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I work for a gigantic computer company I am sure you have all heard of. My particular job is top-level tech support for storage networks, along with parts of the associated tape drives and fridge-sized disk arrays. (My dept.'s lab has about $7M of equipment in it.)
Sitting on top of the support food chain, I am the last engineer that a customer can routinely talk to; the only higher engineers I can escalate to are developers, and they do not routinely talk to customers for obvious reasons. (Namely an astonishing lack of people skills.)
The people in my company that annoy me the most are the sales drones. Too many times I get a call that goes something like this:
SD = Sales Drone
Me: GigantiCorp Support, SirWired speaking.
SD: Hello, I looked you up in the company directory, and I need some help with a FooBar Storage Array.
Me: What is your ticket number?
SD: I don't know.
Me: What is the customer name?
SD: TinyCorp.
(typity-type while I look up all open calls on that customer with that product)
Me: Okay, I found your call... according to the problem record, TinyCorp has been fighting a problem with their disk array for two months. However, the call was just opened last week. It looks like it is still in Level 1, and they have been waiting for five days for the customer to submit the basic troubleshooting logs.
SD: How can I get it escalated?
Me: If Level 1 can't figure it out once they receive the documentation, they will send it to Level 2 (not me), and the Level 2 guys are two cube rows away from me... if they need help, they know where to find me.
SD: But if it isn't fixed by next Friday, the customer will return the equipment!
Me: That may be the case, but we need to let the normal support structure do its job.
SD: When can I get someone from your team onsite?
Me: You will have to talk to my manager about that; it is not up to me. (Note: It's also bloody unlikely. Due to the wonders of modern networks, I don't actually need to be there to fix your problem. That is why we have thousands of Field Engineers spread all over the globe to do actual on-site work, on the remote chance any needs to be done.)
SD: But this problem is holding up a $X million dollar deal!
(I then make vague promises to keep an eye on the call to see if it progressing along.)
Here are the mistakes the SD made, along with TinyCorp:
1) If you opened up a call at all, it means you have an active warranty. If the problem is so serious, why did you wait two months to open a call, a process that is completely free of additional charges?
2) The proper way to get a call escalated to me is not to call me at my desk. The proper way is to ask the person that actually owns the call to escalate to the next level of support.
3) If Level 1 is waiting on a basic doc set, they won't escalate to Level 2 under any circumstances. If they did, we would bite their head off, as we in higher levels of support do not have magic powers that let us fix problems without the most basic documentation.
4) Don't feed me the line: "If it's not fixed by next Friday, it's going back to the loading dock." I have been doing the exact same job for eight years now, and I hear that line about 15-20% of my calls. Out of the hundreds of problems I have worked over the years, I have yet to have ONE customer send stuff back to the loading dock. It is not that I am that good, it is that customers are lousy bluffers... they know and I know that replacing the box with the competition will just uncover a new and different set of stupid problems, and it will take about ten times as long as working with me to fix the issue.
5) Don't tell me: "This is holding up a X million dollar deal!" You moron, I can read our company's annual report. Your "X million dollars" is so insignificant, compared to the company's total revenue, it doesn't even qualify as a rounding error. While it may be very significant to your commission check, I don't work for your commission, so I really don't care, except in the abstract sense that I like my company to make money in general. In any case, I get paid twice a month no matter what happens to your customer.
6) Don't bother to ask me to go onsite. For the most thorny problems, I can mail you an $85K piece of test equipment that will conclusively tell me whose fault the problem is. Luckily, for our $85K, the company that makes it has seen fit to provide it with a user interface so easy, that even a moron sales drone or the most dense field engineer can operate. Onsite visits by support are completely political, which means I'm never going to volunteer for one. The days of a whole team of engineers flying to a customer site to recite magic incantations while hunched over an oscilloscope are long gone.
In short: A sales guy bugging me over the phone about his customer problem has approx. a 0% chance of me actually doing anything differently.
SirWired
Sitting on top of the support food chain, I am the last engineer that a customer can routinely talk to; the only higher engineers I can escalate to are developers, and they do not routinely talk to customers for obvious reasons. (Namely an astonishing lack of people skills.)
The people in my company that annoy me the most are the sales drones. Too many times I get a call that goes something like this:
SD = Sales Drone
Me: GigantiCorp Support, SirWired speaking.
SD: Hello, I looked you up in the company directory, and I need some help with a FooBar Storage Array.
Me: What is your ticket number?
SD: I don't know.
Me: What is the customer name?
SD: TinyCorp.
(typity-type while I look up all open calls on that customer with that product)
Me: Okay, I found your call... according to the problem record, TinyCorp has been fighting a problem with their disk array for two months. However, the call was just opened last week. It looks like it is still in Level 1, and they have been waiting for five days for the customer to submit the basic troubleshooting logs.
SD: How can I get it escalated?
Me: If Level 1 can't figure it out once they receive the documentation, they will send it to Level 2 (not me), and the Level 2 guys are two cube rows away from me... if they need help, they know where to find me.
SD: But if it isn't fixed by next Friday, the customer will return the equipment!
Me: That may be the case, but we need to let the normal support structure do its job.
SD: When can I get someone from your team onsite?
Me: You will have to talk to my manager about that; it is not up to me. (Note: It's also bloody unlikely. Due to the wonders of modern networks, I don't actually need to be there to fix your problem. That is why we have thousands of Field Engineers spread all over the globe to do actual on-site work, on the remote chance any needs to be done.)
SD: But this problem is holding up a $X million dollar deal!
(I then make vague promises to keep an eye on the call to see if it progressing along.)
Here are the mistakes the SD made, along with TinyCorp:
1) If you opened up a call at all, it means you have an active warranty. If the problem is so serious, why did you wait two months to open a call, a process that is completely free of additional charges?
2) The proper way to get a call escalated to me is not to call me at my desk. The proper way is to ask the person that actually owns the call to escalate to the next level of support.
3) If Level 1 is waiting on a basic doc set, they won't escalate to Level 2 under any circumstances. If they did, we would bite their head off, as we in higher levels of support do not have magic powers that let us fix problems without the most basic documentation.
4) Don't feed me the line: "If it's not fixed by next Friday, it's going back to the loading dock." I have been doing the exact same job for eight years now, and I hear that line about 15-20% of my calls. Out of the hundreds of problems I have worked over the years, I have yet to have ONE customer send stuff back to the loading dock. It is not that I am that good, it is that customers are lousy bluffers... they know and I know that replacing the box with the competition will just uncover a new and different set of stupid problems, and it will take about ten times as long as working with me to fix the issue.
5) Don't tell me: "This is holding up a X million dollar deal!" You moron, I can read our company's annual report. Your "X million dollars" is so insignificant, compared to the company's total revenue, it doesn't even qualify as a rounding error. While it may be very significant to your commission check, I don't work for your commission, so I really don't care, except in the abstract sense that I like my company to make money in general. In any case, I get paid twice a month no matter what happens to your customer.
6) Don't bother to ask me to go onsite. For the most thorny problems, I can mail you an $85K piece of test equipment that will conclusively tell me whose fault the problem is. Luckily, for our $85K, the company that makes it has seen fit to provide it with a user interface so easy, that even a moron sales drone or the most dense field engineer can operate. Onsite visits by support are completely political, which means I'm never going to volunteer for one. The days of a whole team of engineers flying to a customer site to recite magic incantations while hunched over an oscilloscope are long gone.
In short: A sales guy bugging me over the phone about his customer problem has approx. a 0% chance of me actually doing anything differently.
SirWired
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