Consumers vs. Technicians

We’ve all had to call technical support at one time or another. We’ve all had good and bad experiences with them. Looking in from the consumer’s perspective, we have complaints abounding. Most complaints can be summed up:

- The technician had poor people skills and didn’t care about me or my problem.
- The technician had poor language skills or spoke too quickly to understand,
- Often, a common complaint is plain and simply - just poor technical skills.

Imagine that? A technician that doesn’t know it all! In my IBM days, it was a common saying that if you could walk and chew gum – but were polite, they could train you to fix computers. Oh, how sadly untrue!

And for the record – it’s the other way around! If you can fix computers, we can teach you to walk and chew gum – virtual gum, and walking through a cyber-world. - Just kidding.

As the customer, we’ve become familiar with that drab and monotone voice on the other end of the phone. They condescend you in every word and even mock you! You can easily imagine the tech’s face and actions akin to “whatever” I’ll bet you suspect that they put you on hold to get their colleagues to listen in, or worse yet, put you on speakerphone – while claiming to be getting their 2^nd level support team involved. And as for 2^nd level support, he’s most likely the guy in the next workstation pretending to be the go-to-guy.

In the end, you’re on the phone for an hour, and the problem still exists. The technician told you to download the drivers and call back – your problem that you could access the internet. How can you download the drivers? How about the reassuring “it should work” reply.

To be continued!