Open letter to tech support customers

The BBQ Pit
1

Four simple rules that will make you a model tech support customer:

1. Tell me what the problem is. No, really. I would love to possess the power of telepathy, but unfortunately I don’t. I am therefore quite unable to solve your problem unless you somehow inform me what it is. Included in telling me the problem is the concept of actually telling me the problem, not your interpretation of it. “It seems to have trouble connecting” is a worthless piece of information. “It displays the following error message:” is a necessary piece of information.

2. Answer my questions. If I ask you something, chances are it’s because I need to know the answer to that question. It’s not because you have a beautiful speaking voice, and it’s not because I need to know the answer to an entirely different question. Answer the questions I ask, and do not answer questions I don’t ask. “I don’t know” is a perfectly acceptable answer. So is “I don’t understand”. If you don’t know, tell me, and we’ll find out. If you don’t understand, tell me, and I’ll explain.

3. Tell me nothing else. I’m sorry if I sound misanthropic, but after several years in the tech support business the number of times spontaneously offered information from a customer has actually aided my work can be counted on the fingers of one hand. If I don’t ask, I probably don’t need to know. Telling me just uses up time, and neither of us has an interest in having the call take longer than necessary. This also applies to subjects like, for example, how long you waited in the queue. While this may surprise you, I’m not actually the guy in charge of the size of the queue. The size of the queue is a direct function of three factors: the number of callers, the number of tech support agents and the duration of each call. The first two factors are completely beyond my control, and the third is something I can only influence with your help.

4. Understand that I cannot change reality. If I tell you the solution to your problem, that solution remains the same even if you don’t like it. The solution is not affected by you being in a hurry, or in another country, or desperately in need of another solution. If something is impossible, it remains impossible no matter how badly you need it to be possible. I’m not clear on how so many people manage to live forty years or more on this Earth without grasping this concept, but there it is.

2

Excellent points all. After more years than I would like to think about doing Tech Support, I have become convinced that many folks that call are not interested in solving their problem in a way that I would recognize. I think that they really want to have some sort of an encounter session with a captive audience because the nasty mean computer made them feeeeeeeel bad.

3

At which point, I invite them to call 1-800-GANDALF, because what they want is a wizard to wave a magic wand and instantly solve their problem.

4

I cannot disagree with a single point made here, but #2 resonates especially well with me. If I ask you a question, one that requires an answer of yes, no, or twice on Sundays, please do not go off on a tangent about how your aunt Mabel drove a Buick back in ‘63, which bothered uncle Mort, because he worked at the Chevy dealership down the street, you know the one, right next to that movie theatre, the one that once played that movie starring Lon Cheney and what’s her name, you know, the blonde, who was in that other movie about the guy with the pet bear, like those bears up in Canada where they have those cops on horses like they did back in the old days, but with nice red costumes, not really a blood-shade of red, but more a rosy red, like Santa Claus, only not as fat, because they don’t eat all those carbs, which apparently are bad for you, so anyway, I says to Mabel, I says, “Yo, Mabel, my computer is broken!”, and she was all like “Well, back in my day, we didn’t have computers”, and I was all like "Yo grandma, get with the times, this ain’t like 19 freakin’ 42", and she was all upset with me because of not only that, but this one time, at band camp…

5

I agree with all points made.

I would like to add one as a customers suggestion to tech support:

  1. Understand that SOME of your customers are actually somewhat computer savy, and if you choose to be a condescending fuck, and tell them to make sure the computer is pluged in to the wall, there is a very real posibility that they will not only cancel their service, they will also name YOU as the reason for the loss of revenue for the company.

Not that this has happend to me or anything (and yes, the computer WAS plugged into the wall, and the problem was, in fact, at their end).

6

You guys are overlooking one glaring situation that probably does not include you as I’m guessing you are competent in your vocations.

I don’t know how many times I’ve encountered tech support people whose technical savvy seemed to be eclipsed by their ability to capably answer the phone. How these people got jobs in this field is beyond me.

Examples:

The tech that asked me if my email was down after I told him my computer wouldn’t boot up.

The tech that wanted to know if my printer was disconnected from the back of the computer - This after I told him that the network printer que was full but the printer itself showed no jobs pending (key word NETWORK).

