The End

This job was supposed to be a quick stop-gap solution while I looked for something with dignity that paid well and was ethical. It lasted about six months. Now I've got a better job. Yesterday was my last day.

I never did hear any sort of acknowledgement from supervisors that I was leaving. I emailed all the HR staff yesterday to make sure they were planning to send appropriate paperwork, and got a curt note that they would.

Over the course of the six months the job went from harrowing and miserable to just tiring. The first few months, with non-stop calls from customers who were all angry from being on hold, were about as bad a work experience as I've ever had. The last month or so, in which the pace has been relatively slow and a large percentage of the customers actually pleasant, has been pretty decent and occasionally almost fun.

But yesterday was my last day. My first call of the day was someone who had been transferred to me inappropriately and got angry when I explained that I couldn't help them without a paid subscription. In the middle of the day I got a call from someone whose computer was totally destroyed beyond help (not because of us; the damage was done before she first called us) and who then sobbed and wept and demanded that we pay for it; and my last call was an hour and a half long and at the end of it I had to explain to the caller that his problem was that his computer was badly damaged and there was nothing I could do about it.

I told one of my coworkers by chat that I was leaving. He seemed incredulous that anyone could want any other job.


Two last thoughts:

The company I worked for provides white-label tech support for other companies. They seem like a decent enough organization. The ISP they contracted with, however, does not. All my experiences have led me to believe that this company thoroughly despises its customers.

Some of my co-workers were themselves customers of this ISP, and said they think the company provides great value (mostly these are people with extremely, extremely fast internet connections, which I just don't see the need for). For my part, I went into this job thinking they were a terrible company to do business with, and I feel even more certain of that now.

And yet... many of my customers talked about how great this ISP was compared to their previous one (including most of the big players). Far more told me how awful 'we' were. Maybe once you account for the fact that folks who call are already having a problem, this evens out statistically. There is a significant percentage of people who are getting a good experience. But there's also a significant percentage of people who are being very badly failed by their ISP.

Also... this country is filled with interesting people. I talked to a lot of folks from all over the compass points, in just about every age, ethnicity and socioeconomic status. Many of the people I talked to were delightful. Many, of course, were not delightful.

Some calls began with a long silence, followed by a guarded, suspicious, "WHO IS THIS?"... some calls began with a maniacal three-minute-long babble of everything the customer had to say, all in a rush. Some began with the sound of the customer cursing.

The job did not enhance my faith in humanity. It may have actually damaged it a bit.

I'm the sort of person who wants to treat everyone with dignity no matter what, because we're all one and we're all worthy of love. And I still believe that. And I had a lot of very sweet and pleasant customers. But a lot of my callers were so blinded by resentment, or so convinced they already knew everything they needed to know, or so intent on proving a stranger wrong, that they kept themselves from being able to get what they needed. A lot of people didn't seem interested in listening to advice. (Which sort of defies the point of paying for tech support). Some were suspicious and paranoid. Some seemed like they had an amazing amount of anger stored up. I feel bad for these folks, but I also feel bad for their loved ones, neighbors, and coworkers.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. May each of you do work that has some dignity and is for a good cause. Be cautious about viruses, back up your files, and be nice to strangers on the phone.

Bad Call

My last call of the day... a simple wireless network setup. I've done hundreds and hundreds of them.
I solved the immediate connectivity issue, and went to establish a remote connection, as I always do.

The customer ran our remote connection software. His screen went black. The mouse froze.
Nothing could unfreeze his computer. So he restarted it.

After restarting, no video, no display whatsoever. Not just after Windows loaded, but even before: no startup info, no BIOS info, no hardware check info. The screen stays black.

I had him check the monitor cable, turn the computer off, turn it back on. Nothing.
I had him leave the computer unplugged for several minutes, then retry. Nothing.

The thing is, software can't do that. The only thing that could completely hose video like this is a hardware problem: a bad video card, a bad motherboard... maybe bad RAM.

But the customer refused to believe that such a coincidence was even possible. And was understandably convinced that I broke his computer.

And, that's all. There's no real recommendation I can give. As it is I probably said too much: by suggesting that his video card might be to blame I stepped well outside my allowable scope of work. So not only is the customer angry... but there's a good chance I'll be scolded by my supervisor too.

The Breaks

Central command just sent a detailed spreadsheet telling all employees exactly when they're allowed to take breaks.

Disappointment

In order to help people remotely, I need to connect to a computer. Not a cellphone or an iPad but a laptop or a desktop computer.

Twice today I've had people transferred to me who weren't told this, and have only an iPad in the house.

One of them, upon finding out that I couldn't help her, calmly decided to call back later.

