My first job out of school was in a hellhelp desk* at a large corporation. I loved the idea of helping people, so it initially seemed like a great fit. However, as the corporate reality of customer support bore down on me, and the cost of living in northern CA sucked my income, I burnt out.
When a customer called into our support line, they navigated a labrynthine menu which included punching in their support plan. If it was a new call, it would be answered by an unskilled person ("level 0") whose job it was to verify the customer had a valid support plan, update contact information, and find out just enough about the problem to direct it to the pool of more specialised people. (The purpose and benefit of all this was the skilled analysts didn't have to ask this information.) An existing call would automatically go to the specialised queue.
In my group, we alternated weeks between the real-time ("level 1") and resolution ("level 2") queues. The theory was calls should be resolved by the real-time folks within 5 minutes. If they couldn't, the trouble ticket would be passed to the people working resolution. Resolution would research the problem and call the customer back with a solution.
This would have worked, except management's bonuses were strongly correlated to hold times, measured as the time until the real-time analyst picked up. To reduce hold times, and thereby enhance their bonuses, management staffed the real-time queue at the expense of the resolution queue. This was spun to us as a noble effort: customers want to have their problems resolved right away. Unfortunately, running diagnostic commands on their computer or finding log files consumed most of the five minutes. By the time we had enough information, we had to toss it over the wall.
To deal with scofflaws like me who took eight minutes to fully resolve the issue, Kate was designated "queue master." Her primary job was to monitor the time we were on the calls. If we took more than five minutes, she'd bark across the cubes. If it was more than seven minutes, she'd have to get up and tap us on the shoulder. She didn't like to get up.
Not surprisingly, the level 2 queue blossomed as calls festered, unresolved. Occasionally, when someone in management got asked about the backlog, a couple of analysts were slotted to pore through the queue. This generally involved identifying the 20% of the calls that were duplicate issues because the customer became impatient and called back, opening another issue that did get resolved. When that didn't work, they'd identify all the east coast customers, call them after 4pm PST and leave a terse message like:
New, naive people like me were chagrined that our company behaved this way and channeled our stress internally. Sensing the lowered morale would affect hold times, management brought in a consultant to hold a pep rally. Meanwhile, the company was shipping a major release on -- surprise! -- unverified and unreadable media. This resulted in a flurry of unhappy customers whose issues, mercifully, were resolved by sending new media, a task handled by the TAPECUT group.
TAPECUT had the worst job in customer support as they were tasked with creating media with updates and patches. This was in the dark times when 5 1/4" floppy disks ruled the skies, 1/4" cartridges had just started walking upright, and Internet access was limited to universities. If an SCO Unix customer needed the latest release, odds are they were equipped with 5 1/4" floppy disk. The TAPECUT team would hand-make all 80 floppies. It was a totally thankless job.
This was an eye-opening place to work, and I was very glad I got out of there. At my next, much smaller company, I made sure we didn't repeat the same bad habits. I was on a first-name basis with all of our customers and had the pleasure of meeting several of them in person when we held our annual user events.
I have empathy for the people working support. However, as a customer, I'm also very jaded at any shenanigans. Mistakes happen, and I expect a company to fess up and fix it. If they do, I'm a loyal customer, if they don't, I seek alternatives. I thought it would be useful to relate some anecdotes where customer support was good and not-so-good. First the goods:
Case #1: (good) I am moderately addicted to Reed's Ginger Candy. I bought a 1 pound bag and, long story short, the ginger in bottom half of the bag had started to spoil. I wrote a short note on Tuesday evening, asking about this and if I could get a replacement bag. I figured I'd give it a few days, and if that didn't work, toss the bag. To my surprise, I received a response 20 minutes later... from the guy who runs the company. He apologized for the bad experience, explained what might have happened, and asked for my address so they could send a replacement bag.
Case #2: (good) Jill was complaining about some Trader Joe's salsa. On a lark, I ordered her a sampler from Salsa de Rosa, the brand I buy when I don't feel like making my own. Later, I realized that I should have included a note. Since it was late, I wrote their customer support asking if I could include a note and make a dig at TJ's. A couple of hours later, Steven, the spouse of the owner (Rosa), wrote back saying he'd take care of it and my wording was similar to what he might write. Product was delivered in a few days, Jill liked it.
Now for bad experiences...
Case #3 (bad) I was going through my phone bill and asked Qwest about the calculation of certain charges. They couldn't answer my simple question and redirected me to their web site, which was equally evasive. When I persisted, the rep suggested I fax (fax?!?) my question to them.
It seems ridiculous that I would need special equipment (I don't have a fax) to communicate with customer support, especially for a question they should already have a stock answer for.
Case #4 (bad) ReplayTV -- through my employer, I got a sweet deal on a ReplayTV unit. About three months after I had it, I started seeing messages that it was unable to update its software. The programming updates are fine, so my programs are recorded, but their software update process fails in some way. Since I can reproduce this at will, this should be a simple thing to answer. However, I've been on the phone ReplayTV technical support several dozen hours. None of their support people is allowed to delve beyond the script, and the company was adamant about escalating this to an engineer. So, since the programming function works, I've given up on it. When the three year (free) subscription contract expires, I'll use an alternative. (Right now there's no cost to me; it would cost to switch to TiVo, however.)
