I was fired because I made the customer feel stupid. Tech Support |
- I was fired because I made the customer feel stupid.
- The comeuppance of Al
- It helps to have a PC if you want to use our website
- You ever get a client who hates you for asking questions?
- How do I explain this...
- The camera that didn't work for very unexplainable reasons...
- Wiggle it... just a little bit...
- Sorry I cannot help you and aren't you supposed to be closed?
- Newly outsourced helpdesk woes.
- If an app is presented in a forest but there's no phone around to display it, does it make sense?
- Pad and a Pencil
| I was fired because I made the customer feel stupid. Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:03 PM PDT I work in IT...and sometimes do support on the side for people/businesses (I'm sure most of us do or have done this). One of my long time customers recommended me to a local law firm and they called me up. Did a couple of support calls for them. All were easy things...setup a vpn connection between offices, poke holes in the firewalls for various things, a few minor AD tasks, stuff like that. A couple of months in I got a call they would no longer need my services. Not a huge deal but I decided to ask why. Turns out, I made the office mangler feel stupid because I was doing the things they asked too quickly and made it look easy. I stopped for a second and said "you realize I have done similar things everyday for the past 20 years right? It's what you hired me to do?" Didn't make a difference...I made it look too easy and he thought that made him look dumb. [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2019 11:45 PM PDT Back on the East Coast of Canada when I was exiled for 13 days short of 2 years (not that I was counting), I worked with a guy named Al who was less than a stellar colleague. I moved from Ottawa and was in a specific position with a specific title. Al was hired into a "superior" titled position and seemed to think that this actually made him superior to me. About a year into my exile, I was doing something and happened to be working near Al when he had to use his admin access on our servers. I happened to see him enter his password which of all things, was "password", all lowercase. I immediately looked at him and said "please tell me that you are not using password as your admin password on our systems." He said basically yes he was and that it wasn't my business as he was the xyz which was a superior position to mine. I promptly went to my part of the office and immediately disabled his admin account. At this point, Al morphed into a Karen... Started yelling, threatening etc etc. Basically said I was going to be out of a job when he was done with me. I looked at him and in a somewhat stern tone, said "come with me, it's time this gets sorted." We proceeded to walk do the IT manager's office (my real boss and Al's boss). Al was bitching the whole way. For a 100 foot walk, he got a lot of griping and threats in. We proceeded into the boss' office and Al started going on about how I had disabled his admin account and he basically wanted my head on a platter. My boss looked at me a bit perplexed until I told him, I disabled his admin account because his password was set to "password". With eyebrows raised, he looked at Al and asked if that was true. Al truthfully admitted to it (because it could have easily been tested right on the spot). At that point, I said to my boss, I would like to get something absolutely clear right now because it is a regular recurring issue. When it comes to any technical matter, opinion, decision etc between myself and Al, who is "in charge"? The look on Al's face when my boss advised that I was the senior technical person onsite and my decisions and judgements were to be followed was somewhat priceless. Al immediately pointed out that he was an xyz and I was an wxy. At this point my boss advised him in no uncertain terms, that I was in charge and he was to follow my lead. The next two weeks were somewhat quiet as Al suddenly realised that a title is just a title and means nothing. He eventually started talking to me again out of necessity and never crossed that line again. I gave him his admin account back after a week. My boss.... was awesome about the whole thing. [link] [comments] |
| It helps to have a PC if you want to use our website Posted: 31 Oct 2019 08:23 PM PDT I read a tale on TFTS from another healthcare IT person and I remembered this incident from several years ago, so I thought I'd share. A few years ago, hospitals were required to make medical records available online. For some reason, our internal IT helpdesk became customer service for this new portal. We weren't trained on it and didn't have access to it, so these calls frequently became a nightmare for all involved. A few of these incidents still stand out to me today. Jim stood out because we rarely spoke to the same patient twice and he called every few months. One day, I discovered why.
Apparently, Jim had never been able to activate his account. I confirmed his info (name, DOB, email, etc), and created a ticket for our recalcitrant portal admin. An hour later, the phone rings and it's Jim. He got the welcome email, but the login process failed every time he entered the verification code. I was out of ideas, so I asked Jim exactly what the error message said. Maybe it would mean something to the portal admin.
