Wednesday, December 12th, 2007...7:31 pm
The 5 helpdesk people you meet in hell
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ComputerWorld just published an article called The 5 users you meet in hell (and one you’ll find in heaven). In this lovely piece, they argue from the point of view of helpdesk support workers, and describe various ways for support workers to “handle” difficult user species. It even describes a “Dream User” type that all support workers want to have as a customer at the other end of the line.
In my perhaps not so humble opinion, this article misses the point completely. The reason they miss the point is that this article is, like many other articles of its type, focuses on categorising users (the customers of a helpdesk) as annoyances that need to be “handled” in particular ways. I’ve done internal helpdesk support. I’ve done customer support. I’ve done application support. One thing that any person in any “support” role should learn is that their role is, indeed, to support people. Not to “handle” them, but to help them. Wake up, support staff! Your job exists because of these “lusers” you despise. If they weren’t there, neither would you.
In the spirit of the thing, I thought I’d write a brief article exposing 5 support personas, and how to handle them, from the point of view of a user. I’ll even throw in the “Dream Support” person for free.
1. Mr Protocol-delayer
This one is tricky. Ever called support to get a task done that should only take 1 minute, and been told that it would take 2 weeks? I actually got told that once, while asking the helpdesk to create me a Lotus Notes ID - a task which takes a matter of seconds. How did they justify the two weeks? That was their SLA, apparently.
How to handle:
There are many other reasons why support will delay working on your task. Ultimately, the trick here is to get acquainted with your helpdesk’s escalation procedures. There’s no point in shouting at this person that they should work on your task. Thank them for their time, hang up, wait five minutes, and dial again. In any large enough company, you’ll get a different person. Politely explain to them that you understand that this is bypassing their normal timelines, but for (insert valid reason), you need it done a bit faster this time, and you’ll be extremely grateful if they do so. You may have to repeat the process several times. At one company I worked for, the system automatically flagged a request as ‘urgent’ if you escalated it five times.
In short, every protocol, no matter how stupid, has a bypass clause. Learn how to apply it in your organisation, and all your colleagues will marvel at how you can get things done in one afternoon that take them two weeks.
2. It’s not possible
This kind of person is most often found at various companies that provide phone-based customer support (particularly the phone companies themselves, but many others too), but can also occur inside large corporations. They’ll stump you with things like “I know that you are telling us today, 20th of the month, that you wish to cancel, but we cannot do that, we can only cancel after you pay your next fee in ten days”. They will drive you insane because what they say so plainly doesn’t make any sense that you even begin to doubt your own sanity.
The key here is to realise that when they say “it’s not possible”, they actually mean, “it’s not possible for me”. Many companies design their customer service organisations to squeeze more money out of their customers, rather than to provide good service. Because of this, they’ll manufacture an imaginary reality and convince the first level support people that this is the real reality. The sad truth is, a large majority of customers will just accept this and let go of an extra £30. When that’s scaled up to tens of thousands of customers each month, it can make quite an difference to a business. Even when that impossibility is not there as an intentional hurdle to make you pay more, it may still simply be the case that the person you’re speaking to does not have the access or the tools to do what you’re asking.
How to handle:
The solution there is easy. Once you identify one of these, ask to speak to their supervisor right away, and refuse to continue the conversation with them. I have yet to meet a medium or large company that doesn’t allow you to escalate your call to a supervisor. Sometimes, that’s not enough - you have to escalate twice. What you’re trying to reach is a “manager” level person. This guy or girl has risen through the ranks because they are flexible enough to cope with things that aren’t in the book. Even if they don’t have access themselves, they’ll know who does. They tend to be fairly reasonable, and because they don’t get so many calls a day, they’re not permanently irritated. Get to them, and you can make the “impossible” happen quite easily.
3. Mr Ignorant
This kind of support person is most often found at the technical support helpdesk of large, consumer-facing companies, but can occur sometimes in a large corporations’ internal support organisation, particularly when they’ve been recently outsourced. They basically have no idea what you’re talking about. They’re the telephone equivalent of an FAQ. If your problem isn’t in their not-so-extensive catalogue, they won’t even realise it. They’ll keep on reading their script and insisting you do what they say. This type of helpdesk person is only recognisable if you actually do know more than them, of course.
