expert, so why is nobody helping? - and the engineer is most likely a specialist in something completely unrelated - and busy putting his actual skills to use.
It’d be something if helpdesk jobs actually were recognized as important - with proper training, an advancement path and perhaps a bit of respect, even.