The tech that asked me if I could access the files on my slave hard drive AFTER I called asking to have the service tech put the hard drive BACK INTO my computer (He left it on my desk after installing additional equipment)

Don’t get me wrong, I agree with your rant. I just want you to know that as a custumer I get some real headaches too when I get a green or incompetent tech support on the other end of the line. I love it when I get a good tech on the phone.

7

I try, as God is my witness. The problem is that customers do not follow the laws of physics and logic. I’ll get a customer who talks at length about TCP/IP and DHCP and firewalls and ports and whatnot, but when I ask him to open the Start menu he has no clue what I’m talking about.

Really, it’s not that I want to treat everybody like a moron. The morons force me.

8

There are two kinds of tech support customers: those who are morons, and those who are not. The problem is that it’s almost impossible for the tech support provider to know the difference.

That’s why wise ones come up with little tricks. For instance, instead of asking if the computer is plugged into the wall, a clever one will ask them to unplug it, turn the plug over, and plug it in again. This catches a remarkable number of stupid people who in fact had it unplugged the whole time, and is not a complete insult to the intelligence of the smart ones who did have it plugged in.

Another great trick I learned was about (I think it was) keyboard plugs, something that comes in “big” or “small.” Now, if I am a naive user, I will have only the one type of keyboard and will have no way of knowing whether it is “big” or “small” because I have nothing to compare it to. A clever tech support person once told me that he asks people to find the plug hole and stick their finger in it. Does it fit? If yes, it’s small. If there’s plenty of room left over, it’s big.

I have also found that I am sometimes better off not calling tech support at all. My favourite is when you call them up, and they remotely control your computer, and you WATCH them as they randomly open dialog boxes and check menus, clearly having absolutely no idea what they’re doing (as I have already opened all those dialog boxes and menus, before I called, so I know they’re grasping at straws. Of course they don’t listen when I tell them I’ve already tried it, because they don’t know if I am the idiot kind of user or the other kind). Man, that remote controlling thing must be really annoying for the stupid tech support people because clever users like me can see in living colour how incompetent they are. (Why can’t they just say “I don’t know?”)

9

I can field that question. I have found, over the years, that it is the kiss of death to admit that you don’t know something. Most of the people that call me are stupid. Not only that, they are that dangerous kind of stupid where the dummy has a dim notion that he is stupid and is angry about in.

Because nothing in the whole wide world can possibly be his fault, and because they now have the monkey seeking to improve his pecking order status sub-routine activated the very last thing that you want to do is show anything that they will see as weakness. It is like blood in the water.

10

Not necessarily. The weekend before I started tech support, at the very end of training, we got training on this very thing. We were told the right sorts of questions to ask and keywords to listen for to nail down the customer’s level of competence within the first two minutes of the call. With experience, one could get pretty good at it.

In fact, we had a categorization system for the four levels of competence. UI, CI, CC, and UC. They broke down like this, using a person driving a stickshift as an example:

UI: Unconsciously Incompetent. User doesn’t know how stupid she is. She thinks she can buy a new car with a stickshift, and drive right off the lot. Doesn’t know why the car keeps stalling.

CI: Consciously Incompetent. User knows how stupid she is. Realizes she needs lessons in shifting, and is willing to learn.

CC: Consciously Competent. User knows what she is doing. Can drive the stickshift.

UC: Unconsciously Competent. User is smart, but not as smart as she thinks. Very dangerous, especially when reaching a stop sign at the top of a hill.

11

Ah, but you see, we are not ALL like that (see my first paragraph above). I spent ten minutes watching the tech support guy reproduce my random dialog-box-opening because he had as much clue as I did, ie none. If he said he didn’t know, I would have gone and asked someone who did.

The problem here, of course, is that “I don’t know” often means the same as “I could prolly figure it out if I could just randomly open a bunch of dialog boxes.” In fact this is precisely how I have managed to develop something of a reputation as being computer-savvy. I am the queen of figuring shit out by opening menus and dialog boxes.

Perhaps we should all get identification numbers, or rankings, or something, so that we can instantly communicate our computer competence to tech support people we encounter. Maybe a secret handshake, or something?

tdn, I am inspired by your story of techies learning to distinguish between different kinds of stupid users. Hopefully the techies I deal with will take the same seminar.

12

I just make sure to put my husband on the call, who’s been running big computer systems for 30 years or so, and have him tell the tech what the problem is, why it’s at their end, and what he’s done to verify that it is. It’s amazing how quickly they realize the call will end a LOT faster if they just follow his instructions.