After my brain rebooted, I explained 2FA to Jim. He seemed to understand, but Jim didn't have a PC or a cell phone. By the time he got the code, drove to the library, and logged into a PC, it had expired. Every time. I suggested a $3 burner phone from the dollar store, but that was impossible for Jim. See, his wife wouldn't let him have one because "they were an instrument of the devil". Our patient portal software was terrible and I doubted it would offer any other means of 2FA, but I was wrong. Louise, the portal admin wasn't happy about having to talk to Jim so much (he WAS a talkative old gent) but she found another 2FA method for him. All's well that ends well, I suppose. Jim was a nice guy and helping him certainly beat the threats of violence and firings that happened over portal issues later on. [link] [comments] |
| You ever get a client who hates you for asking questions? Posted: 31 Oct 2019 08:19 AM PDT I do, fairly regularly in fact. Context: I work in the field of 'Medical Patient Portal' on the inbound line from users, which more or less just translates to me being a password resetter, account unlocker, and general person who knows how the particular website works and explains how to use it. 90% of my job falls into the previous category, and so does this story, but here's another 10% of my job that is actually doing proper tech support and troubleshooting that I absolutely love (even if it tanks my numbers to actually do support work to resolve the issue rather than just immediately escalate and keep my calls short). Because my job is medical in nature (of a sort), I need to ask a short bout of questions to confirm I'm giving people their medical information and not someone else's, lest we breach the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and suck a major fine. What I need to verify varies from health group to health group, but it usually is just Name, DOB, and the Full Mailing address, with the option to do the last for of their SSN if the address isn't lining up. You know, stuff that really isn't a huge thing all things considered. This is the story of one patient who thought I was an idiot for daring to make sure they were who they said they were, and berated me a week until they finally let me help them... (Obviously I need to make redactions, they'll be in []'s, otherwise my quotes will be full quotes, misspellings, caps, and all) Inbound email: July 16th Your phone agent also cannot find my account I have [doctor], [specialty], who I need to make an appointment. Also, [doctor2] and possibly [doctor3] Last login was Dec. 18 to [website] I CANNOT LOGIN TO [WEBSITE] regards," (No they didn't put a signature on the message, just said regards.) Outbound email: July 16th Thank you for contacting [website] support. To assist you with your request, we need a little more information to verify your identity and locate your account. Please reply, either by email or calling us at the contact information listed below, and provide us with the following information: Full name (First and last): When replying, either by phone or email, please reference Ticket Number: [number] Your prompt reply is greatly appreciated. Thank you for trusting your care to [health group] [redacted signature with all our contact information]" Inbound email: July 17th [DOB] [City and State]" Outbound email: July 17th Thank you for contacting [website] support. We do need to verify the full address you have listed on file, could you reply and give us the following: Full Address with City, State and Zip Code: When replying, either by phone or email, please reference Ticket Number: [number] Your prompt reply is greatly appreciated. Thank you for trusting your care to [health group] [redacted signature with all our contact information]" Inbound email: July 17th HIPPA legal action is now on tap. Find a supervisor with authority to frid my login to [WEBSITE], NOW. If my flight from [Non US city] to [US state] is without an appointment, you will see what service..." (Again, yeah, it just stops there? Might be a phone character limit thing?) Outbound email: July 17th Thank you for contacting [website] support. We are happy to assist you in accessing your account, however, we require the full address that is on file in the system to complete the verification. If you are uncomfortable with giving us your full address, we can also use the last 4 of your Social Security Number to verify you, so please provide us with one of the following: Full Address with City, State and Zip Code: When replying, either by phone or email, please reference Ticket Number: [number] Your prompt reply is greatly appreciated. Thank you for trusting your care to [health group] [redacted signature with all our contact information]" Inbound email: July 18th DUH BD: [BIRTHDAY] DUH CITY OF BIRTH: [CITY, STATE, ZIP] DUH DUH... don't you retain records PER HIPPA REQUIREMENTS I am notifying your negligence to [STATE] state board of ETHICS following this breech You may contact an Ethics Commission Special Investigator at [phone number] for further information as to damages" Outbound email: July 18th Thank you for contacting [health group] Patient Portal Support. We can assist you with logging into the portal, but we need either your full correct address or the last 4 of your SSN. The information you have provided thus far has not been enough to verify your identity for account access. If you would please provide one of the following, we will be more than happy to get you in your account: Full Address with City, State and Zip Code: When replying, either by phone or email, please reference Ticket Number: [number] Your prompt reply is greatly appreciated. Thank you for trusting your care to [health group] [redacted signature with all our contact information]" Inbound email: July 20th Last 4 ssn [ssn] uid [Username] Pwd [A terrible temporary password that was not strong enough to be a permanent one] EMERGENCY. Your system does not SEND ME ACTIVATION/AUTHORIZATION CODE FIX YOUR SITE Full name (First and Last): [Name] Outbound email: July 20th Thank you for contacting [website] support. To protect your account, we do not send IDs and passwords in the same email. We have temporarily deactivated your account. Please follow the instructions below to reactivate your account. During this procedure your ID will be displayed, and you will be asked to create a new password. You will not lose any information through this process.
