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Techs Discover End Users Aren't So Bright
hkypipe writes "In response to a CNN story slamming tech support, a former tech fired back. He correctly points out that much of the trouble end users have with their PCs can be traced to their skillset, which in many if not most cases would make them more qualified to operate an Etch-A-Sketch." Not everyone who calls support is clueless though. How many of us have had to sit on hold for hours and reformat a hard drive as DOS just to convince the tech support lackey on the other end that a hard drive really is bad? The article also covers other factors like scripted support, and per-customer time limits, which can make for a poor tech support experience.
In other news, it was discovered that everyone looks like an idiot when they require the services of a domain expert. What's next, neurosurgeons complaining that patients don't know as much as them? Of course end users don't know much about tech - that's what they're paying support workers for! Just like drivers pay auto mechanics, and anyone who has a bathroom pays a plumber.
Just because someone doesn't happen to have some specialized piece of knowledge you have, that doesn't make them "not so bright". I know plenty of PhDs who are extremely competent in their fields, which aren't computing, who need to call helpdesks from time to time. You see, and this will sound harsh to a Slashbot, most people have better things to do than learn the minutae of their PCs.
Most of the people who call for help don't even know what operating system they're using -- even though they've spent their money buying the machine.
How many drivers know what OS runs their engine control computer? Even tho' they spent their money buying the machine. You see, techies are into operating systems are care a lot about them. End users care about getting their jobs done, and the computer is just a tool. One version of Windows looks a lot like another - can you tell the difference between '95, '98 and ME with just a glance? You can? Can you tell the difference between Red Hat, Debian and SuSE at a glance? You think so? I didn't tell you they're all in console mode at a $ prompt.
Tech support needs to stop thinking of end users as the enemy and start thinking of them as what they really are, its bread and butter.
I always find it difficult to jump in the rink with other techies complaining about the naivity of users.
If users suddenly started understanding the technology, 1/2 of the people on slashdot would be out of a job - and not just the clueless ones.
People calling tech support lines have bought a product which is meant to do something. The fact that they can't work it out even when everything is working is the fault of a bad UI - not the users.
When things are broken - tech support get paid to fix problems because people either can't do it or don't have the permissions to do it. For those working in tech support - stop whining as long as these people are providing your pay cheque.
And yes, I'll just in with the obligatory "I used to work in front-end and network support". Users seemed to appreciate the fact I wasn't judging them for going snowboarding and clubbing instead of sitting at home learning how to use our products.
I work in tech support. I actually don't mind helping old people learn to use computers, because I am fortunate enough to work without a time limit. Most people are friendly if you are patient and don't talk down to them.
Know what is 100 times more annoying than the computer illiterate? Computer experts. That's right, slashdot readers are the bane of my existence.
That fact that you can write software/build a network from paperclips and phone line/replace a hard drive does not mean you haven't forgotten your password. I have talked to hundreds of computer geniuses who wanted to go "Off script" only to realize that their password was l33thax0r3, not l33thax0r4. How about you just take two seconds and clear your browser cache instead of giveing me your resume?
Web designers are worse. Apparently, being a web designer means you don't have to read the most basic instructions on any website. If you can't login with your eyes closed, then they could have done a much better job with the site.
Keep in mind, no matter how many times you TELL me what a smart guy you are, I have no way of telling if you really know how to diagnose a bad hard drive, or if you're one of the many people who thinks "surge protector turned off" and "bad hard drive are the same thing. Save some time and answer a few simple questions.
Of course, if you really are the the genius you would have me beleive, do us both a favor and don't call. I'm sure you'll get it figured out.
A few years back I had the VP of a department call because his laptop suddenly shut down. I went to look and found that the power supply wasn't plugged in. He turned red, looked at em and said "I should have known better". I replied by telling him not to worry about it, as long as he did his job of keeping the company running, I'd do mine of making sure his laptop worked.
Point is, end users aren't stupid, they simply have other things they do, and what we find intuitive, they may not. It's tech supports job to help them, and make them feel better about it when you walk off into the sunset.
For example, we have Dell servers where I work, that have RAID arrays. Sometimes a disk fails, so we grab our spare (we keep one spare for each type of RAID so that we can quickly rebuild in case of a failure) and pop it in, and it rebuilds and all is happy.
Then comes the hard part; convincing Dell support to send us a replacement disk, under warranty. Even though their own hardware reported the disk was bad, and the spare disk formatted and rebuilt fine, they insist that we run diagnostics on the disk. Running them, of course, would require that we down a production server! I once spent a good deal of time explaining this simple concept of not being able to down a production server to verify a disk is bad, when we already know it is.
