Success story

[skylion.livejournal.com]

Lots of us bitch and moan here, which is very useful in it's own right. But, for my first post, I was waiting for an honest to goodness success in my job efforts, before I would put in word here.

In short, I am a Tier One agent for my local ISP. Basic connectivity troubleshooting is the name of the game. Part of that is assisting the punters on their very first installation of our equipment; modem support basically. In most other calls we are under the twenty minute time limit before we pass up to the next level (with about ten minutes being in line with maintaining a profit margin for the company). On the installation calls, however, the sky is nearly the limit in regards to time. Get them connected, get them on email, introduce them to a search engine, educate them on basics of a browswer etc.

One of my calls, yesterday, I regard as a great success. It took nearly an hour to get from start to done, but under the circumstances, it was a good call. The customer was an elderly woman, a complete N00b in all regards, and knew so. By and large it took 35 minutes just to get the modem and cables attached and get the phone filters fitted properly. Yes, it was a bit exhausting, and I must have covered the same ground seven or eight times before it finally sunk in and the dsl light went from flashing to rock hard solid. She pulled IP, launched IE, got on to our homepage and got into her mailbox.

On two occasions, she wanted to give up and schedule a costly tech visit to get the job done. I pointedly, and politely, refused. In fact, I asked that she step back, grab a cool drink, and just let it go for a moment. She did so, came back, and the deed got done. At the end, she was happy, and very please that I worked with her to get her going.

Sounds a bit like I am patting my own back, but, it was a tough call, and my patience was getting very well and truly grated.

Hope y'all have the same type of stories out there.

Ne hablo pas Espanol

[afreak2600.livejournal.com]

(I am sure that my attempt at Spanish here is terrible)

One of the lovely issues that come up from time to time is do we support $LANGUAGE? We're based in Canada, so we could support French alongside English and we do have a few employees in Montreal, but our official policy states English. Because we have contracts in the United States, we get asked from time to time if we have anyone speaking Spanish in our office, to which I reply "no." In most cases, they're happy to speak English with me, and to be honest, the majority who ask actually speak the other language quite well.

However, this call was pretty terrible. Keep in mind, I don't remember what the literal translations worked out to here.

User: Do you speak Spanish?
Me: Nope. We only have English support available.
User: Okay. I cannot get online.

So I run through some basic diagnostics and determine that it has nothing to do with us.

So we then start to look at the likely suspect.

Me: What errors do you see when you open up Internet Explorer?
User: The remote computer is not responding to a connection.
Me: What versions of Windows do you use?
User: Windows XP Home Edition.
Me: Okay...
User: It's the Spanish version.

At this point, I know it is going to be painful. Just imagine computer errors like "limited or no connectivity" or what have you in Spanish and have them translated to English. Needless to say, this was a frustrating call and she was not a very patient person. Half-way through the call, I get this:

User: Why don't you offer Spanish support?
Me: Because we only offer English support.
User: That is not right. There has to be a reason.
Me: We are not mandated to speak Spanish, nor do we have Spanish-speakers here.
User: I think that I will cancel my service then.

I checked her account today because I recalled her name, and she's still around. In fact, she has called twice since and apparently she installed English Windows XP.