1.  When in doubt, restart your computer.  You would be surprised how often that fixes whatever problems you’re experiencing.  Application crashed and you can’t get it to open again?  Restart.  Computer moving very slowly for no particular reason?  Restart.  Just about anything else?  Restart.  Seriously, restarting not only clears out the virtual memory that may have become bogged down the longer the PC has been on, but it ends any active applications running and gives you a fresh start when it reboots.  One of my my favorite British comedies, “The IT Crowd“, addresses this best.  When one of the main characters answers the helpdesk line, his introduction consists of “IT this is Roy, have you tried turning it off and on again?”  Brilliant, and entirely accurate.

2.  Don’t be afraid to use Google.  Search engines have evolved by leaps and bounds in the past 10 years, and now you can find just about anything you could possibly want using only the internet by making use of the tools available to you.  If you have a question about computers, the odds are very likely that at least one thousand other people have at one point had the same question, and the answer is on the internet just waiting for you to ask.  You want to know how to add a printer to your computer? Google it.  Want to know how to change the background picture on your desktop? Google it.  The internet is a vast encyclopedia of knowledge, you just have to pose the right question to get an answer.  If you get an error and you don’t know what it means, type the first sentence into Google and see what you get; chances are it will auto-complete before you’re half through typing because others have also had this problem.

3.  When in doubt, don’t do it.  If your printer stops working and you think that maybe prying it apart with a screwdriver will help you find the problem, don’t do it.  There’s a difference between being proactive and being ridiculous.  You can’t do everything for yourself.  Yes, you can use the internet to search for possible causes to your problem, but you’re not helping matters by taking tools to the machine to try and get it working again.  You have to know when to stop and ask for help.  Don’t call someone for help if you can’t find the power button.  Do call someone for help if the printer is powered on, has paper and ink, yet doesn’t seem to print for some reason.  If you aren’t sure you know what you’re doing, don’t try.  There is a pretty good chance you’ll only make matters worse (even unintentionally) and that isn’t necessary.  I have never been upset or frustrated with someone for having a genuine problem they need help with; what does get frustrating however is the person who calls a few times a week with problems that they’ve either had before or are easily fixed by anyone with common sense.  You don’t have to have a college degree in technology to get by on a daily basis, no matter how much you may want to pretend that’s the case.

4.  Try to be realistic with your expectations.  I cannot even attempt to count how many times I’ve gotten calls from family, friends, and people in the workplace where they express frustration over something not working like they expect, but their expectations are unrealistic.  Technology is amazing nowadays, I’ll grant you that, but if you think for a second that you should be able to restart your PC and have it back up and running in 30 seconds, you’ve lost your mind.  Yes, some will do that.  Those “some” would be the computers with a very powerful processor, a large amount of RAM, and that were made in the last year or less.  Please don’t expect your 4 year old Dell running Windows XP with 512 MB of RAM to restart in less  than a couple minutes.  It won’t happen.  If you are connecting to the internet using DSL and trying to load a 4 minute video on YouTube, please don’t complain that it takes a few minutes.  You are using a slow internet connection and accessing a data intensive website.  It’ll load.  You just have to be realistic with your expectations.  People who don’t understand how things work often assume they’re broken when in actuality they’re performing exactly as they should be.  If you want a fast computer, you’re gonna pay for it.  That $395 laptop you bought on sale at Best Buy isn’t going to be “state of the art” for more than a couple months (sad truth, but there you have it).  Don’t expect it to last you until your toddler graduates college.

5.  If and when your computer someday breaks, please be courteous to whoever you take it to for repairs.  If you call a helpdesk or a PC repair shop, please don’t yell at them or vent your frustration on them because your computer crashed.  They didn’t build your PC.  They didn’t fill it with data and crash it.  They didn’t have anything to do with it whatsoever, yet it is not at all uncommon for people in the IT field to bear the brunt of the frustration you feel when something goes wrong.  Being in the service industry doesn’t mean they should have to stand there and listen to you whine and complain and berate them.  I’ve had it happen to me all too often, and it’s uncalled for.  Things break, it’s a fact of life.  There is an entire professional field of people who are solely there to help you find the problem and attempt to fix it.  Just please be nice when asking for help.  The fact that you’re having to ask at all shows us that something’s wrong and you’re in need of assistance, so yelling and screaming about how you didn’t do anything and it just randomly broke one day isn’t going to help matters.

And there you have it.  Five easy and user-friendly tips for handling some of the most common problems you’ll run across.  Pain free, right?  You’re on your way to being self-sufficient.  Congratulations!

I love it when people call IT to open a ticket for something, then call us back 2 and 3 times a day to check the status.  We haven’t forgotten you.  The system kicks us constant email reminders letting us know there are pending issues.  We don’t need you checking up on us like we’re toddlers getting into the paste.

I just got off the phone with someone who opened a ticket a couple days ago and called in to tell me that it should’ve been a simple fix and there’s no way it should take 2 days to resolve; add to that the fact that he said “there’s no way you’re that busy” and I have no more patience.

Fact is, we are “that busy” and it’s mostly due to people like him.  You want us to fix your issue?  Don’t call us 3 times a day asking us the status – that takes away time it could be being worked on.  Don’t berate us for taking long.  That lessens our motivation to help you any faster than we’re already moving.