Eventually we manage to convince them to give us an RMA and cross ship us a replacement disk, but not after a lot of hair-pulling and grinding. Speaking of grinding, sometimes we fib and tell them the disk was grinding to speed the process.
Tech support people: Stop ASSUMING your customers are idiots. Especially system administrators at your customer sites. We know when a disk is bad!
I work for a hotel chain. We are entirely a resort hotel company, the people staying at our facilities are people on vacation.
Customer service is a big, giant issue for us. We aren't going to hassle our vacationers with grief over losing their room key while they had a drunken walk down the beach. We aren't going to berate someone for being so stupid as to allow their kids to ride the elevators just for fun while unsupervised.
The company exists to support these folks, make them happy and make them want to come back to us again and again. Some of them are clueless, some of them are mean, some of them are thieves. Then again, most of them are nice folks.
At the end of the day they have a choice on if they want to stay with us or not.
IT support departments have the luxury of having a captive audience. However in a business like ours, we work very hard to spread a customer focused culture throughout the organization.
If you can imagine what it's like to be an immigrant housekeeper working for a bit over minimum wage and having to do manual labor to clean up after folks who earn vast sums more than you and act like you don't exist, and do your job with a smile, then you can see that maybe working at the IT help desk isn't the most difficult thing in the company, talking people through how to get Word to print in landscape or something equally as silly.
The IT folks that I work with are fantastic, and just like the housekeepers, and the front desk staff, and the food & beverage folks, they realize that they too have customers to serve and the purpose of our company isn't to support the IT staff, to buy many l33t Sun boxen or to provide a rationale for a data center, it's to serve customers. And as far as we go in my firm, there's no difference between an internal and external customer.
I'm in the training department for my company. Mostly I develop multimedia CBTs to train reservation agents and front desk staff on how to use their systems. So my PC isn't the standard MS Office/Outlook setup. I have all kinds of weird multimedia programs and development tools that sometimes don't play nice together. Needless to say, I have to get IT help from time to time. (Even as a power user, some installs don't run and so on. Plus we have a training room with multimedia laptops set up as a CBT learning lab and the dongles break, the laptops are old and lousy and require lots of help since they get constant use and abuse.) When I told an IT staffer that I hate to submit lots of tickets he jumped up and down and got mad. "You should submit as many tickets as you need! We have some people that routinely put in 15 tickets every day! The more tickets I can close the more justification I have for IT staff and those are people's jobs! If you need something to get your job done or the laptops aren't working right or whatever it is, don't even hesitate to call us. If i catch you not submitting tickets, I will beat you up."
All I could think was "Wow!" Here is an IT help desk guy that has a customer focus, which is what the whole damn company is about!
So maybe the end users aren't so bright sometimes, or they don't know what OS they are using. Look on the upside. If they don't know what OS they have, it will be easier to transition them to Linux.
Never confuse feeling with thinking.
To be fair, there are multiple problems here:
1) The users -- they range from completely helpless with computers to grand masters, and there isn't a system yet by which helpdesk can sort them out quickly. This is compounded by people who think that just because they can install a new mouse, they're expert level and expect to be treated so.
2) Tech support personnel -- Ummm, putting this gently, tech support is a stepping stone on the career path. Support personnel either rise out of it to developers, admins, etc; sink below it to cashier at the fast food joint; or find a new job. It's a big hole in the company into which you shovel people. So, you may get a good tech support person, who eventually might be a very good developer or sysadmin; or you might get a loser whose next job will be reading "this end towards burger" in his training manual.
3) The companies. They're half the reason tech support is a big hole in the company, into which you shovel people. They see it as a giant cost center, and continously attempt to minimize it by hiring cheaply and getting rid of more expensive people. Eventually, they're at the bottom of the barrell, and in order to use their front line people, they create scripts for them to use before escalating them to 2nd tier. Which annoys the end users and annoys the tech support personnel. Then the companies decide on ticket quotas or time limits, in which the tech's job is dependant on how many tickets they close, not how well -- which annoys customers and tech support, further contributing to the problem.
I've had hororible experiences, including one company that insisted I reinstall windows 98 on their laptop, as obviously I was too clueless to install win2k and linux -- because the onboard mouse had died! (I called back after downloading their diagnostic utils and gave them the error output)
I've also had tolerable experiences, where the tech asked a basic question, and I responded with "no, I did not try $VENDOR diag utility, but I did do $X, $Y and $Z, which if the device was working, should have given me $A, $B and $C. Instead I got $SOS". One notable one, the tech shouted over the cube wall "Anyone know what ping and tcpdump are?" and a reply came back "The router's broken".
Kids nowadays grown up with computers all around, so it's going to be easier to solve stuff later on as the general population slowly becomes more tech-savvy.