How to handle:
Be careful about that last point. If you know for sure that your problem is not the one they’re trying to solve for them, short-circuit the conversation and ask to speak to their technical team (which may be called the ‘dev team’, the ‘engineers’, or a number of other similar labels). If you push hard enough and consistently enough, you will be passed on to a real technician who actually has a chance of helping you resolve your issue.
If you’re not 100% sure that you know better than them, politely ask them why they’re asking you to do whatever it is they’re asking you to do. A properly knowledgeable support person will provide a decent explanation which should convince you. If they don’t want to explain, or if their explanation is clearly wrong, ask to speak to the technical team instead.
What to do if they won’t forward you? “Look, let’s just do this. Please check your windows disk is in the drive (while resolving a mac issue).” If they refuse to pass you on to someone with a clue, hang up. Call again. Tell the next person that you were in touch with the technical team and got cut off, could they please forward you again or give you the direct number. That’ll work most of the time.
4. No One Here
This happens mostly with smaller companies. What if you send a mail in asking for help with something, and you get no answer. Two weeks later, you send another polite email follow-up. Still no answer. You try phoning, but either there’s no answer, or there’s not even a number. You send another email. Still nothing.
How to handle:
Unfortunately, there’s only one thing to do in this case: get out. This company is a ghost ship. Even a company experiencing massive growth will answer their paying customers within a month, if they escalate their queries a couple of times. If they don’t answer, they’re probably in the process of folding. Get out of there right now - if you can.
If, however, it’s an internal department of your own company that you’re dealing with, then chances are you’ve been sending your mail to the wrong person. Never send rude follow-up emails. Most people will redirect you to the right place when you send them an email that should have gone somewhere else. In my experience, the only type of person that will not even bother to redirect you is the fairly senior, extremely busy manager. They won’t take kindly to you sending them an email full of insults, and it might well cost you! If you’re not getting answers, try to find a different way to reach the people supporting your application.
5. It’s Your Own Fault
This is a particularly arrogant sub-species of support staff, fuelled by the fact that often, they are actually right, and it was your fault. That’s no excuse for treating you disdainfully, however, and it definitely doesn’t justify proactively treating every user disdainfully just because some, or a majority, make blunders. The reason why they’re in charge of providing help and you’re not is because they’re more qualified - not because they’re more arrogant.
How to handle:
There’s only one thing that will persuade this type of support person, and that’s facts: detailed, step-by-step facts. Give them a clear, factual, step by step description of what you’ve done, and they might still insist it’s your fault, but at least they’ll point out where you “went wrong” (”Well, before saving the record you are supposed to click this checkbox on the previous screen, otherwise it obviously won’t save!”). Don’t waste your saliva in educating them in what “good support” consists of. They’re not worth it.
The perfect support staff
So, with that being said, what’s an ideal support staff? I believe that that great support staff will have the following characteristics, that basically match up with the anti-personas above:
- They are willing and able to follow the spirit of the rules rather than the letter of them (an SLA is a worst-case scenario, not a strict guideline)
- They are intelligent enough to be given access to the tools that can help you, and aware of the tools that are available to them
- They are knowledgeable about the area they’re supposed to help you with
- They exist, and answer the phone or email in a reasonable time
- They are polite, and endowed with sufficient social skills to realise that blaming their own users for the system’s difficulty of use is not productive
Do those support people exist? Absolutely! I’ve had dealings with many companies and internal groups that provided outstanding support. The fact that “support sucks” is no excuse for doing it badly, and in many cases, it’s not taken as such an excuse.
Caveat: Are you a hellish user?
There’s one small caveat that I owe all the poor people out there who are stuck doing application support. Occasionally, it does happen that the user is an intolerable annoyance. Starting the conversation by shouting angrily is no way to behave with another human being, whether or not they are working the helpdesk. Even if you’ve just been forwarded across a string of inept, tedious misdirections, to finally end up talking to this latest helpdesk worker, you should always start politely. Helpdesk staff are paid to help you, not to suffer your temper tantrums.
I hope this article helps someone, somewhere! Let me know in the comments below if you have any other tips or horror stories to tell.
6 Comments
December 20th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
The perfect support staff called expensive personal assistant
December 20th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
B:
True, but most of us have to deal with organisations that don’t provide personal assistants to all their customers or employees :-)
Daniel
January 24th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
I manage the global engineering compute infrastructure team for a fortune 50 company, including about 20 or so people who’s primary job is customer interface/help-desk.
You sound like the hellish user (I prefer “customer”) yourself - a person I wouldn’t particularly enjoy working with. There’s more to getting good service than learning how to go around the system.