The other flew into a rage and demanded a refund and blamed the "incompetent Indian salesperson", and then demanded to be transferred to someone who could cancel her account with the ISP.

I guess people have different ways of dealing with disappointment.

C'est la vie

Since sending in my resignation letter, I've intentionally begun to err more on the side of being nice to customers at the expense of being a "good employee". I was kind of doing that already, but I'd been trying to stay in scope for paid services and trying not to be too slow in my ticket times. Both of which sometimes necessitate not solving a customer's problems. Or, transferring a customer when it might be better for the customer not to be transferred. So, anyway, during the last couple workdays I've been extra-nice to customers.

The unfortunate truth is, customers aren't extra-nice back. They're just as rude as ever.

You want to CHARGE me?

My department (really a separate company, Support.com, but we're not allowed to say so) does paid tech support, for a major ISP (Comcast) that treats its customers badly.

Comcast employees tend to clear their own phones and get rid of problem callers by shunting callers to us inappropriately: in the afternoon as each time zone closes offices, we get sudden spikes of folks who have no idea they need to pay... often they have no idea they've even been transferred.

"I was just talking to a nice young man named Steven, he said he'd check on something. Why am I talking to you?"

Then I have to look up their account (sometimes a time-consuming process), then explain that I can't help them without a paid support subscription, and transfer them to our sales department. At which point 75% or more of callers will, understandably, throw a fit and start shouting.

Yesterday was an especially bad day for this. I took 22 calls yesterday. About 15 of them were folks who shouldn't have been transferred to me at all. About 13 of them were very angry.

Sadistic Sundays

So far all five of my first five calls today are folks without subscriptions, who didn't know they'd been transferred to paid support. One of the five callers was calm and unruffled by learning that he'd be charged. The others, not so much. So I've been harangued for the awfulness of Comcast four times today.

My last caller shouted at me for a long time with a lot of vigor. Apparently the installer gave her a new wireless router but didn't tell her the password for the wireless network. I explained to her how to find the new password, on the sticker on the bottom of the router. There it was! She read it back to me.

Then she screamed at me at the top of her lungs that the installer was a bad, bad man and should be fired... because he should have written it down for her. And that I was a bad man for wanting to charge money to help her.

A coworker says "Welcome to Sadistic Sundays".

You Will Be Assimilated

In theory, our department isn't supposed to have any hold time.

In practice, hold time varies from 5 seconds to 20 minutes.

When the calls stack up faster than we can answer them, we call it "The Queue". Or, "The Q Monster".

The Q Monster doesn't like being mentioned. Any time someone says "how nice that it's a little quieter today", the next thing you know there will be back-to-back calls and customers will be waiting for five or even ten minutes.

When that happens, the customers are very angry. And take it out on us.

The Specific Problem

If you were a giant corporation with millions of customers, and wanted to have the worst customer support possible.. how would you go about that?

Evidence suggests that the following is a very effective strategy:

1. Make sure all your services are in different departments.
2. Make sure those departments have no way of contacting each other.
3. Make sure customers have no way of contacting any of those departments, but have to click through an elaborate phone tree in which there are many dead ends.
4. Make sure front-line phone support agents aren't trained in basic customer service skills, and don't really understand which department is which.
5. Make sure your staffing is minimal enough that every department has a significant hold time, even for direct transfers.
6. Allow disconnects and hang-ups when a customer doesn't say exactly what the agent wants.

The results? Customers that have long hold times before they can reach a human being, then more long hold times while they're transferred to the wrong department, then more long hold times before they're hung up on. From an evil-corporate-mindset, it's absolutely perfect.

I've had customers reach me, in error, while trying to cancel their account because of the poor customer service they'd previously received. I can't do anything about that. So I have to put them on hold again, so that they can get transferred to someone else... who will hang up on them.

The Main Problem

The main problem with the ISP serving my customers (Comcast) is,

It absolutely does not care one bit about its customers.

It's a giant, giant company that doesn't need you.

So if you should happen to be one of those customers, and call because you have a problem, they don't care.

If you call because you want to cancel your account, they don't care.

In most markets they have the only fast internet around. What are you gonna do, take your business elsewhere?

Just pay up. They don't care.

The Gamble

Customers with odd problems. Sometimes I can solve them, sometimes I can't.

When I can't, it becomes stressful. Am I missing something obvious? Am I recommending the right followup/backup plan? Often the next step could cost the customer large amounts of money. And because I'm phone support I have limited amounts of information to go on; in some cases I need to make a quick diagnosis based on mumbled and extremely incoherent comments. Since the customer has already paid money to talk to me, I'm very conscious that asking them to pay for something else is going to seem like a ripoff.

