The customers, they are stupid?

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

$CALL_CENTER TRSHOOT


Name: $NAME

PH#: $PHNUMBER

Issue: No surf.

Resolution: Customer isn't home to trshoot. advised customer to power-cycle when she gets home, and to call us back when she's near her computer.


why do they do this?

Comments

in defense of the stupid customer

[xanthrant.livejournal.com]

they mainly do this because our everyday world is filled with deadlines and the constant sense that you must fit everything into as much time as you're allowed.

Naturally, she prolly was on her lunch break and remembered that this one thing needed to be done. Also, people in this generation and the one preceding have no idea of what needs to be done to make things work as they are ignorant to the technical advances and are not exposed to the everyday workings of it as their livelihood, like yourself. Believe me, if you swapped positions with them and tried to do their job, you might fail abysmally. This is what they are trained to do, just as this is what you are trained to do.

Eventually, as the next generation grows up, the one that is infinitely more technically savvy than ours and the preceding, there will be no need for tech support as they will be able to do all these things for themselves. Be thankful now that you offer something and can be compensated better, coz tech support is slowly going the way of janitorial work and will be compensated as such...heed this warning and get your certs as soon as possible and climb up. So be thankful they are stupid now, coz once they discover our ruse, then all bets will be off.

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

Good point.

But.

When people do this to agents in call centers that track number of calls to resolution, they've just guaranteed that whoever had the bad luck to take the COMPLETELY USELESS call is going to get dinged *when* they call back. Not *if*. As much as I can sympathize with the people who want to be cool and multitask and call in to tech support from their car while they're driving to work and trying to negotiate freeway traffic, I hate them, because if they don't understand that they are going to need to be ready to follow troubleshooting procedures when they call, there are plenty of other things that I know from experience they're not going to understand either, and likewise from experience with way too many of these calls, the moment I start asking them to do things, or remember things, or follow the instructions in the web article I'm emailing them, I can pretty much count on them blowing up at me and going off on rants about "how dare you tell me to do anything, it's your job to fix it". I understand why it happens, but a) it wastes our time and theirs, and b) it leads nowhere good in terms of how they feel about their support experience.

Agreed, the one-on-one support model isn't going to have a useful role forever. I'm pretty sure things will be going to a feedback/knowledge base model within a generation or so. Hopefully I'll still be employable when that time comes ..

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure things will be going to a feedback/knowledge base model...

I like the car-computer analogy a lot. Were this true, mechanics would simply be specialized tool-sellers, and haynes and chilton would be absolutely rich.

It ain't gonna happen.

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

(laughing hysterically, visualizing car owner on his back in the driveway underneath his SUV, taking the transfer case out to get at the transmission governor.. :)

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

if only.

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[wxgeek.livejournal.com]

ignorance of the highly technical, complicated, billion-transistor+ networking system the customer has spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars on is not my fault. I'll do my best to correct it, but damn. critical thinking is not a job-specific skill. "My internet connection is down. When I call to have it fixed, I ought to be in the same zip code as my computer" is critical thinking.

Besides that, screw certs; I'm working on a Computer Engineering degree.

Re: in defense of the stupid customer

[mariasama16.livejournal.com]

I wish that future generations would be more technically savvy, but I disagree. I've run into more people younger than me (and I'm young myself, grew up on computers) that know less and wished that they didn't even know that much about computers. I also know older folk who know a fair amount of computers (I'd use my own grandparents as examples, but my grandfather is more of a gadget person, so he likes to tinker. He's not perfect and can do stupid stuff with the best of them, but he's willing to learn from his mistakes).

[ohmyhead.livejournal.com]

I especially love when they call from the car and don't inform you of this until you are on step two of whatever you are having to walk them through.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

See above. :)

It's a combination of "I'm Mr. Cool Multitasker" and "Lookit My Cool Cellphone" and a number of other narcissistic social trends. Most of those correlate with a short attention span, impatience when confronted with the need to actually participate in the process of fixing what they're calling about, and a "tech support == lowly tech slaves at my bidding" attitude. Not things that generally inspire sympathy in me, especially the latter.

I still hate it that they so clearly don't understand what a waste of everyone's time this habit is, and especially don't understand that not only is it a completely useless call, the tech who took the call is going to take a hit on his metrics because the guy couldn't be bothered to call when he's actually at the computer ready to troubleshoot. The thing most of them never grasp is that it's ideally a closed-loop process, and opening up the loop by calling back for *each troubleshooting step* is about 0.001% as efficient time-wise most of the time. Not to mention how bad it looks to have your name on a case like that. A lot of these get escalated to me, and there've been way too many times when I've had to restrain myself from using extreme rudeness to get the point across (on the fifth or sixth call like this on the same case) of how inefficient and inconsiderate it is.

Most call centers *don't* have a procedure to take this into account when people make useless calls like this, so taking a hit on the metrics is almost completely unavoidable. No sympathy at all.

[canray.livejournal.com]

Two calls were "Perfect" as far as my Supervisor was concerned.

But, because one was impossible to do, and the other was taking a "WHERE THE **** DO YOU FIND THESE FIELD TECHS???" call, I was given failing marks.

[wyldthyng.livejournal.com]

It drives me nuts. I'm a cellphone tec, and although Our Competition says on their voicemail that you can't be on your cell to get assistance with it, we're apparently not that smart. Competition's data centre won't even take a transfer if the person is on their handset. We're not so fortunate.

[lihan161051.livejournal.com]

I posted this a little over a year ago in response to my general frustration with this and many other strategies customers use in misguided efforts to game the system to get what they want, which most of the time only make the calls longer and their experience more unpleasant. (http://lihan161051.livejournal.com/31261.html)

Part rant, but there's useful advice in there for people who aren't experienced tech support customers. Use it wisely. :)

[ptstech.livejournal.com]

THAT was AWESOME. Should be required reading for anyone calling a helpdesk.