chicken or the egg

[belovedcrown.livejournal.com]

Do you ever wonder which came first:

treatment of customers en masse by support techs as though said customers were lower forms of life, stupid, and lacking value,

OR

treatment of techs by customers as though said techs were awful arrogant incompetent social rejects ?

Who started the great war?

Who can end it?

Comments

[linguafranca.livejournal.com]

I don't mind people who suck at computers as long as they're polite and can listen to and follow directions. We're paid to help people, and that's fine. The ones who lack value in my eyes are the ones who scream at me about every little stupid thing. So I think when the first customer approached the first tech, all was good until the customer stopped paying attention.

[katyism.livejournal.com]

in these extreme terms (although they're valid now), neither.

[jjjiii]

I find that if you don't take a negative attitude into an introduction or negotiation, it usually doesn't come out on its own. It helps greatly if you can pick or choose who you talk to, and can killfile people who don't treat you with respect. Most of the problems with customer service that tech support has is because they don't have this power.

[ambitious-wench.livejournal.com]

Well, treatment of "servants" has historically been poor. I think that when tech support started growing ovaries (or gonads) was when we realized that we had more knowledge than our customers. It takes a special breed to have high intelligence, a willingness to help others and maintain a sense of dignity when confronted by the irate luser.

To be blunt, I like reading this community much more than customers_suck because I get the definite impression over there that the members are often as big a bunch of jerks as the customers. The folks here are decidedly much more intelligent, and better typists and spellers and much more imaginitive than regular customer support folks.

[kallell.livejournal.com]

i think one of the issues facing the image of tech support and codemonkeys etc. is the efficient way isnt polite.

We ask a question we are looking for yes or no and get paragraphs.

we are asked a question we give the strictest information but people want t "packaged"

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

A related issue is that consumer expectations have been warped by the pandering most companies give in order to attract that extra sales dollar. This even extends to other service/repair areas - you're more likely to go back to a mechanic or plumber who's as efficient and discreet as an old-world butler.

Tech support, on the other hand, is a slightly different prospect from the local garage or plumbers' shop.

Firstly, it's a relatively recent business, at least in terms of being a large-scale, publically-available service.

Secondly, it requires very intelligent employees with an aptitude for logic and problem solving.

Partially as a side-effect of these, it tends to employ younger people.

As another side-effect of *that*, remuneration is not the greatest. All these put together lead to -

High tech support staff turnover, and a dearth of long-term, experienced (read "patient") staff.

This means that most tech support shops are, to an extreme degree, staffed with young, recently-employed, highly intelligent kids (compared to career-length jobs), who have not yet learned patience and who care more about being right than being employed there five years from now. Heck, I'm not that young anymore and I'm still much the same. Such a concentration of similar personality types also reinforce each other.

In other industries (programming, FX shops etc), this is not always a problem. Customers talk to or meet with the senior team members, managers or sales people, who then take the requirements into the 'nursery'. This even happens sometimes at local computer shops, where the repair tech sits in the back room most of the time and the owner does the up-front counter/sales work.

In tech support, however, consumers are directly connected to these repair techs, and there's a culture shock. Customers don't always realize that their entire service experience up until now has been artificially massaged by salespeople after their wallet, and still think they're talking to people who can be cajoled, intimidated or who will pretend to give a crap what they did on the weekend.

Techs are also, in the main, not interested in learning or being taught sales skills.

There are a couple of ways to address this. Tech salaries could be raised until they attract people with dual tech/sales-schmooze skills, a rare and expensive combination. The general public could be educated (through the idiot box or similar) that low-paid areas of the service industry, especially those employing people smarter than dirt, have no vested interest in going that extra mile.

Or maybe there are other possibilities.

[kallell.livejournal.com]

wow

just wow