Technical Support

The above must be everyone’s worst nightmare, even highly trained I. T. professionals but with a little behind the scene knowledge you may get your problem fixed faster.So what makes me qualified? I have had extensive experience in working on various help desks for large IT vendors with CD Burner being one of the products I had supported.

I know the majority of people reading this are not going to be happy with what I suggest but if you want help then you have to give help, it’s a basic factor in life.

When you contact a help desk for support then there is an extremely high chance you will not actually be contacting the manufacture of the company but likely to be contacting an outsourcing company who just handle all the customers telephone and email requests.

It can be difficult to tell if you are actually speaking or emailing the company and not an outsource center unless you do some reading on the internet. See Call Center Outsourcing

Why not to shout or verbally abuse the Help Desk Teams.

• Making enemies will not help you one bit.
• There is a high chance they are not employed by the manufacture of your product so they didn't’t make your product or design it or even have shares in the company.
• Call Center jobs are possibly the worst office job that one could have, extremely stressful so don’t add to their stress.
• The Support staff has guidelines to follow and is always faced with meeting call targets.
• Call Center staff do not want to hear what you think of XYZ company and how crap their service is – this is a red flag, you can say goodbye to a fast solution to your problem.
• It’s likely the support agent will cut you off as they aren't’t getting paid enough to take verbal abuse from not only you but probably another 60 customers on a daily basis.
• Support staff are usually trained to let customers shout on or moan as after 4 or 5 minutes of doing this the customer becomes mentally drained and starts becoming more clam in order to receive the help they want. Unfortunately this does not work for every customer as there are loose cannons out there.
• If you are placed on hold then the agent is seeking advice on your problem and no you can’t speak to the same person as the agent. Level 2 teams are usually smaller in numbers compared to the team of agents of the phones; Level 2 supports the agent while the agent supports you.
• Be patient!!! Help desk agents need to use PC’s just like you and yes they too crash and can run very slow.
• Try having a friendly conversation with the person, after all they are only human and you will get a better response if the agent actually likes you.
• Don’t forget, call centers spend thousands in training staff on how to deal with customers and to control the support call to resolve the problem quicker.

I know at this stage some of you are probably cursing me but to be honest, if you are then I wish you the best of luck whenever you have a problem with any product or service. I have the experience of being both the technical support agent and the customer having problems so this info has to have some good advice, right?