Please feel free to contact [website] Support should you require any further assistance. Thank you for trusting your care to [health group] [redacted signature with all our contact information]" And with that, another closed ticket....... Only took far too much 'verbal' abuse and time to get it resolved.... [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2019 04:34 PM PDT Many moons ago through a long and boring story I would up working on the Service Desk for one of the countries largest health insurance companies. Working the evening shift (1000-1900) had two distinct patterns: around 1700 call volume died for the obvious reasons and the calls you did get, well you tended to get familiar with certain frequent callers. One always stood out to me not only because of his distinctive voice but he always wanted to understand what the root problem was. I can't fault the guy for that at all; he wanted to learn and avoid future issues which I was (and still am) all in favor of...as a general principle. On a lot of his calls that was no problem and I was happy to help but on some calls not so much. This story is about two such calls. Call #1: User was getting a very specific error message in a custom in house application. I check the documentation, known issue with steps that of course couldn't be performed on the service desk so I created a ticket and let him know I was reaching out to the admin who could fix it. He asked what the problem was and I told him but he didn't understand. He asked me to explain further which I tried but it eventually would up with me asking him if he knew anything about databases (he didn't) and I let him know politely that without a basic understanding of databases I wasn't able to break it down to layman's terms in a timely manner (the queue was building up unexpectedly) and he threw a fit, contacted my manager to complain, the whole nine yards. The next day my boss basically told me that I wasn't wrong but next time just tell him I didn't know and move on. After going home I realized that as frequently as this guy calls in that it was only a matter of time before I was in the same situation and being the "I'm a CSR but all of my issues should be a P1" type I figured "I didn't know" would cause more drama than it would solve. I was feeling very burnt out already so when my smarta** idea came to mind I decided to go for it. Grabbed an old Last Unicorn Games Star Trek TNG RPG book and a few D6, threw them in my bag and the next morning put them in my desk and forgot about them. Sure enough, within two weeks is call #2 (A little backstory, I shared a cube with my buddy J who not only got me that job, but him and I had also games together for years) Call#2: Said inquisitive user calls back and has another one of these issues that I knew right away he couldn't understand but I didn't want to go down the rabbit hole with him so I pull out this book and dice and turn to a page pre-marked with a post-it and roll 2D6 three times. J whips his head around at the sound then hears me say "oh well see this is a known issue that can occur when there is "... degradation...in the...network...compensators." I had to put his headset down and walk away he's laughing so hard and I'm waiting for User to lose his cool and try to get me fired again but all he says is "ok, that makes sense, can I have the ticket number?" That night I put that chart into an excel sheet saved as "ID1 Explanation Resource Guide.xls" [link] [comments] |
| The camera that didn't work for very unexplainable reasons... Posted: 31 Oct 2019 12:46 PM PDT Customer calls me. He wants to do video calls with Skype but his camera just shows a black image. In a quick remote support session I see that the driver works correctly, the camera gets recognized by Skype etc... but still: no image. Since the customer lives in close proximity I offer him to bring his laptop over so that I can have a closer look at it. When the customer arrives, the first thing I see is that the taped the camera over with duct tape. I peel off the tape and the camera magically starts to work. Customer: "Ah, wonderful, what was the problem?" Me: "Well... you put a tape on the lens..." Customer: "Oh, doesn't the video work when there is duct tape on the lens?" Me: "Of course not... I mean that was probably the reason why you put the tape there in the first place?!" Customer: "I put the tape there for privacy reasons!" Me: "....?!" Customer: "Yeah, I've read somewhere that we should put a tape on the camera lens to protect us from being filmed secretly." Me: "That worked very well... have a nice day." I didn't try to figure out how one's mind must be constituted to understand that putting a tape over the lens protects him from being filmed secretly while at the same time not understanding that the same tape will also stop the camera from working in situations when he want's to film... it's really beyond the borders fo what my mind can grasp. [link] [comments] |