Are they really more savvy, or just accostomed to executing a different set of tasks than the previous generation? As computers get more complex over time, is your average computer user today really equipped to handle learning the new tech?
I might actually propose that the opposite may be the case. As computers become more "appliance-like" for average users, all the scary configuration stuff will be even more mysterious to an average user than they are today.
Look at the history. It used to be that computers were very difficult to use: you had to be a qualified expert to use one. Typically, if you were dedicated enough to learn to use the thing, you also learned enough along the way to be able to fix it as well, or at least be helpful to someone supporting him/her. Today, the average user uses Windows, which is somewhat easy enough for non-savvy people to use, but the expectation is there that things will break and they will have to change some stuff around to "make it work" again. In the future, I would wager that the average user will be completely incapable of (or not permitted to) making any changes to a computer's workings.
The analogy is, once again, the automobile. Early on, old timers refused to have anything to do with cars, and if they tried they'd fail, while the early adopters had a steep learing curve on how to drive and maintain the car. Later (30's-40's), anyone who owned a car had a neighbour who was an expert on maintaining it, while the rest relied on just learning to drive. Now, it is very rare indeed that you can find anyone outside of the "customer service" ranks (a garage) who has any inkling on what to do if something breaks, or for that matter on what some of the technology under the hood is doing in the first place!
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Group 1 users aren't too bad - they can usually be handled with the troubleshooting script. They will generally do what you tell them to do (within the limits of their understanding of your instructions). As long as you treat them reasonably well they will treat you reasonably well.
Group 2 users are a bit worse simply because their problems are NOT going to be handled by the script - if they were they wouldn't be calling you. However, once you identify them as being in group 2, you can "kick it up a notch" and use "the big words" to quickly find the problem (assuming the problem can quickly be found). However, the problem arises if they user is in Group 2 and the tech support person your standard Tier-1 meatware text-to-speech unit - the user will want to skip over the script (because he's already run it) and that leaves the meatpuppet floundering.
The group that causes the problems for ALL of us is group 3 - the luser who thinks he is a tech:god. Look at this guy from the tech support person's perspective:
In other words, to the tech support person Group 3 looks just like Group 2.
If a Tier-1 person passes one of these jokers on to Tier-2, when it comes out that the moron didn't have something plugged in (as step 4 of the script checks), the Tier-1 guy gets dinged for it. Now, if you were the Tier-1 guy, would you be really willing to transfer somebody like this to Tier-2?
Of course, these Group 3's make it harder for us Group 2's to get anything done. So how do we Group 2's work around this?
If you have a tech support group you need to work with on a regular basis, try to get to know them by name, and be known to them by name. IF you prove to the Tier-2 guys that you really are Group 2, they MAY give you a direct number to them. Example: I have just such a relationship with my ISP - they know that when I call them and say "router 3 is down", they need to fix it, not ask me to reboot Windows.
However, this is not always an option - if the organization is large, or you contact them infrequently you won't be able to do this, so:
Let Mr. Tier-1 drive the conversation. Play dumb. If he says to reboot Windows and you are running Linux, just say "OK, give me a minute" and lie. Follow his script. Remember, Group 2 and Group 3 look alike to him, so the only way to not be taken for a Group 3 blowhard is to look like a Group 1.
Accept the fact that you are going to have to run the rat's maze of Tier-1 support, take a deep breath, and get over it. Eventually, when you hit the end of the script you will be transferred to a Tier-2 support, and can start to "use the big words".
Them: "Did you reboot your modem?"
You: "Yes, I rebooted the modem, and tried to ping the gateway, and got no response."
That way, the guy on the other end slowly comes to the realization that you actually know what you are doing, and are NOT simply trying to impress him.
Yes, this is time consuming, even time wasting. But in the long run you are more likely to get your problem fixed this way then by coming across all arrogant.
Final story: I've been on both sides of the phone - I frequently have to do Tier-3 type support on my projects (and sometimes Tier-1, before I cracked the whip over the service manager and told him in no uncertain terms that I would NOT accept his people dropping calls on me cold
www.eFax.com are spammers
Your post shows the amount of experience you have. It's very low.
Here's what I do:
Me: Hello, helpdesk.
user: I can't get on the internet.
Me: Okay, what happens when you try to get on the internet?
###
Notice I don't try to ask anything technical here, about anything the user probably doesn't know, like the operating system they use. My response gives much better results.
###
user: Um, it gives me an error
###
Responses vary. Sometimes they'll actually give me the error. If I wanted to know what the operating system was, I would know from the error. Like if they said "It says 'error 691'" I would know right away both that they're using windows, and that their password is wrong.
