Meme transcription:
Panel 1 of 3: A cute dog looks asks, “pls fix problem??”
Panel 2 of 3: The dog has become upset and says, “No Info!!”
Panel 3 of 3: The dog looks very angry and says “only fix”
Me in tech support.
Customer calls: “Internet is not working!!”
Me: “Router lights status?”
Customer: “Can’t tell.”
Me: “Why?”
Customer: “Router still in box.”
Me: “…?”
Me (pretends it was just an error of communication): “Can you please describe the lights on your router?”
Customer: “I can’t. It’s still in the packaging. The box is on my table.”
Me: “…??? … You … need at least electricity to power this device.”
Customer spirals into rage and madness: “I ordered wireless internet!! I won’t plug any cables in! I did not want any wires!!!”
This reminds me of when we were the first ISP in France (we had a thing that was basically Compuserve with Internet bolted on — now some people will know what that was :-/).
We were at some kind of expo, I was the tech guy, I was with the cute sales girl. For historical reasons, we started with mostly Apple clients, then opened to everything else (this was the early 90s in Europe).
Anyway I was playing on my Linux machine (yay, early adopter) and she had a hairy guy that came in that was enthralled with the whole thing. So she spent a full forty minutes with him, explaining the whole local forum things, the Internet, the Usenet, the email, the whole shebang, the guy loves it.
So he really wants to sign on, but when he’s filling in the papers, he’s stuck. “Is it ok if I leave that blank?”
“That” was the phone number. The guy didn’t have a phone line. At the time all accesses were through a modem. No phone line, no online access. The wonders of the online world were forever beyond his reach.
It took another ten minutes to get this through to him.
As a high school student, I had a job like this for about a week. On my last day, I received this call just like yours and I said “You are quite possibly the stupidest person I’ve ever interacted with” because they were yelling this type of nonsense and screaming over me.
I do not regret my exit to the call center work life. You people have a special type of patience and deserve to be paid far more.
No customer service reps? Company fails.
Makes me glad that I don’t need to look at user reports.
“This bug happened”
“Ok, can you tell us the things you did to make it happen?”
“You’re the developers, figure it out”
Unfortunately, sometimes they can’t determine reproduction steps because it’s rare to happen and required multiple things, or they just didn’t catch it. I definitely don’t blame them, at least not in a lot of cases.
And sometimes logs or crash dump or whatever is all you need to figure out the bug anyway. In fact, ideally it should be more often than not.
I had a WFM role that involved me listening in on recordings and live calls to techs for a few years… Hell of an insight.
My end user reports are as efficiently descriptive as possible. Every time I have to submit something or contact, I aim to have their experience as pleasant as possible. I aim to be a 5-10 min break for them and am more than happy to talk shit with them as long as they want to delay their next interaction with Kevin or Karen.
I do the same thing, and it pays off. Afew months ago, my Dell computer was being really laggy. I had a maintenance contract, and when I called them, I gave them a detailed description of the behavior and a list of exactly what I had tried before calling (it was extensive and exhaustive). I could hear the gears in the support repository head grind to a half momentarily and then restart in another mode altogether, and she jumped right to advanced troubleshooting. It was a great moment for both of us,.
Works both ways.
- Raise bug with as much info as possible following template
- Did you try reboot, clear cache?
- You did? Ok, duplicate
- Never fixed.
Me: Contacts tech support while providing detailed information about the issue and what I’ve already tried.
Support: Tells me to try what I’ve already tried without fully reading my ticket.
I hate this, especially when you wait several days for reply.