He still gets the ones, of course, who have to check off all the questions on their list, so he goes through it surprisingly patiently with them – I guess he wants the tech support people who work for him to go through their checklists, too, so he lets them do that part of their job. But at the end of it, basically 100% of the time he’s diagnosed the problem for them, down to which piece of equipment at their end is malfunctioning and why. I just sit back and enjoy it.

He’s also been on the receiving end for enough years to amass enough tales of tech support horror story to curl your hair. So the joy of his life from his customer service viewpoint is when he has a customer who actuallyi not only understands what’s going on, but has enough authority to make the other idiots listen.

13

However, if there is a long queue, please be aware of it and understand that this will effect how we interact with you at the beginning of the call. If we’ve been waiting in queue for 27 minutes, listening to soft music and getting pissed and slowly drifting off into never-land, we’re probably going to need a minute to get our bearings. We may have moved on to other tasks to pass the time. We probably won’t have the necessary windows open any more on our computer, and we may even need a moment to remember why we called.

Nothing pisses me off more than twiddling my thumbs for an hour on hold and then some tech guy gets on the line with “hellohelloareyoutherewhatisyourproblemhellohello” and expects an instant answer.

14

Mama Tiger, that has never happened to me. Ever. Every single time that someone has acted like that with me (and it happens rather frequently), they’ve been wrong. Every. Single. Time. Do you now realize why we have to go through our checklists anyway? We have no way of knowing that this customer, this particular one, is the once-in-a-blue-moon stuff-of-legends customer that actually has a clue. Of course he will say that he does, but they all do, so that’s not a reliable indicator, to say the least.

15

Would this be a good time for an amusing tech support anecdote?

Back in the day, Microsoft used to do its own tech support, rather than farming it out to India. They had one third-party support group, which I worked for. MS would normally divide up the calls for products pretty evenly, so any random call could go to any random place. The one exception was the “lesser” BASICs. We got 100% of those calls. Which was no fun because those products sucked ass.

So we’d take all the calls for GWBASIC, QBASIC, and VB for DOS. And then there was the infamously stupid BASIC for the Mac. We only got one type of call for that product, and the solution was always “We’ll send you a disk with the upgraded version.”

I thought that was woefully inadequate. Not one of us in the group had any kind of experience with the product. So I decided to take the bull by the horns and become the expert, the goto guy (pun intended) for Mac BASIC.

So I spent all of my free time in the lab, writing simple programs for the Mac, and seeing what made the thing tick. I then aquired a cheap (OK, free) Mac that I think was built in 19 freakin’ 42 or something. This was a dinosaur of a machine. No hard drive. No mouse. With a slight downgrade, one could have hosted the SDMB on it. :smiley:

So anyway, snagging a disk and the one and only manual we had, I was ready to do some study at home. Which I did. I was going through the manual page by page, learning the ins and outs of the software.

By about page 6, I’d hit a snag. What the manual said was clearly wrong. Or misleading. Or something. At any rate, I’d hit a brick wall. There was no going further until I figured out how to do what the manual misindicated.

What to do? Looking at the back of the manual, I saw a tech support number. Aha! All I had to do was call it. As I was dialing, it occurred to me – the call will get bounced to the third-party support group where I worked. And they’d pass the question on to the expert, the goto guy. And that guy was…

…me.

And I wasn’t there at the time!

16

I would have to second that. It has been my experience that the type of caller that Mama Tiger describes is almost sure to be totally wrong and a nightmare at that. That said, I am sure that there are exceptions out there (such as Mama’s Mantiger™). That issue is that (like with ever uttering the words “I don’t know”) all you can do is base how you do your job on what the overwhelming majority of the cases are and cultivate the ability to switch gears with blinding speed in the ravishingly rare cases where it is different.

17

And this works? Because, I dunno about you, but where I live, plugs only go in the wall in one direction.

18

Nope, the ones without grounders can go either way. I guess most computer plugs have grounders these days, though.

In fact, and I swear this is true, I had a friend with an electric analog clock, and if you plugged it in upside down it would run backwards. Weirdest thing I ever saw.

19

In the US most of the 2 pronged plugs I have seen in the last 10 years one is large than the other. The sockets in any building over 20 years old will have one side large than the left

20

Not the point. By asking the user to “reverse the polarity”, you get him to actually look at the plug and the outlet, and to realize that it was never plugged in in the first place, and to plug it in while saving face. “Hey, that worked great, thank you!”