| Wiggle it... just a little bit... Posted: 31 Oct 2019 01:13 PM PDT Dramatis personae: I arrived at the client site, bright eyed and bushy tailed, at 9 AM, only to encounter a bare room with nothing in it except a locked door and a phone. This was apparently so much of a Secure Facility (tm) they didn't even have a receptionist in the front room. At 9:20, $CT finally condescended to pick up his phone and let me in. He walked me through the signup process, picked up the sticker that signified that I was a US Citizen and was Properly Signed in, and... reached out and attempted to stick it on my forehead. $CT was a nice guy, expansive, garrulous (especially when socially lubricated), doing his best to put me at ease. $CT was also convinced that his technical and troubleshooting skills were cutting edge. He was correct. They were cutting edge... circa approximately 1970. I'm not going to talk about the main issue that brought me to the site. I tried to detail it, but realized that it would be impossible to anonymize the info. We were attempting to resolve a hardware issue with a backup server that $client had bought on ebay -- with no hardware maintenance -- and even though the server itself was brand new the model had been discontinued back in the late 90s. It was a nightmare, but thankfully, I mostly have the twitching under control these days. No, today's story is about me sitting down at $CT's desk and noticing that he's got a continuous ping running to his production system. "Hey, $CT, what's this all about?" It took me roughly 3 minutes to figure out that he was trying to talk to a 1G switch with a line set to 10Mb. Unfortunately, I had to figure it out when $CT was out of the room, because he wouldn't let me look at it otherwise. His system was running perfectly, don't you know, and it was all due to his cutting edge technical skills... [link] [comments] |
| Sorry I cannot help you and aren't you supposed to be closed? Posted: 31 Oct 2019 11:22 AM PDT A little back story: I work as support technician at a community college. My job is mostly to manage phone calls and do some basic troubleshooting before I redirect the client to level 2 techs. I usually work the evening shifts and that's about the time when all of the tech 2 staff leaves for the day (around 4:30-5:00pm). This call is from the Financial Aid department (notorious for being rude to the students, you'll see why) and the person calling is a front desk staff. Cast: $Me: Yours truly $Client: FinAid front staff member I am working on my tickets as per usual, mostly just people forgetting their passwords or freaking out about an email they think is sent to hack their account (never a dull day at this job). Around 6pm my phone rings... Me: "[College] IT, How can I help you?" Client: "Yeah, you, reset my password" Me: [Jeez] "Sure, and which password are we talking about?" Client: "OMG! THE PASSWORD, you should know this, the one to log in" Me: "Okay, would you be willing to tell me if you're going to use this password to log in to the computers? check your email? or something else?" Client: "I can't believe you got hired if you don't know what I am talking about" Me: ... After about 15 minutes of me trying to ask the client what they were doing, I found they were trying to log in to the Financial Management Portal. Me: "Okay, this makes a lot of sense now, I believe all the technicians that have admin access to that system have left, however, I am going to create a ticket for you and your log in should be all set first thing in the morning." Client: "Oh dear *sigh* I want to get into this system now!!" Me: "Ma'am, this system deals with financial transactions from the state and the students... Quite understandable, I shouldn't have access to such liable systems, I'm just a level 1 tech" *insert whiny face* Client, rages out: "You are such a f***ing a******. All I want to do is place this transaction and head home. You should be fired." Me: "Ma'am your department closed at 5pm, I am sorry but you shouldn't even be in Financial Aid at this hour. But here's my supervisor's phone number, he might be able to help you better with your concerns" After this I put my phone down (after an hour long phone call with the client cussing me out several times), take a nice long walk and send an email to my supervisor about the issue... Later the supervisor told me that the client had been fired since they were rude to everyone and were trying to get into secured files they were not supposed to. I almost feel bad for chuckling at that. [TLDR]: Client calls after they should've closed asking me to change password to a system I didn't have access to. Client later started cussing me out for not knowing my job. They were later fired for being too rude and sniffing in systems that were not authorized. [link] [comments] |