When a customer called into our support line, they navigated a labrynthine menu which included punching in their support plan. If it was a new call, it would be answered by an unskilled person ("level 0") whose job it was to verify the customer had a valid support plan, update contact information, and find out just enough about the problem to direct it to the pool of more specialised people. (The purpose and benefit of all this was the skilled analysts didn't have to ask this information.) An existing call would automatically go to the specialised queue.
In my group, we alternated weeks between the real-time ("level 1") and resolution ("level 2") queues. The theory was calls should be resolved by the real-time folks within 5 minutes. If they couldn't, the trouble ticket would be passed to the people working resolution. Resolution would research the problem and call the customer back with a solution.
This would have worked, except management's bonuses were strongly correlated to hold times, measured as the time until the real-time analyst picked up. To reduce hold times, and thereby enhance their bonuses, management staffed the real-time queue at the expense of the resolution queue. This was spun to us as a noble effort: customers want to have their problems resolved right away. Unfortunately, running diagnostic commands on their computer or finding log files consumed most of the five minutes. By the time we had enough information, we had to toss it over the wall.
To deal with scofflaws like me who took eight minutes to fully resolve the issue, Kate was designated "queue master." Her primary job was to monitor the time we were on the calls. If we took more than five minutes, she'd bark across the cubes. If it was more than seven minutes, she'd have to get up and tap us on the shoulder. She didn't like to get up.
Not surprisingly, the level 2 queue blossomed as calls festered, unresolved. Occasionally, when someone in management got asked about the backlog, a couple of analysts were slotted to pore through the queue. This generally involved identifying the 20% of the calls that were duplicate issues because the customer became impatient and called back, opening another issue that did get resolved. When that didn't work, they'd identify all the east coast customers, call them after 4pm PST and leave a terse message like:
Hi, this is (muffled name) calling back regarding your support issue. The answer is blah. I'm going to close this trouble ticket, but please call back if you have any more problems.The sneakiness of this is they don't leave a trouble ticket or the company name, and they assume it's resolved unless you say otherwise. Yes, this was rewarded.
| I later realized the episode with corrupt media was deliberate in that it allowed the company to claim it had technically shipped in 1Q; when new media had to be generated, it "would save money" by incorporating some additional changes made. These "additional changes" effectively extended the quarter four weeks and gave us time to work out bugs. The product wasn't late. Love is War. Freedom is Slavery. |
TAPECUT had the worst job in customer support as they were tasked with creating media with updates and patches. This was in the dark times when 5 1/4" floppy disks ruled the skies, 1/4" cartridges had just started walking upright, and Internet access was limited to universities. If an SCO Unix customer needed the latest release, odds are they were equipped with 5 1/4" floppy disk. The TAPECUT team would hand-make all 80 floppies. It was a totally thankless job.
This was an eye-opening place to work, and I was very glad I got out of there. At my next, much smaller company, I made sure we didn't repeat the same bad habits. I was on a first-name basis with all of our customers and had the pleasure of meeting several of them in person when we held our annual user events.
I have empathy for the people working support. However, as a customer, I'm also very jaded at any shenanigans. Mistakes happen, and I expect a company to fess up and fix it. If they do, I'm a loyal customer, if they don't, I seek alternatives. I thought it would be useful to relate some anecdotes where customer support was good and not-so-good. First the goods:
Case #1: (good) I am moderately addicted to Reed's Ginger Candy. I bought a 1 pound bag and, long story short, the ginger in bottom half of the bag had started to spoil. I wrote a short note on Tuesday evening, asking about this and if I could get a replacement bag. I figured I'd give it a few days, and if that didn't work, toss the bag. To my surprise, I received a response 20 minutes later... from the guy who runs the company. He apologized for the bad experience, explained what might have happened, and asked for my address so they could send a replacement bag.
Case #2: (good) Jill was complaining about some Trader Joe's salsa. On a lark, I ordered her a sampler from Salsa de Rosa, the brand I buy when I don't feel like making my own. Later, I realized that I should have included a note. Since it was late, I wrote their customer support asking if I could include a note and make a dig at TJ's. A couple of hours later, Steven, the spouse of the owner (Rosa), wrote back saying he'd take care of it and my wording was similar to what he might write. Product was delivered in a few days, Jill liked it.
Now for bad experiences...
Case #3 (bad) I was going through my phone bill and asked Qwest about the calculation of certain charges. They couldn't answer my simple question and redirected me to their web site, which was equally evasive. When I persisted, the rep suggested I fax (fax?!?) my question to them.
It seems ridiculous that I would need special equipment (I don't have a fax) to communicate with customer support, especially for a question they should already have a stock answer for.
Case #4 (bad) ReplayTV -- through my employer, I got a sweet deal on a ReplayTV unit. About three months after I had it, I started seeing messages that it was unable to update its software. The programming updates are fine, so my programs are recorded, but their software update process fails in some way. Since I can reproduce this at will, this should be a simple thing to answer. However, I've been on the phone ReplayTV technical support several dozen hours. None of their support people is allowed to delve beyond the script, and the company was adamant about escalating this to an engineer. So, since the programming function works, I've given up on it. When the three year (free) subscription contract expires, I'll use an alternative. (Right now there's no cost to me; it would cost to switch to TiVo, however.)
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