Some of you may wonder what I do for a living. It has nothing to do with web design or surfing the internet (though I wish it did!). Well, about 1% of it is web design. Anyway, I do a lot of stuff, too much for me to put in here right now.

But one of my jobs is tech support. That's actually what got me started at this company, long, long, ago.

Over the years I've worked here I have been in contact with a wide variety of customers, with a wide variety of problems. To tell the truth, I love doing customer support. I love helping people with their problems and coming up with a solution. There are people who are great at doing support, who can make a customer feel at ease. There are some people who suck balls at it - they come off as unhelpful, rude, cocky and they give the customer the feeling that they are just wasting their time. I apologize for those people...they're getting paid for a reason, and it's not to piss off customers. Keep a smile on your face and drown 'em with niceness, that's my motto.

But I've also experienced my share of jerky customers, people who talk to you like you're nothing, people who feel like they're entitled to be priority #1 even though their problem may be a minor one. When people are jerky to us, we don't work as hard to help them. Sure, we'll try to fix their problem, but we won't go above and beyond for someone who talks down to us.

So here's a couple tips to enhance any experience you have with customer support:

- Be nice. If you're nice to us, we'll work hard to fix your problem. If you're mean, we'll still fix your problem, but we will just do enough to fix it. For nice people we might throw in some extra help or advice to make things work better.

- If you have an error, write down the error somewhere so when you call us, you can tell us exactly what the error is. Just saying "I'm getting an error" isn't going to do anything!

- Make sure you check any troubleshooting tips in your manual before calling in. We're going to ask you the exact same things when you call us. Don't get upset and scream, "I'VE DONE THAT ALREADY!" You don't know how many people call us and never try the steps in the manual first...we're just trying to cover all the bases!

- Never say, "It's not working!" and let that be the end of your complaint. If it's not working, tell us what's wrong. Tell us if it's ever worked before. Tell us if anything had changed before you had the problem. Give us as much info as you can about your problem and what it was like before the problem.

- I know you're smart. I know that maybe some of the things we walk you through to troubleshoot you may know how to do and might be easy. But if we're having you troubleshoot on the phone, try not to get ahead of us or assume that you know what the next steps will be. We get a lot of people who hit enter before we tell them to, or who have deleted massive amounts of data because they thought they were supposed to run a query before we gave them specific instructions. Don't be a hero, let us guide you.

- This might be a big problem for you, but it's not going to help if you call every 2 hours asking for a status update. If you want, send an email to check on the update, this way you have a trail in case the support tech is a total ass and is actually surfing the internet instead of working on your problem.

- Being nice goes a long way. I know you're frustrated, but we're really trying to help you out.

Hmm...that's all for right now.

Pictures from Ben's Cubs game coming later today!

Posted by Yano at August 22, 2006 10:37 AM

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