Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be

Might work if there's a way to filter out the tech-savvy posers from the people that are actually tech-savvy. More charitably there's a wide range of tech to be savvy in. I've had a customer tell me they were a expert in last-mile access systems because they "are a expert WinSock programmer". People that think they are tech-savvy but actually aren't tend to do things that are worse than the normal user and have a attitude about it. You can't afford to waste your Tier 2 rep's time or burnout points on them. On the business side we do tag customers as tech-savvy but it's based a bit on trick questions. E.g. When assigning static IPs do they understand CIDR or do they insist on talking in terms of Class A/B/C subnets? Do they throw a fit about /31 subnets not being valid? Do they insist that a /32 subnet mask on their PPPoE connection is invalid and that the gateway can't be outside the subnet? There's nothing worse than a IT consultant that presumes to know more than the ISP about running a network (they almost never do). To a degree we use how much they pay for their connection as a proxy for knowledge. It seems like customers that optionally pay for higher end service or business products have a understanding of the business value of the connection and are pretty reasonable about their expectations. Example: customer with a $3k Dedicated IP+BGP link that's called in for a outage and the call went "oh, outage? how long? ok, call me if you think it will take longer than that". Customer with a $60 DSL calls in yelling and screaming about losing thousands of dollars in sales and such. We're like, really? Thousands of dollars a minute and you didn't see business value in a backup link, redundancy, or a SLA? When I have a problem with my cable connection at home I focus on helping them get through their script as quickly as possible to reach the escalation or dispatch stage. If this means I'm dragging out a Windows 7 laptop because that's the fast path through their script, so be it.