What you need to do to insure success with technical support.
Everyone one of us has been there, with racks of gear
installed and the shadows growing long on the rear lawn, the final run through and system QC is stuck - a bugaboo is stopping all operation. The homeowner is eagerly waiting to sign off
and get you out of their home for the first time in three months. The other
trades have begun pointing to you as the cause of the trouble and cost overages.
You can just hear the security installer
gravely telling the homeowner: ”..if you had let me put in my dedicated keypads this will be working fine
and done...”. Your nerves are
frazzled – you begin to see hallucinations as your fears manifest themselves. Before your eyes the last payment (nearly all
your profit) becomes a squawking Blue Jay flying from your grasp straight
toward the nearest window. Finally, you put a call into the manufacturer's tech
support.
Now the real fun begins.
First one must make leaps and bounds through the automated call system
like the Mario Brothers bounding over the rocks for coins. At last you are connected to a human who
after listening to your synopsis of the situation states ...”‘funny,
I have never heard of that issue before!’ or proceeds to insist that you go
through the same basic check lists you performed twenty times prior to
calling. As darkness falls the crick in your neck gets worse
from keeping the phone against your ear and your stomach rumbles in protests as
the smells and sounds of the clients dinner waft down to the cellar. Now your patience worn thin the vitriolic
bile begins to rise.
It did not have go this way.
Over the recent holiday I read a good many social posts from
associates about how they were on hold or frustrated with the time it was
taking to resolve ‘the’ issue. I read
through these with an equal amount of concern and chagrin. I no longer work as a support person you but
you can never quite take the support out of the person.
After spending more than ten years inside a technical
support division I have found that it is all about expectations and honesty. Put another way it is about what each side of
the conversation expects from the other and the fear of appearing
unknowledgeable. These two items are at the root of more frustrations in
support calls than any other – even when faulty gear is the issue.
While many manufactures can improve the type and quality of
their support services, the honest truth is that the problem starts at both
ends
Knowing what the
other side of the conversation knows.
What makes a great technical support person is not just an
encyclopedic knowledge of the technology and devices involved but the ability
to visualize the system as described over the phone and to then find the
missing items. This is where you – the supportee – can make the process move
along by describing the setup you are having issue with in detail. I would rather hear you over explain then
presume I ‘know what you mean’.
One of the best things a technical support floor manager can hear is one of her techs
saying something akin to ‘Okay, if I have heard you correctly – you just pushed
the top keypad button in the lower hall
which is tied to the Push[20] in programming …
Rather than “so you pushed the
button”?
One of the best examples of how a technical support phone
conversation can go amiss comes from a story on ‘tech support nightmares’
postings I first read on a BBS board. The
Story is from a phone support tech that was helping a person send a fax from
their computer for the first time. The
tech duly had the caller change a setting or insure that the phone line was
connected properly (and was live) he would ask the user “Is the document on
screen?, okay hit send. Despite insuring
that everything was set up correctly several times over the tech exhausted of
options began to issue a Return Authorization for the computer’s repair
(remember that this was in the days when most computers had to be sent in as
the boards were all one). The situation
was only solved when the tech asked caller to use the File| Info menu to read a
serial number:
Caller: Sure, hold on a second I have to move the paper to see
Support: Sorry, what are you moving? The menu should be just above the document
Caller: Yes it is but
I could not see the mouse because the document was over the screen….
(Evidently he thought it would work just like a regular fax machine and scan his
physical copy then transmit) .
Here both sides of the conversation used the term ‘Document
is on the screen’ to mean something
slightly different – a simple linguistic misunderstanding which delayed finding a solution. I remember this story every time I work with
a client to troubleshoot or explain a process.
Knowing what you know
The technology is getting simpler to use while
simultaneously becoming exponentially more complex to troubleshoot. All of this means that the technology, tools
and even the interfaces are changing and new technologies are being integrated
before the previous tech as begun to settle.
It is a daunting task to keep up with it all even when you live and
breathe it on a daily basis.
As folks who are deeply tied to the AV integration industry,
one which truly converges a great gob load of technical disciplines into
seamless systems there is a pressure to be an expert on all of it or face the
possibility of being leapfrogged by someone who does. This a harder nut to crack as it requires us
to face our paranoia and accept that to
not know something is only a temporary condition so long as we admit it.
Knowing what you actually know is a huge step to helping get
your problems solved. A support person
is not going to riff on you for not knowing (if they do it should result in
disciplinary action from the company) – but will for being caught proclaiming
false expertise. Why? Because it causes
confusion and delay ( as Sir Topham hat would say) .
When the company I worked for first started to roll out
wireless systems using the 802.11
protocol, which we all now simply call
Wifi , (rather than then the proprietary
lower UHF Transceiver systems previously offered) the hold times with support tripled. The cause of this flood of calls was not the
product itself , per say, but the folks who called in first claiming they
absolutely understood not just how to
set up a wireless connection but also how to connect a lager network of
devices. To be fair most knew a bit,
often enough to get their computer connected using a wifi tool, but were
missing the understanding of what actually made it all work. One of the most
common misunderstandings we would encounter was how a computer connected with
no issue by just entering a passkey in the wifi setup but the control devices
would not. Often if came down to a
misunderstanding of how DHCP worked versus static addressing. Simple enough but
we experienced an all too common aggressive stance from the caller that they “knew
how to set up a network and had done several successfully’. This puffing up of the chest only got in the
way of an honest dialog. In comparison
callers who knew admittedly knew nothing about networking took less phone time
as they let the support folks guide them through the process.
As I stated
earlier there is much we can say to fix what companies provide in terms of
support (This is another article altogether) yet, we as clients can go beyond
demanding and find ways to work with our support to streamline and maximize the
end point gain. Namely, a solution.
Mine is just one set of tools, what have you
noticed helps? What would you change about the level of support you
encounter on a daily basis?
*This article originally appeared on the AVNation.tv blog. Check out our podcasts for and by AV professionals