Am I failing a customer? Or am I providing the best service I can?

It's just not always clear.

Clue-By-Four

Lately my teammates' attitudes have been bothering me.

Dealing with customers is always a challenge: they tend to be panicky, irrational, poor at communicating, poor at following directions, and prone to sudden moments of irrational behavior. In other words, they're people. But people under stress, dealing with things they don't understand, and who've been put on hold three times and hung up on twice.

Some of my teammates like venting about how stupid their customers are. This bothers me.

I've been noticing in my calls lately, that the stupid tends to recede, exactly when the angry does: as the customer finds that I can and will actually help them, they suddenly start communicating clearly and saying sensible things, no matter how ridiculous and strange they were a moment before.

So when a coworker says something like "there's a cure for stupidity, but bullets are expensive" or "this customer needs a whack with a clue-by-four"... it bothers me.

Beep

For some (BEEEP) reason fire alarms with dying (BEEEP) batteries are a thousand times (BEEEP) more annoying when (BEEEP) you're on the other end of a phone (BEEEP) line. I don't know why that (BEEEP) should (BEEEP) be, but it really (BEEEP) is.

Please

If you're going to talk to someone on the phone for tech support, please take a short break from screaming at your kids while you do so.

Or at least hold the phone away from your mouth so that you're not shrieking into someone's ear.

Zzzzzzz

I have the mid-afternoon doldrums. The person I just finished talking to is one of those non-talkers. She never volunteers information, and long stretches of silence go by after I ask a question before she mumbles an answer.

Part of the trick of this job is maintaining ownership of the conversation, keeping the call moving in a productive direction. But it's hard when I want to take a nap and so does the person on the other end of the line. It's so quiet... so calm... I wish I could just close my eyes for a moment.

Virus Hunting

Most of the work I do is wireless networking stuff, with a little bit of general helpdesk and occasional virus removals. I'm not all that great of a virus hunter. I'm too conservative and careful, which means I'm slow. And I don't get all that much practice, because I pass off my virus tickets to other folks, who love that work.

When I get stuck with one, I tend to stay on it for hours, asking my coworkers for advice about every file I don't recognize, and fretting about whether I'm doing things in the right order, and worrying about whether I'm about to ruin someone's computer.

I like to tell myself I'm being cautious.

Today at least I was successful. My virus hunt caught the bad guys and eliminated them, then found the damage they'd done, and repaired it. And the customer was happy. So I guess that's what's important.

Can We Not Just Keep Figuring Out New Ways to Rip People Off?

I just got a passionate and fairly eloquent speech from a customer about how I'm part of a larger social trend in which everyone gets ripped off more and more efficiently everywhere they turn.

I sort of agree. But the call still ended with her hanging up on me in anger.

Deep Thought

You know how calling a big company for tech support is pretty much the worst thing that you can ever do?

Well, it's like that for the folks on the other end of the line too. Except we're doing that all day.

Wine is Fine But Whiskey's Quicker

This job makes me drink.

I made it through college without becoming an alcoholic, and I've had a pretty comfortable relationship with booze over the years. I like a beer in the evening, and sometimes two. If I get to a third it's a party. About once every six months I might have four or five. I never get belligerent or anything; I might get extra-jovial and sleepy. I prefer quality beer and alcohol. Sometimes I don't drink at all, which is fine.

But at the end of a shift at this job, I really want to reach for some alcohol as fast as possible.

Why? I work 10-12 hour days. My average call time is somewhere in the 45 minute zone. (It's supposed to be in the 30 minute range, but I've given up on worrying about that). That means I get about 14 calls a day.

The outcomes are getting better, for a variety of reasons, but in any given day there will be at least one person, and usually two or three, who chews me out, either loudly or via quiet shaming. When I started a few months ago the odds were much worse.

I'm in a paid support department (technically a separate company, Support.com), and the primary Comcast tech desk transfers folks to us willy-nilly without warning them that it'll cost them money. So Joe or Sally Customer calls in because their internet has stopped working... waits for 15 minutes to talk to someone... then gets a surly person who says "hang on" and then they're suddenly on hold... and after 10 minutes they get me, and I have to explain to them that I can't help them unless they pay $45. This may have happened to you. If it did you probably used some choice obscenities at the person who broke the bad news.

Around the holidays there were a couple weeks when I actually got more calls like that, than the kind I'm supposed to get (folks who've already purchased subscriptions and want tech support). This meant that all day long... a steady stream of invective.

And the worst thing is? They're right to be upset. They should be pissed off. But there's nothing I can do about it.