And sometimes, there’s more than one remote. You might have to use a different remote to turn the TV on and off, to change channels, or to play something recorded on the box. Until recently (when we got FiOS TV) we had to do this with our Tivo in our living room. My old and non-technically-inclined parents love our new FiOS TV because now they can do everything with one remote.
I’m with Ogre. It’s to the point where I don’t even bother with tech support. If I can’t fix it on my own, I’ll just look online for the answer.
It will very prettily and ergonomically do approximately half the things one would want a remote to do.
This. The customer pays your wages, listen to them and do what they want. As for saying you’re not paid enough to put up with their bullshit, if you were anywhere near the “expert” you claim to be, you’d be paid more than enough to put up with it.
Or, if you’re so low down you have a script, at least bitch about being made to follow it, not about the customer being pissed off by it.
I’m sure there’s a few arseholes who call you, but most people that you complain about will be pissed off at you asking something that they’ve already told you. I doubt one in ten thousand people who tell you that they’ve checked that it’s plugged in actually have it unplugged.
How fucking professional. Finish your previous call before answering the next, and listen to what your customer is saying.
And yet, if i call you at all, it will be precisely because cycling the equipment (often more than once) has not worked.
I recognize that it takes far less time and hassle for me to turn off, unplug, wait a minute, and then reconnect and power up my modem, router, and computer than it does to call tech support. So, if i experience any problem at all with my internet connection, this is the first thing i do.
Similarly, if i have any issues with my (internet-connected) television and Blu-Ray player, i turn them off, unplug them, give them a minute, and then plug everything in again.
And all of this usually works. Over the past few years, i’ve had to do this maybe five or six times with my internet, and a couple of times with my Blu-Ray player. The only time it has failed to work was on two occasions when there was, indeed, a service outage at my ISP. Those outages were short and quickly fixed. I’ve actually been very happy with Cox as a service provider.
I remember once, when i lived in Baltimore, i had internet problems. I tried the whole cycle thing two or three times, then gave up and called Verizon tech support. The tech had me power down and cycle everything, despite the fact that i told him that i had already done it.
After my modem and router and computer had all rebooted, and the connection still wasn’t working, the tech told me to hold on a moment. Then he came back and said, “I’ve just checked our service advisories, and it appears that there is a service outage in your area. They are trying to fix it now.”
Considering it took a good two or three minutes for me to cycle my equipment, and it took him all of 15 seconds to check his advisories to find out that there was an outage, i have to wonder why he didn’t do the latter before asking me to do the former.
According to our tech support “experts”, because you were lying about having power cycled it.
No no, I’ve had that experience with both Comcast and AT&T. I have no idea why it isn’t part of their ‘script’ to check for outages FIRST THING.
[QUOTE=Steophan]
How fucking professional. Finish your previous call before answering the next, and listen to what your customer is saying.
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, wrong answer for call center agents. Occasionally asking a caller to repeat something will hurt them far less at review time than taking too much time in “wrap” to log notes from the previous call.
You have to blame the machine for this, not the person.
Good for you. Now we need a way to separate you from the people who haven’t tried it and say that they did.
Oh yay, I love call center threads. I don’t work in tech support, thank god–all those scripts would bug the loving SHIT out of me. But I work in claim intake for an insurance company, and one of my biggest gripes is callers who try to fight me for control of the call. Someone who calls and says, “So you want my policy number? It’s 123456789. My name is Jane Doe, I’m the widget manager at XYZ and John Smith fractured his tibia and ruptured his left kidney on August 32nd. What else do you need to know?” That shit is intolerate, the bane of my existence. Because either I have to ask them to repeat themselves later in the call, or type at 100+ WPM to take notes. I’m really good at taking notes, I can even type at the speed of normal speech. But there’s a line. The only thing I dislike more than repeating myself is making you repeat YOURself. So please don’t make me.
My worst callers are ones who launch into a fucking monologue before I can even finish my greeting. Most of the time, those people don’t want to be helped. Also, they’re usually from New Jersey. And fuck New Jersey callers.
I don’t think I’m an official Old Person yet, but that thing terrifies me. The other day I sat on it and got blackness on my screen. I went to the chat option for my cable company and spent a whole hour (I had nothing else to do) between a slow connection and endless questions about this and that. I finally went over to the TV and pushed the TV/Video button which solved my problem. My mom is 84 and is even more terrified of her remote. I called the cable company and told them neither of us is technical, and they assured me they would send a living body over to her house to un-F her TV should it be necessary.
Really, do you people not understand how confusing these things are? “Read the directions” isn’t helpful at all. Why are there 89 buttons on the remote? All I want is on, off, channel change, and volume.