###
Me: What does the error say? I'd need that information to find out the problem.
### again, no technical knowledge required.
user: I don't have it in front of me right now, I closed that window.
Me: Okay, can you try to connect to the internet right now, or do you have to hang up the phone first?
user: I've got a second phone line. Lemme try this again.
###
It's not always this way, but I want to be somewhat brief. If the user answers that he has to hang up first, then I tell him that he should write down any error message he gets and call us back. Sometimes this is where he reveals he has ADSL, which again, is very helpful.
###
user: it says "The computer you are dialing is not answering" And I can hear a voice coming from the computer. Oh, it's starting to dial again.
###
Here we see why we didn't get the error message earlier. Oftentimes, the user will leave the error message on the screen before calling us, because they know they'll need it.
###
Me: Okay, click cancel, we don't need this window anymore. Can you see your "My Computer" icon?
###
Notice I said "your 'my computer' icon" not "my computer." Microsoft has always irritated me with that little naming convention.
###
user: No, I just see "This page cannot be displayed."
Me: Okay, close this window. Umm, for that matter, close anything you have open right now.
user: okay, all I can see now is my icons.
Me: Okay, double-click on the My Computer icon, and then open Dial up networking.
###
Two steps at a time, max. Even YOU couldn't follow instructions much more complex than that unless they were written down.
###
user: Okay. Now I've got "Make new connection," and "Internet Foo"
###
See, we've just established that the user has windows 95 or windows 98. If he had Me or XP, he wouldn't get this, and I would ask him what he *does* have in this window, and I could figure it out from there. At any rate, I now have the information in our database so we don't have to guess next time.
###
Me: Okay, now right-click on the "Internet Foo" icon...
user: right click?
Me: click with the button on the right side of the mouse. It should pop up a menu.
user: Okay, it says 'connect', blah blah blah
Me: Alright, now click properties at the bottom.
user: right click or left click?
Me: Unless I say otherwise, I always mean left click.
user: okay...
Me: we should see the phone number here. More than likely, we've got the area code in the area code box. Windows will just assume you don't need to dial that unless you're dialling long distance. Just type '604' at the beginning of the phone number in the phone number box.
###
Finish up the call, various troubles getting user to edit text snipped, close windows, haveaniceday.
The user I just walked through here is pretty typical, although perhaps a bit on the slow side and certainly not clued when it comes to computers. You'll notice there's no yelling, no frustration on my part, and most of all, it's not that hard.
I hope this helps.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Because I paid money for their product and I expect them to support it.
Often enough they're considered "literate" if not even "power users". Why? Because someplace along the road they learned how to use MS Word or Excel.
To complicate things, they're usually considered computer "literate" by someone - completely on the basis of having once put together a tiny spreadsheet in Excel and changed a font or two in Word.
To me this is literacy in the small - about fourth grade level in literacy-as-reading terms.
The analogy is always made with cars. Many people drive and drive well - but they are often said to be "car illiterate" because they don'tunderstand the internal combustion engine and can not adjust a cars timing with a yardstick and an alarm clock. So, the argument then goes, why should anyone need to know anything more about computing?
I find this analogy unpersuasive. Think about it - almost everyone who drives is "driving literate" in some sense. They know the basics of how to drive a car (not entirely simple) and how a car works (enough anyway to know that you need to put gas in it and change the oil ) and usually things like how to change tires. They also know the basic mechanics/physics of driving, the general rules of the road, basic road etiquette, how to read a map (well, mostly) and so on. "Driving literacy" is really pretty complicated. A good driver who's had some years of driving experience in a variety of conditions knows a whole lot. (Admittedly, much of this is not usually taught - Driver's Ed notwithstanding.)
But even so, a car is a pretty simple device compared to a computer. Cars do one basic thing - carry their contents from one place to another (serious reductionism here!). Computers are complex and very flexible in comparison to cars. Most computers can run software that does many different (and sometimes very different) kinds of things (think Word vs Excel vs Blender vs Mozilla vs Big Complicated Game).
So, counting someone as "computer literate" because they can turn on a windows machine and use a specific version of word (or whatever) just doesn't work for me.
Computer literacy for me is much more. I'm not sure what I'd consider computer literate, but at a minimum it would involve :
The most important parts for me are the meta knowledge. Not knowing how to change a font, but knowing how to approach finding the information about how to change a font. This can not be taught simply by teaching a couple simple applications.
I've proposed "computer literacy" requirements in a couple of different universities that would at least go a step or two beyond MS Word (even if not to the meta-knowledge I mentioned above) and the bulk of the faculty have responded predictably. Most common is the attitude of "We dont know that. Our students don't need to.", next is "But why? All anyone ever needs to know