CheeseburgerBlue's Journal: Your Call Is Important To Us

I have read more than a few articulate, entertaining personal essays by veterans of the trenches of technical support; I have heard the rants from fed up and frustrated friends who work in the field; I have attended the complaints of the beleaguered and much blamed help agents, and have gained some appreciation of how much it must suck to handle customer relations.

After absorbing all of this, there is no doubt in my mind that grappling with irate, idiotic, impatient, disrespectful nincompoops is a thankless and demanding chore. It is clear that the conditions under which their expertise is tapped is seldom ideal.

...The thing is, I would find myself more sympathetic if most technical support didn't consistently suck so badly under ideal conditions, too.

As someone involved to a greater or lesser extent in the arts of geekery, I have had to deal with various technical support representatives from a diverse array of services and companies over the years. I have learned from my experiences, both good and bad, in order to hone my technical support manner so that I can maximise my chances of getting the assistance I need. The area I most often require assistance is with webhosting.

At this point, I am willing to say with no hint of false modesty that I am a perfect technical support customer. Immaculate, I tell you.

My default assumption is always user-error (I'm probably confused about how something is supposed to work); I am always patient, and courteous (I don't get grumpy about being put on hold, or become aggressive toward support agents for policies beyond their control); I always have all the necessary account information on hand (I don't say things like "You never sent me any membership number in the first place -- can't you look up my profile some other way?"); I keep notes about any incident I am reporting before I call, so that I can supply exact error messages and specific failure circumstances; I am willing to try whatever suggestions the agent recommends, even if I cannot see the relevance of their diagnostic approach; and I do not commit the classic nerd-dick testosterone-bred error of trying to convince the support agent that I'm just as smart if not smarter than they are.

You see? I'm a fucking gem.

And yet: technical support still sucks. They still deny that a newly reported problem exists as a matter of reflex, so most serious matters have to brought to their attention at least twice before being taken seriously. Once a problem is acknowledged they report that the problem is fixed without thoroughly checking things out, requiring a third technical support session to be opened to get the actual repairs underway. Once changes have been made to address a problem they don't take any interest in secondary or tertiary problems which may be caused by these very changes, requiring these subsequent issues be dealt with through yet another session of support, beginning the entire process over again...

If you are in the technical support industry, here are a few tips for you. Pay heed -- they will make you a star, raising you head and shoulders above the rabble:

1. Learn to distinguish idiots from reasonable people. If you treat reasonable people the same way you treat the idiots, you suck. Don't cry to me that the vast majority of the callers are idiots -- that should just make it all the easier to spot reasonable people. Pay attention. All further rules apply only when dealing with reasonable people. Dealing with idiots is between you and your supervisor.

2. When someone reports to you that they have done everything by the book, and then methodically checked over their steps again to make sure they weren't missing something, do not respond by simply reiterating the written instructions back to them again. This is a waste of time. If they were illiterate, they probably wouldn't have been able to go through the written instructions in the first place.

3. Say "I can't seem to reproduce that error" rather than "There is no problem at all" because the latter will only make you and your company look stupid later on. If there was no problem at all a reasonable person wouldn't be calling you saying there is a problem. The problem may have been caused by intermittent circumstances beyond your control, but there was still a real problem. Accusing people of hallucinating, even when put nicely, tends to rankle them and impair further relations. This is just a minor point of politesse, but it points out a constructive, trust-based attitude. The customer is trusting you to have some level of expertise: in turn, you must trust that the non-idiotic customer has a basic grasp of their perceptions and faculties.

4. If you make a change to something in order to solve a problem, for crying out loud please be sharp enough to verify what impact these changes might have had elsewhere in the system. Sadly, this is the most consistently negative feature of bad technical support: failure to anticipate the possible repercussions of their own advice.

5. Cut down on denial. I once had a webhost assure me that their system (and thus my data) was not vulnerable to a certain known exploit, even after I had sent the support team recent articles about computer security naming exactly the software versions and hardware configurations my webhost used. Technical support stubbornly defended their point of view, right up until their systems were compromised through the very exploit I had been flagging. The moral of the story is that arrogance isn't a quality that wears well when it comes to security; when non-idiotic customers are trying to tell you something, listen.

Over-arching theme: If the person on the other end of the line is patient, polite, humble and organised, think twice about what they're saying, even if it initially seems like bunk to you. They really might be on to something, dude.

(For anyone in the technical support industry who thinks I'm full of shit, please review tip #1 six to seven times before posting any flames.)