I want to be able to find the mute button when I need it without hunting for it or finding it so small that I can barely press it without hitting half a dozen other buttons in the process. Why the fuck is the mute button considered this obscure ‘just throw it over there’ button?
Was that supposed to ruffle my feathers? You don’t even come close. I deal with people on the phone multiple times daily who are way more competent at aggravating me. And even they get handled with politeness.
But I admit, most call center reps are not as good as me. That’s because the jobs usually don’t pay well, don’t have good benefits, involve large amounts of stress, and aren’t very rewarding in a personal satisfaction sense. Most of the good people quit.
I consider my job a sort of spiritual development thing, though. I become a better person through absorbing abuse and getting little compensation.
The best thing about a shitty life is when it ends.
Because Steve Jobs didn’t design the remote.
Seriously, you expect the engineers who design these things to design a remote that non-techy people can easily use? Have you MET many engineers? 
It’d be like expecting a world-champion weightlifter to design furniture that’s easy for average people to move. He’d have no idea how heavy/light things should be.
I have no problem with Jersey folks. Massachusetts and Chicago are places my most difficult callers have hailed from, in other jobs…although now, my most difficult callers are usually elderly, poor, uneducated, male, and ANGRY. I can’t tell you how miserable I get as soon as I hear a certain buzz-saw redneck type of voice start to talk in my ear. Those type of men NEVER seem to call unless they are angry. I realize they feel taken-advantage-of by the educated/young/wealthy/urban, but MAN, they really have a gift for ruining my day.
I don’t mind people giving me the rapid-fire delivery of information, so long as they are willing to repeat themselves when necessary. I will make them miserable anyway, by making them slow down long enough to troubleshoot. Those types of callers HATE having to troubleshoot methodically and carefully, but…troubleshooting requires patience.
Well Chimera made a prick of himself inthis thread and is now promoting himself as the guru of phone support. He may aspire to be a check out chick one day.
I’d say that I’d be watching for when you make an ass of yourself so I could feel free to repost it, but then I’d remember that I’m not that kind of person and be glad that I’m not like you.
and sometimes the customer is not a flaming idiot, the bloody thing IS plugged in and rats really did eat though the wires in the junction box down the street.
Shouldn’t have taken a week to convince know-it-all tech support to send a technician 
I worked in outsourced tech support for a major wireless carrier once and I can tell you why we didn’t. Our computer systems were absolute shit, and designed by monkeys. Everything we did was via a Citrix connection to a computer on the East Coast to our primary center, which in turn used a SECOND Citrix connection to the West Coast to reach the client. Can you imagine how shitty and slow this was? Also, they didn’t buy enough licenses of Citrix or some shit so we’d get punted out of the system or not be able to login on a regular basis, and our computers were old pieces of shit so they’d often lock up trying to manage this ridiculous setup.
Long story short, checking the outage board was a 5-10 minute process, and often it wasn’t terribly up to date. We did other things to fill the time.
Of course, the company was “saving” money because our cost per minute was lower… yeah.
Customer support of all kinds is considered a cost that needs to be minimized as much as possible. Customers never seem to shop around based on service these days, and it shows. Even if you get a sharp, caring person on the other end, they’re often wrestling with greater issues.
I’m “the OTHER kind of customer”. You know the one…
Yup, I’m the one who always has that weird problem that even stumps the experts. Never fear though, I’m unfailingly cheerful and don’t blame the techs, I always laugh with them.
One was that I wasn’t able to get one of the channels that every single other customer had on the same plan as me. They had me try every trick they knew, nothing worked (and no, I didn’t yell at them, or get cranky, it’s not like I HAVE to have even more TV :D). All of us were merely extremely perplexed. They called me back a week or so later (after running it through some of their in-house checks). I called them back. No go. Yup, everyone else was still getting the channel, nope mine still wasn’t working. Finally about 2 months after the problem occurred, the channel mysteriously started working again.
Same thing with my computer. It’s always something super weird.
Are your really that fucking stupid, or is it just an act? If you paid even the remotest bit of attention, you’d realize that all he said was the exact same shit the OP said. The OP’s rant boils down to: “I know more than you, so just shut up and let me do my job and everything will go faster.” Guess what the response to that is? “I’m paying your fucking bills. I know exactly what I need from you. If you shut up and let me tell you what’s actually wrong, you’ll get your job done a lot faster.”
Get it? It’s the same reason I respond like an asshole to people who are assholes. (Though I’ve got to learn to stop doing it so much, since people obviously lack the self-awareness to figure out what I’m doing.)
And let us not forget that you think people should go to jail because they have bad parents that taught them an incorrect view of the world. As I said back when you complained about this stuff–a lot of the reason you have assholish customers is because you act like an asshole. And if the OP lets any of this frustration out on his callers, he likely is running into the same problem.