Here are some better ideas on getting help:
People aren’t “stuck doing application support” (your terrible words). People choose to do the job because they like technology, they like helping people, and they like solving problems. Get it out of your mind that you are stuck dealing with a miserable cretin who hates is life, his job, and has no options until his job gets shuffled off to a third world country. Instead, treat the person as you would want to be treated - somebody who can help you be more productive. Remember - you called them.
Be honest and upfront about priorities. A lot of the work that helpdesk folks do (like creating accounts) are a lot easier to do in “batch” mode and are best done when nothing is going on. Creating 10 accounts at the end of the week may take 5 minutes. Creating one account in the middle the week may take 4 minutes. If you typically have 10 accounts to do in a week then it just makes good business sense to have a two week turnaround time on a five minute task. Remember, your helpdesk people are generally trying to best balance the needs of an entire division/company/workgroup. It may be that they have a network outage that is effecting 1000’s of customers while you are whining about, repeatedly calling back, and escalating to management about the account you forgot to request at the beginning of your project.
Work for change. If you don’t like the service you are getting, instead of complaining, try to understand what’s going on. Contact the helpdesk management to let them know the business impact their policies are having. They may not know the impact and can reprioritize, or explain why the policy is so and and not change, or enlist your help in trying to make changes (justify budget for hc, or new sw, better documentation, a training program, an all-hands email, an updated interface, help with a problem employee, …).
Be sure you are in sync with your management too. This is where support standards come from. Often times I’ll have a customer yelling at my team while their boss (or higher) is saying just the opposite. A positive dialog with your service providers is good for everyone - don’t wait until you are frustrated to start partnering. And yes - your providers should also be reaching out to you.
I’ve worked customer service positions in a number of companies. I’ve seen plenty of Associate Engineers get much better service than Directors or VP time and time again because of the way they approach the support staff. “Crying Wolf” is not a practical long term strategy.
February 26th, 2008 at 6:23 am
First and foremost - remember that IT is a shared resource. We are not sitting by the phone just waiting for your call. Generally, we are trying desperately to catch-up on the 70 or so tickets we have backlogged. So when you call in for your problem, no matter how simple or complex - realize that there is a human being on the other end of the phone who has at least three PCs already going and usually has somebody else waiting on the other line.
Second - remember that while we only have the 600 plus end-users locally that you know about, the Helpdesk team actually supports more than 2000 people. And usually the Helpdesk team are supporting more than that. IT provides support for email literally all over the globe. We like you, but we’re busy. And yes, this is really the same point as the first one. It’s important enough to repeat: We like you, but we’re busy.
Third - The phone rings constantly. Particularly when we’re in the middle of a technical nightmare. Do us a favor and if it’s not urgent - DON’T CALL!!!! SEND AN EMAIL!!!!!! We can trace emails. We can give email tickets our full attention. And there’s no annoying, train-of-thought-interrupting, ringing sound involved.
Fourth - If your issue IS urgent - CALL THE MAIN NUMBER. If the entire callcenter or warehouse is down and the company is losing money and possibly a client - CALL THE MAIN NUMBER. Don’t call that nice IT tech who helped you out last time - I guarantee you they’ve gone home for the day, are out sick, or off at the boxing gym punching a bag with your face on it. CALL THE MAIN NUMBER where there are people available to help you.
Fifth - Password changes are not a production down issue. I don’t care if you’re the CEO. And I mean you, Bossman. And alllllllllll your assistants. Password changes and locked accounts do not count as production down. Production Down means that an entire callcenter or warehouse is down and the company is losing money and possibly a client. If one person cannot log in, do not call the after-hours support and have them wake-up a tech at 3am. And if you do wake-up a tech at 3am, do not be surprised if they’re a bit rude. You deserve it.
The next rule is - remember that the Tech who picks up the phone is a human being. As a human being, they might have the flu or a headache, they might just have signed their divorce papers or gotten a call from the vet saying their cat died. By the way, those are all real examples that have happened at our very own IT desk. If the tech on the phone is abrupt or asks if they can call you back - remember this a human being you are talking to - a very busy human being who might be in the middle of a very difficult day. Cut them some slack and call back later - or better yet SEND AN EMAIL IN THE FIRST PLACE!
