Yet another clueless TS article

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

http://www.helpmasterpro.com/community/blogs/entryid/56/professional-telephone-skills-for-the-helpdesk.aspx

Go on, have a look. And groan.

Feel free to comment on the page itself. He's also spammed it to other networks, where I shall be picking apart the multiple problems inherent in the underlying assumptions.

Seriously - if your boss started reading this out at work, would you be too stunned and insulted to reply, or simply laugh said boss out the door?

Comments

[xforge.livejournal.com]

Clearly written by someone who's never worked phone customer service for even one second.

[grrltechie.livejournal.com]

Clearly

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

The primary fallacious assumption seems to be that helpdesks desire qualified, professional, skillful employees in the first place.

Service costs money.

[tullamoredew.livejournal.com]

that would depend on the helpdesk. I'm working my second techsupport job in a row, after 14 years as a system admin, and I have no complaints, neither about the customers, nor about the job definition

but that's high level support, the lower the level, the cheaper the employees, and the less professional they start off, before they become really good, and either move higher, or move on :)

[tallanvor.livejournal.com]

It depends on the product. For example, I'm expected to be able to do code level reviews and be able to analyze core files and crash dumps (we offer Windows and Linux (Red Hat) versions of our software. Questions about how to do this will weed out the unqualified people really quickly.

[gremlingirl.livejournal.com]

It's more like, how to be an affective admin/ corp assistant.

Clearly the author has no clue about IVR or call handling and tracking, and that note about making sure your hold music doesn't suck? Yes, because all operators/technicians have control over that.

Clueless.

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

I think my favorite part is instructing no more than 30 seconds go by without checking back on the holding person, and then he lists a shit ton of other stuff to do while they are on hold.

Yeeeeah.



*peers at paragraph* I need my coffee. I'm not entirely sure that makes complete sense. Ugh.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

Perfect sense to me. But yes, supplicate to the caffeine god $DEITY_TYPE for his her its THEIR favour is eminently desireable.


Mmmm. Caffeine.

[mariasama16.livejournal.com]

Where I work, if we put the customer on mute, 30 seconds is the rule to check back. If we put them on hold, we have 2 minutes before we get back to them. And we can get dinged for not meeting those.

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

"Rather than focusing what is not possible, structure your language and thoughts to express what is possible."

"Well, sir, after your reviewing your request for a special exemption to security policy and the laws of physics... well, I don't want to be negative and dwell on what's impossible. Instead, to keep a positive note, let me tell you what we can do for you. None of what you want."

[polarbee.livejournal.com]

This week's example:

"Disable the Print Spooler on the printer server to facilitate speed of print jobs."

Not even making that up. Copied it straight from the ticket. He was selecting large numbers of PDFs in Explorer and then just hitting print and they weren't printing out in the order he wanted them.

[digitalraven]

Aye. Right. Bollocks to that.

The only phone manner we need is: "Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again? *pause* Have you tried plugging it in? *pause* There you go." On a tape.

[tuba-man.livejournal.com]

Thanks to your use of the word "Bollocks" I am now seeing that scene from the IT crowd in its entirety.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

The only phone manner we need is: "Hello IT have you tried turning it off and on again? *pause* Have you tried plugging it in? *pause* There you go." On a tape.

This.

[ashonaut.livejournal.com]

When they did that on The IT Crowd, I began wondering how I could replace myself with a tape..

[jecook]

My only request, my friends, is to be thoughtful when commenting over there.

Otherwise, yeah, I was cracking up reading that.

[amynnah.livejournal.com]

I was reading that and thought to myself, "Hey! That's us already! That guy needs to be smacked!"

I'm not gonna comment over there... :) <3

[mouser.livejournal.com]

Sadder, we've had a few that SHOULD read and heed this...

[zhent.livejournal.com]

yes, sadly I've worked with a few who could learn a few things from this...

[azleaneo.livejournal.com]

I hate "Use the rule of 3. ie Use the name once at the beginning, the middle and end of the call"

I hated having to do it, and I hate when I have to call somewhere and they do it to me. Stop saying my name. You don't care what my name is, and I don't care to keep hearing it. It makes me feel like you're trying to sell me something.

I also hate that 'keep checking up with the person on hold thing' I don't care if you have me on hold 1 min or 5 minutes without an update, but you better have some kind of information for me when you get back on the line.