| Newly outsourced helpdesk woes. Posted: 31 Oct 2019 04:39 PM PDT Hello all, been lurking for a while, don't think I've ever posted but not sure tbh, I know I've thought about it a few times. But that doesn't matter, on with the story. I recently moved cross country and got a new job at a giant helpdesk outsourcing kinda deal for a new project they are undertaking. It's for a financial institution who has two highly compartmentalized divisions as a result of a merger a number of years ago. Near daily we see why this is the worst possible client for this kind of project... They are transitioning easily a solid 3-5 systems at the same time they are trying to get us trained, and expect us to help story l support both through the transition. An overwhelming number of their systems are documented only in their current employees heads. The group chats they've set up for us to ask questions in is all but abandoned by them despite us desperately asking question in there. When we do get one of them to answer, it's often extremely dismissive saying someone else should know. That other person never responds... They have systems that they have multiple names for the same thing And systems where each division calls a different system by the same name. There are a few smaller things but these are the highlights. Maybe I'm too new to IT and these are fairly mundane issues, but I have a hard time believing that based on my previous experiences, I've never seen such disorganization. Thanks for hearing out my frustrations, as I've lost all motivation for the day after a simple outlook issue has only begun to be resolved after 4 days and 4 separate tickets, causes by them having a separate i-device third party support that were meant to escalate to who uses a different ticketing system than us and our clients on-site people, but they can escalate tickets to desktop support on-site. The final ticket ultimately came back to me and was simply adding a user to a security group. [link] [comments] |
| If an app is presented in a forest but there's no phone around to display it, does it make sense? Posted: 01 Nov 2019 04:01 AM PDT This one is on me, to be honest. We have a web portal software package with a progressive web app that for all intents and purposes is an app. It does app things. You can download it from the app store. It has notifications and stuff. It'll work on pretty much any smartphone. With that said, it was originally designed as a web portal, and what you see on the app is exactly what you see when you login on a web browser. it's just been responsively designed to fit all the boxes onto a small screen in a way that makes sense. So I demo this software frequently to existing clients that don't have it yet and to prospective clients. And the easiest way to demo this for 10 people in a room is on a big screen in the browser, so I open it in Chrome and go through all the features and functionality that way. I explain at the start that this is an app that you can download from the app store and carry on. And time and time again, I will get a response like this. The Managing Director or Ops Manager or CEO (whichever bigwig it is) will lean back slowly at the end of my spiel, put his hands together and say "Ok this is all very good, however what we need is an app. Everything is about apps now in 2019. We want our clients to be able to use this on their phones on the go. Do you have an app?" And every time, I have given the same response. "Yes, it is an app! Let me show you". Since pulling it out on my phone is impractical in this big meeting room with so many people, at that point I will click the Restore Down button on the top right of the browser, grab the edge of the browser window and shrink it down to the rough dimensions of a phone. As I do this all the elements contract and move about as you'd expect. "As I said to begin with, this software will work on any device, so really regardless of whether you use an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy or an iPad or whatever, it is exactly the same suite of software as I've been showing you." And generally, the response to this is pretty tepid. Some people look unconvinced, others confused. Maybe one or two will get it. This continued to happen in pretty much every demo until I discovered a trick. In F12 developer tools, you can cycle through sepcific smartphone dimensions. What I didn't know is that this can also show you a frame around the window to mock a physical smartphone. I mean it will literally look like the edges of an iphone, button and bevel and everything. Toggling this on in front of clients and the penny finally drops. "Oh yeah, this is great. Exactly what we need. An app." [link] [comments] |
| Posted: 31 Oct 2019 01:43 PM PDT So I get 3 phone calls from the same user with 3 different issues today. All offsite and of course it is snowing pretty hard so I am not driving. 1: Cannot scan to email from a MFP. I ask what the error is but she says it only says "Contact Administrator". 2: Cannot connect to the WiFi. This one is easy because this is the 3rd or 4th time in the past 3 months for this user. She has an HP that has a physical switch to turn WiFi on or off. Can I bang my head on this one? 3: Cannot connect to the postage meter. All she had to do was reboot the postage meter BUT this is what sent me through the roof. "Why do I have these issues every month?" I don't know, have you ever considered taking NOTES on the process and what you did? I love my job but there are 2 users that are making me seriously consider a move. THAT should never happen! [link] [comments] |
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