OH! And stop lying to us. We know you’re lying and we don’t like it. If the tech asks if you’ve rebooted the computer and you say yes - we know you’re lying. If the IT department sends out a company-wide email saying we are taking a program off-line for an hour and you call and claim the program was working for you - we know you’re lying. If you say, “I didn’t do ANYthing!” - we know you’re lying. Do yourselves and us a favor. Say, “I downloaded 4 gigs of porn onto my company computer during work hours and now I can’t use Internet Explorer.” We’ll skip the 2 hours of troubleshooting and go right to the rebuild. Everybody wins.
And don’t tell me how to do my job. I know you were the IT God at your last company, but you don’t know anything about this setup. Frankly, if you knew anything about computers at all, the odds are very good you wouldn’t be working in our call-centers in the first place. So shut up, sit down, and stop pestering me with useless questions you think are showing off your expertise when all they are really showing off is how deeply annoying you can be.
Last and most irritating – Don’t call me Buddy. I’m not your Buddy. I don’t want to BE your Buddy. I will never ever want to be your Buddy. I have a name, use it. If you don’t remember my name, I will not be offended if you call me Techie, Hey You, or even IT Dyke, but drop the fake friends nonsense. Did I go drinking with you last week? Do you know my favorite movie, favorite song, or relationship issues? No. That’s because we are not buddies. Help me help you with your problem then go away, I’m busy.
‘nuff said?
February 28th, 2008 at 12:26 am
While I might not completely agree with everything ITWoman says, the just of it is correct along with what Keith says.
Over the past few years every IT dept has undergone cuts in staff and have been asked to streamline. The result of that leads ITWoman and I to a grossly understaffed helpdesk without the tools we need to do our jobs properly. Since we are a cost center, we have very little clout with the profit centers to get the money to buy better software, hardware, upgrades, and training, let alone the psychotherapy we need to deal with the sometimes unreasonable requests of the end user community. We completely understand that our job is to support the company. The company does not seem to understand that we have limited resources, physical, financial, and mental to get the work completed to the exact specifications of the end users and business units.
A fine example of the unrealistic expectations our company can have, is that they wanted a working call center up and running in 2 weeks. In Mexico. Without spending hardly any money. And they want us to keep all the other support working perfectly. Along with the data center move that is in full swing to the other side of the country. Maybe our real problem is the fact that we were actually able to pull it off. We killed ourselves and are still bleeding from the amount of work we did, but we did it. I’m sure the next request will be a call center in the void of space in 2 hours. You may laugh, but we never thought we would get a request like the Mexico one.
business unit - we need to win the Indy 500
IT - what kind of car do you have?
business unit - we have a geo metro with 3 wheels.
IT - you can’t win it. you need a better car. go buy a Corvette.
business unit - we need to win. now. just get the car on the track and win.
IT - ok, but you are not going to win. the car is too slow and not powerful enough.
business unit - just do it.
4 hours later
business unit - we didn’t win. IT is terrible and they don’t know what they are doing.
IT - umm, we told you that you would not win.
business unit - well, my friends brothers sisters cousins dead frog used to work in IT and he says that not only could we have won, but we should have.
IT - we stand most humbly rebuked. Our appologies for not being able to change the laws of physics.
Try actually working in a real company before you comment on how badly we do things, my friend.
Personally, I love IT because it is always mentally stimulating. I’m not complaining about it, I’m giving the reality of it.
March 1st, 2008 at 12:48 am
He does love it. He’s irritating that way. The more work they throw at him the calmer and happier he gets. I know when I walk in the door if he’s throwing a temper tantrum I will have a relatively smooth day, if he’s well-mannered and smiling I will have a serious bruise from beating my head against the desk by noon.
Me? I’ve been working helpdesk for 12 years across universities, dotcom startups, and international corporations. It’s a fun job for the first 6 months, then it’s better than digging ditches for another 2 years if you’re lucky, but eventually it gets to you.
Some idiot put Helpdesk on a list of low-stress jobs. That idiot never worked at a helpdesk in their life. You pick up 30 phone calls a day from people who expect you to know everything about all software, refuse to compromise even slightly, and escalate to your boss if you’re not able to resolve their issue in less than a minute. And every single person on the planet thinks they know how to do your job better than you do.
Still, it has good points -
you get to meet some really great people - not one of whom uses the tricks the original poster suggested
you learn tons about software, hardware, networks, and human nature
there is always something new to learn
there is a certain social status with other geeks
and occasionally a happy end-user sends us cookies or free pizza
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