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Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies
by 97s 10y ago
Exactly. The company I worked for was a huge customer support company that developed the firmware that went on most of the modems that rural internet companies used. Some of the smaller companies paid on per a call resolution basis. The other's just had large contracts for us to help them no matter how many calls we got. It was a major problem when customers called in for simple questions that were outside of what we were paid to answer. Nothing worse than turning down/playing dumb a super easy question because it is against your policies to help people. It led to some really interesting problems, where you couldn't tell the customer that you can't answer that question, but the customer was confused as why you couldn't answer it, thinking that you were dumb, and asking for the next level of support or something. It also made for some really odd tickets. "Couldn't help customer because question was outside scope of responsibility.(question goes here) Customer got angry, tried to calm customer down. Customer wanted to speak to supervisor. Transferred to supervisor Billy Bob."
I would later check those tickets and supervisors would just refer the customer to the customer support of the actual internet company. FFS how frustrating would that be. Call the tech support number 24/7. Then speak to a supervisor, who send you to a customer support for the local company, who pays you to solve peoples problems. It was one of the most confusing jobs on the planet.
Another side note, they rolled out a call center check list/call flow application that was developed in house. They required us to use it. I was one of the few who refused to do so. My supervisor came around and asked me what the issue was. I showed him all the problems it had and how it drastically slowed down and erased notes if the customer mislead you down the wrong path and you found out later it was a completely different issue, which happened all the time. (They literally developed this software without having a single person who answers calls on the team, not a single person...)
Supervisor said can you write it all down so I can give it to the tech department. I sat there that night(was on night shift this particular night) and wrote up a javascript(notepad) example version on my local machine that was probably 5x better than theirs. I didn't think they would understand what I was saying.
My supervisor flipped out and introduced me to the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls. Man I could go on and on about how bad tech companies and customer service companies are.
About a week later they hacked my javascript into their version of the app and rolled it out. My supervisor eventually left due to frustrations of how they ran things. He had no other skills and left a 65K a year job to do manual labor for half the amount per year. He was probably the best supervisor there. I think this is probably another reason customer service industry sucks. Good people don't like doing bad jobs.
- illnewsthat 10y agoThanks so much for sharing all this, I find it super interesting! I've spent a long time on hold wondering why it's so hard for large companies to properly scale customer service. And I'll definitely keep in mind the tip about thanking the supervisor when a representative is particularly helpful.
- majewsky 10y ago> the tech team, who now also hated me because I literally did what took them 4 months in a night while taking calls So you're the mystical 1000x developer. :)
- FollowSteph3 10y agoHe said he had a prototype in JavaScript, that's still s long way from a multi-user production system. The problem generally is that management doesn't understand this. There's concurrency issues, as in what happens if two technicians are accessing the same ticket. There's the backend system which will also include user details etc. there's the whole account management portion. And so on. A prototype is great but there's still a good a lot of work left to productize something ;)
- 97s 10y agoI am not saying I am a good developer. I don't do any development at all anymore, I used to do web dev that is all, and I wasn't that great at it. I looked up the javascript/JQUERY in the docs and hacked together a front end that took notes off a checklist that then generated a note that users could put into the ticketing system. To clarify what was happening. They had 2 apps that were separate. One was the one that allowed us to log into their modems etc. This is where we wrote the notes for the client. It was just a text field that we could write what we did on the ticket. That was all. Most people didn't write good notes, so the company got tired of that and developed a second app. Which was basically a html form with check boxes that you could work through. At the end of the work flow there was a button which generated text based on what you checked off. "Answered customer call about MODEM SUPPORT. Customer claims INTERNET NOT WORKING." Basically something like that. We then copied the text it generated and pasted it into the other software which was on their account. So when I say it took them 4 months to develop the call flow and note taking app. I literally mean 12 call flows with about 4-6 check boxes that generate text to copy and paste into the other one. The issue is they had the call flow you want to go through on the top, say MODEM DEAD or something. After you took in the customers information in those fields: name, phone number, company, problem, etc. If the customer was leading you down the wrong path, and it was actually internet being slow not modem dead(which happened all the time). Then you could have to change call flows by selecting the right one from a drop down box. What happened then is it cleared the entire form of all the information you had placed in it. Their name, number, all your previous steps everything. So all I did was hack together a duplicate version of this that when you changed call flows it kept your notes and said ---> changed call flows to ---> and then let you paste all that information, so if the call was 10 minutes because of this, it was noted. So am I saying I am an awesome hacker, hell no, but it isn't hard to make check boxes on a form print out words to copy and paste, why did it take them that long to do it. When I first started there they told me they had just started working on it in my training.