I spent 45 minutes of my morning troubleshooting an issue over the phone with someone. They have a work laptop that they take home and they can’t get to work for them. At work, the computer is fine, and I suspect that if I took the computer to my own home and connected to my wireless network that it would work fine. However, for this person, no, it doesn’t work fine. It works sporadically. And so it falls to me to do “my job” and to assist the person over the phone in making an effort to determine the problem through a series of troubleshooting steps. One of those steps is the obvious one of eliminating possible causes of the problem or eliminating those things which are NOT the problem. Of course, it seems obvious to me to do the process of elimination. With computer tech you are left with one of the few areas of life that you actually can treat like a dime store mystery novel in the process of eliminating suspects. It’s entirely procedural and a step by step process. What it isn’t is randomly guessing what the problem might be based on partial knowledge you have seeped up along the way in conversations and newspaper articles about technology. Dumbing down happens, and when you overhear a conversation and pick up only the bits you understand a little of and take those as entirely accurate descriptions of reality, you should know that you only have part of the story. None of us will ever have the whole story, of course. But some of us WILL have more of the story. And that “more” of the story is what differentiates supposed experts from novices. “Experts” just spend more time doing something over and over again, and in some cases that means reading and learning the same things over and over again. When you pick up just enough to be dangerous then you are not actually helping yourself. And if you ask an “expert” for help to solve a problem but refuse to follow even the most simple steps or answer even the most simple questions, then you are never going to actually solve the problem. You are going to make it worse.
I help people with computers. My job is not to pull teeth. If we are talking to each other and I am asking questions or giving instructions it is in the service of reaching the end goal that you desire. You are not necessarily expected to learn anything at all from a troubleshooting interaction. If you ARE expected to learn something from the interaction, the good tech will summarize that at the end (and hopefully in a follow up email). But I should not have to coerce you or lay out bait for you to tell me what I need to know to HELP you. If you are coming for help you must also provide help to the person attemtping to provide help for you. You must help in the form of providing information and following steps. And if you don’t understand the steps you should always feel free to simply say “I don’t understand. Can you simplify that anymore than you already have?”
What it comes down to, though, is sad and simple and not about technology at all but about customer service: Customer service jobs are fucking nightmares. They are nightmares for both the customer and the service. If you receive good customer service that means you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone. If you receive good customers as a service person then it means exactly the same thing: you are lucky to get a patient person on the phone.
Nightmare customer service can stem from many things, such as lack of knowledge or communication skills. But most poor customer service is simply because one or the other or both people on the phone lack patience and are not bothering postponing their impatience. Customers want problems solved NOW NOW NOW. Customer service wants to solve the problem as quickly as possible as well. Maybe not “NOW NOW NOW” but the sooner the better. Now we are basically just an entire country of impatient people attempting more often than not to be a service oriented society. We are increasingly impatient on both sides of the equation, and worse is that we are propogating the idea that “The customer is always right.” when quite often the customer isn’t right at all. The customer can’t be right all the time and it’s a silly concept to start with. You can’t be right about something you don’t know about. That’s why you have to CALL customer service. If you want to be right, then you call consumer relations. They are PR people and their job is to tell you how great your company is, and one function of that is to please the customer to the point of making the customer feel that, yes, indeed, they ARE always right.