Captain Oblivious strikes again!

[Hyndis]

A lot of times I get extremely long winded calls in tech support. These are people who just soak up FAR too much time, and while I'm ignoring most of their blathering on, its still keeping me on the phone and also slowing down the pace of my other work.

I get people who call with a problem, then go on and on and on and on about things that frankly, I don't give a shit about. And its not related to my job.

Example:

Person calls with a pre-sales question about our product. I explain it to him. Then he starts talking about what sort of computer he's going to use our product in, how he's going to set it up, what the overall system is going to look like, generic questions about the type of product that it is and how is compares with other similar products, and so on and so forth.

Last week this person kept me on the phone for TWO HOURS. He just kept calling back again and again, asking about the exact same product, which is just a $50 thing. This isn't a big ticket item we're talking about here. Then he would demand to speak to me about it. Those 30-45 minute phone calls kept adding up.

Most of the time I just made a vague grunt of acknowledgment every once and a while as I ignored him and went about my work as best I could, but the guy simply would not get the hint.

Also ever time I tried to end the question, he'd ask a question genuinely related to the product which I'd have to answer, then he'd wander off into tangent-land and start babbling away.



How do you get people to simply shut up and get them off the phone?

In the time it took to deal with this person, I could have helped ONE HUNDRED other people. Seriously. I could have taken care of a triple digit number of tickets and calls from other people who actually had a real problem and a point to their problem.

[Geek King]

Frankly, you need to talk to your supervisor or manager about what is valid in your workplace to handle wandering talkers so you don't run afoul of the QA folks. If you don't have to worry about QA, I'd just keep forcing the conversation back. Rudely, if you have to.

[Hyndis]

Its not a formalized sort of environment. Its relatively casual and we provide actual tech support. There is no tier 1. When you call, right away you're talking to someone who actually knows what they're doing and can fix it.

But people do not understand this and keep trying to treat us like tier 1. Most of my day I'm literally just reading the instruction manual to the customer because they're too dumb to read it themselves.

Massive Google failure. Rather than spend 5 seconds finding the information on their own so they can read it themselves, with it being the very first result from Google, they'd prefer to spend 15-20 minutes on the phone flailing about helplessly because they don't know squat, and I can't help them.

Unfamiliar with your BIOS? Great. So am I. We don't make it. Every BIOS is different. I can give you the numbers, but you're going to have to figure things out from there. Don't want to? Buy the bargain bin stuff. There is an implied understanding that if you want the top of the line stuff, you have to be a little savvy.


The average call goes like this:


Customer seeks information about product. Customer does not know what the product is, scrambles for 10 minutes seeking this information when I answer the phone. Customer then tries to configure these settings and demands I wait on the phone while they fumble through the BIOS because they lack the curiosity to look at anything before they call in.

Customer repeatedly ignores which option I want him to change.

"Do X, Y, and Z."
"So I see A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K..."
"No, just X, Y, and Z."
"What about A, B, C, D, and E?"
"No, just X, Y, and Z."

And so on and so forth, flailing about for ages. Takes forever. I maybe actually only spend about 1 minute, tops, providing useful information. The rest of the time is listening to the cows moo.