Also:

Open

* "What is on your screen at the moment?"
Nothing.
* "What were you doing before the error occurred?"
Nothing.
* "How did you check the connections?"
Don't use that technical jargon with me!

Closed

* "Do you have Excel on your screen at the moment?"
Huh?
* "Did you specify which printer you want to use?"
I already told you what printer I wanted!
* "Have you checked the wall socket?"
Don't use that technical jargon with me!

[trayce.livejournal.com]

"I hate "Use the rule of 3. ie Use the name once at the beginning, the middle and end of the call"

I hated having to do it, and I hate when I have to call somewhere and they do it to me. Stop saying my name. You don't care what my name is, and I don't care to keep hearing it. It makes me feel like you're trying to sell me something."

I agree. In fact, the TL on my support desk here, she uses peoples name's repeatedly when she has a difficult, rude customer - because she knows it sounds patronising and schoolmarmy, without actually being rude at all. Puts people in their place, that shit does.

[dkdeath1.livejournal.com]

While I have been out of support for a bit, ive been through that short end of the stick personally. Its not fun, and theres a lot in the article that doesn't even fall under the control of of the tech.

Really its pretty much a stock article on how you should conduct professional phone conversation. I don't see a single piece of this advice that doesn't directly translate into any other job which involves regular customer contact.

For the under-paid under-motivated crowd, your boss trying to shove these down your throat would truly suck (I know, they did when I was there) but coming from the world of communication, the list could practically come out of the 'guide to phone etiquette' if one existed. The underlying attitude is one of 'let the caller know whats going on, because they think you care.'

So while maybe not given the best focus, I dont think the ideas should be dismissed.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Its problem... ONE of its problems is that the underlying message has been dressed up in multiple clown suits and sent lurching down to the village with bolts in its neck.

It's as if someone told the author the basic principle, and he thought "Hey yeah!", and then proceeded to sit down and pull the specifics out of his arse because he had no recent real-world experience to base them on and decided to substitute management-speak instead.

[mavikfelna.livejournal.com]

Sadly, this is exactly the sort of thing my manager looks for. I LOATH that kind of management. Get a clue about what we do and what we support and then you can propose crap like this. ::mutters and wanders off::

--Mav

[trayce.livejournal.com]

This article to me reads like it applies to a receptionist, and he's just crammed a few techy phrases in to re-jigger it.

EG: what helpdesk can one control answering after 2 rings? On what helpdesk would you normally be expected to (or able to!) take a call, park it, take another call, say "pls hold", park it, and so on and so on? And be proactive and call them? Sure, I can do that in my job - but I ain't helpdesk. A lot of call centres do not even allow outbound.

Mind you the one bit he does cover that I like is the gaining control paragraph. That stuff's always important to be skilled in.

[emsporter.livejournal.com]

He did have a couple of good points, honestly, mostly in the call-control area. I've been trying to beat some of that through my newbies head, with somewhat limited success...

Then again, most of his problems (my newbie's) spring from having been a phone monkey in an outsourcing op, rather than inherent inability.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Call control is an extremely useful skill in techsupport, it's true. The examples given, however, are largely orthogonal to the real world.

Hmm... perhaps I should write an article on the hows and whys of genuine call control. Couldn't be worse than this one.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Come to think of it, and I should have asked this earlier, has anyone here used or heard of the software being flogged at that site? Maybe the programmers have a firmer grasp on usability than the management.

[rodw.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've heard of it. In fact, I wrote it. HelpMaster has been around since 1996 and is in it's 11th major release. HelpMaster is an enterprise-ready helpdesk / service management tool that is currently being used around the world in just about every sector of the market, from small start-ups, to multi-national corporations.

It has a nifty Email Management module, and comes with SLA management, web interface, Active Directory integration and is compatible with the ITIL framework. It out-performs helpdesk software many times it's price.

Evaluation downloads are available from www.helpmasterpro.com.

[nem0.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of the time we were instructed by our boss's boss that if the campus internet was down, we were NOT to answer the phone with, "The internet is down. Thank you for calling $TECH_SUPPORT_DEPT. Can we help you with something else?" So instead we had to give our usual intro spiel, only to be rudely interrupted by questions about whether the internet is down.