Cutting off the leeches

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

Everyone has them. The users who call and call and call and CALL for utterly trivial stuff. Timewasting bonebrains of the first water. People who don't understand "We are not providing you support any longer. Stop calling us."

As a corporate helpdesk, we can cut these people off (both phone and email) and direct them to their supervisor for all future interactions. Well, when I say 'cut off', I really mean "One of the low-level managers gets stuck dealing with them", but for the people on the phones it's the same effect.

We're somewhat fortunate to have this system in place, even if it's a little flawed. But it could be a lot better. What's your favorite way to tell certain individuals they won't be receiving any more beersupport?

Comments

[usekh.livejournal.com]

We have one serial pest customer. Our managers even offered to pay all costs involved with him going to another ISP. He won't ;/

[jon787.livejournal.com]

userdel -r $LUSER

[jecook]

When I was working for the feild service company, we had at least one client that the owners of the company fired for being asshats.

Unfortunately, the owners of the company managed to lose other clients through their own scheming of going after bigger fish and neglecting their older clients...

[trayce.livejournal.com]

I had a nice but doddery old coder who stuck to me once because he thought I could help him with his ASP code. This is despite the fact that a) I knew jackshit about *any* ASP except for the one very specific mail gateway script we supported; and b)we never supported client coding/html problems or questions (we provided web hosting space - thats all).

I don't remember how I got rid of him now, it was so long ago. He'd just email me with nice but pointless questions a lot. I think I just stopped answering him...

[kizayaen.livejournal.com]

We do not have such an option. :(

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

We only started having such an option after management discovered:

(a) That for one particular email pest, I was actively camping the team mailbox for anything from that address, and

(b) The nature of the replies I was sending back.

At one stage, this one person (out of about 25,000 corporate users) was responsible for upwards of 25% of our incoming mail.

[sigurther.livejournal.com]

This sounds like it should be a post to customers suck ;)

Mmmmm, deeetaaaiiiillllls.

[the-s-guy.livejournal.com]

This person had been handed the role of office 'tech' at one of our remote sites - about a hundred and fifty people, and one of the more important sites as seen by the executives.

Office techs are charged with being our firewall. They are supposed to take care of every local technical problem short of arranging replacement hardware, tinkering with the server, and frobbing the back-end on the national databases. This is why there's only one of us per two to three thousand staff.

Anyway, this idiot was fundamentally unable to troubleshoot or investigate. At all. In any way. Her emails consisted of "someone told me last week they were having a problem." And she sent dozens of them. Hundreds.

So I started taking all her emails for myself, and sending them back with a standard template requesting that basic troubleshooting be done. And when she replied again with no troubleshooting done, I would bounce them again. And again. And again. And again. And each time, I would include a line about the total number of times we had advised her to do this before contacting us.

When the number cracked 50 (in the first three days), I started cc:ing the site manager on my replies.

The site manager blew up and called my manager. My manager talked to me. I explained that because this anti-tech was unable to do the job she had been given, our own efficiency was suffering, and produced the 50-plus examples (plus dozens of previous emails) to corroborate it.

Her incoming emails got assigned to a junior manager, whose job it was to do exactly what I had been doing - just keep requesting that she provide basic information, and cc:ing it all to her site management.

As a followup, she was apparently assigned an assistant. The assistant's job was to receive emails from the idiot and forward them to us so that the idiot's name didn't appear in the 'sent from' field. Unfortunately for the site, we quickly learned the name of the assistant and gave both of them the same treatment.

I think the assistant eventually learned the basics of troubleshooting. Whether the site still wastes money employing the original idiot, we neither know nor care.

[blossomingfire.livejournal.com]

I only get that option if they quit.

Then I get to say "I'm sorry, but you'll have to pay my consulting fee."

[tecie.livejournal.com]

I kept a PDF of the support contract on my desktop and would start quoting the scope section.

[heleneotroy.livejournal.com]

I'm faced with the task of cutting off people who claim too many missing issues from their subscriptions. Now, if you miss an issue here and there, that's okay. Sometimes the post office loses things, sometime the mail gets wet or torn. No big deal, I'll send you a replacement issue for free.

But if you call/email me every month MULTIPLE TIMES for MULTIPLE ISSUES?
NO MORE MAGAZINES FOR YOU!
In addition, we are more than happy to send you issues that you have missed from the last few months. But, if it has taken you until now to realize that you are missing the Novemeber, 2003 issue of your magazine? Sucks to be you!
I want to punch these people!

[katyism.livejournal.com]

We have a policy-related knowledge base doc for any situation. If they won't accept "we don't support that" then i usually just point them to a doc. of course they just call back and start asking for supervisors by name next time, but i don't have to deal with them.

[kayfox.livejournal.com]

I thought you were supposed to apply the leeches to the lusers?

(I can always say: shut up, go away. To anyone bothering me about technical stuff that I dont have to be bothered with, thankfully.)

[jdotmi.livejournal.com]

We had one user who, for a time, was banned from calling us because he would call us over the most inane things and ramble for hours on end. Sadly, he's allowed to call us again. Fortunately, he doesn't ramble as much.