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I work tech support for a company I don’t want to name, because if I do, I’ll get a bunch of emails about work issues at my personal address through this blog. I don’t want that.

Anyways, we had an issue a couple of weeks ago, that while trivial in the great scheme of things, could come back to bite us. One of our agents got into a confrontation with a user and that user eventually got to me as the team lead. I calmed the user down, worked her issue, and got her off the phone, hopefully feeling that I fixed the problem. This issue should never have taken place.

In many organizations, call center performance is based on call volume. Every call costs money, and taking an inordinate time to do tech support over the phone escalates that cost. At my job, we have a lot more satisfied users (in my opinion) than disatisfied users because our call volume is not that high. We also don’t have real “metrics” we have to hit, like call volume, call time, scripts, etc. Additionally, this also means that we don’t have regular team meetings, one-on-ones, internal issue tracking, and so-on.

I feel I am successful at what I do because I’ve been in this industry long enough to know what makes a good call and what makes a bad call. Here’s how I roll:

• Treat all customers equally: We have one free product, an inexpensive product, and then several pricing tiers. Regardless of the product you are using, if you call into my company and get me, I will treat you as if you have a private jet waiting at the airport. This should be a no brainer to anyone who works in this industry, but I use the axiom, “If I call in, how do I want to be treated?”
• Be honest at all times: self explanatory. It doesn’t mean you should reveal trade secrets, but it does mean if a customer asks you a direct question, you should attempt to answer to the best of your ability. If you don’t know, say so, and tell the customer you can try to get an answer.
• Take ownership: We don’t have a really good trouble ticket system, so in order to escalate an issue past our call center, we have customers use the tools in our software to send an error report to our upper level tech support. This generates a ticket number. Of course, upper level tech support triages all tickets and some take priority over others. This means that all tickets cannot be attended to in a timely manner, if at all. Therefore, I tend to give my name and extension number to the customer. This allows them to have someone to reach if they don’t get a response from Tier 2, and allows me to investigate the issue further.

These things should be obvious, but in our organization, getting people to take this job seriously is like pulling molars.

I have to get back to the calls.

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