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

[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.