And most importantly, don’t presume to know how busy we are.  While I’m on the phone with you, there are 3 calls holding right behind you waiting for my attention.  The irony is, the reason we’re so busy is people calling all the time when there aren’t actually issues.  About half the daily call volume at any IT helpdesk is people either complaining that something’s broken when they’re actually doing it wrong, or calling to check the status of something they reported 30 minutes ago.

I love working in IT, and I fully acknowledge the fact that I probably wouldn’t have a job if some people weren’t so completely inept, but there comes a time when it goes beyond customer service and into being a kindergarten teacher.  When I have to tell a half dozen people a day that they locked themselves out of an account because they had their caps lock on when typing their password, that’s too much.  It’s just too much.

And on that note…it’s back to work I go.

Just about every job is customer service related in one way or another.  It really just depends on what you do and who you interact with, but almost every job requires some amount of human interaction, be it by phone, email, or in person.  However, this post isn’t about the people working on the CS side of things as much as it is about the people who in some form or fashion use that customer service.  While my particular observations will mainly be based on my work in the IT field (and will be presented as such), many are pretty universal.  So sit back, grab a pen and paper, and take notes ladies and gentlemen.  It’s time to learn how to be a decent human being.

1.  First and foremost, PLEASE do not chew gum or eat while you’re on the phone with us (and I speak for anyone and everyone who answers a phone as any part of their CS job).  The last thing I wanna hear in between sentences (let alone while you’re talking) is you smacking your gum in my ear, or chewing your granola bar.  As a common courtesy, you could wait until you’re off the phone to do that.  If you don’t, we reserve the right to pull up your address and send you a care package with laxative laced snacks.  Enjoy.

2.  The majority of the call centers you call for any kind of assistance have a queue setup where the agent’s phone automatically picks up when your call goes through.  They most likely don’t have a ringing phone that they have to pick up.  The reason I say this is because that also means that when the call is over, they don’t have a receiver to hang up – they’re usually using a headset that’s always on.  The moral of the story?  Please hang up when the call is over.  When the call is over and you just say bye and go back to what you were doing before (this mainly applies to people who call on speakerphone) without hanging up, we have to listen to you talking and rambling in the background, or manually release the call ourselves; and speaking from experiences, some companies don’t look kindly on any force-released calls because it could be construed as them hanging up on the customer.  So do us a favor – when the call is over, hang up.

3.  Depending on what you’re calling about, there’s a good chance that you’re going to be providing us with some specific information in order to help you.  Please don’t give us all that information in the first sentence you speak.  I can’t tell you how many conversations have gone something like this:

Me:  IT Support, may I have your full name please?

Them:  Yeah, this is Mary Johnson and I’m calling from 800-555-0000 in Nowhereville, USA and I have a question about my Dell Optiplex 780 computer running Windows XP SP3 and how it handles this program that I’m trying to use which was given to me by my coworker named David Rodriguez and I can’t seem to get it to install correctly even though his works fine.  What’s wrong with it?

Me:  Umm…so your name is Mary Johnson?

Please don’t flood the rep with information they haven’t asked for.  It’s overkill.  Call centers require information be tracked when people call in, and every ticketing system is different.  We have to move around from screen to screen to put your information in correctly to make sure it all gets handled and notated.  If you throw everything at us in one sentence when we’re not ready, you’re just gonna have to repeat yourself in a few moments and we both know you’re gonna get frustrated with us because you already said it once.  Please, just wait until we ask for the information.  Because if we feel like it, we can ask you for the information 8 times even though we already have it just to frustrate you more.  And we will.  Trust me.

4.  If you’re calling in to tell IT that your printer doesn’t work, the correct answer to our question of what type of printer you have should not be “umm…I don’t know, let me look”.  Prepare yourself.  You’re calling about a printer, chances are we’ll need to know what kind.  If you insist on not being any help at all, I’ll tell you that we also require the teeny tiny serial number on the back of the big printer, as well as the barcode number for the ink.  We don’t really need that.  But you must learn to be prepared.  Better to have more information than we’ll need than to keep us waiting while you look everything up.  There are other people calling for help, and they’re having to wait because you didn’t have any common sense.

5.  Computers can be fickle.  Sometimes, problems resolve themselves without any external influence.  Or sometimes, you might not be the only having the problem and someone else reports it and it’s been fixed.  Please don’t notice a problem, then wait 30 minutes to call and report it.  It might’ve been fixed already.  I can’t even express how many times someone has called to report a problem and in the middle of the call say “oh…well it’s working now” while they’re talking to me.  Please check before you call in.  You’re wasting your time and ours.  And I like my time.  Yours I don’t care about.

6.  Punctuation exists for a reason.  If you see something that has a hyphen or a period in it, it’s almost definitely meant to be there for one reason or another.  A perfect IT example would be what’s known as your IP address, a unique identifier of your computer on a network (or the web as a whole).  A basic example would be 172.24.14.3 which if read without punctuation comes across as 17224143.  That’s not helpful to me, because that could be 172.24.1.43 or 17.22.41.43 or any other number of combinations.  Those periods are there because they need to be.  When you give me the number, place them there.  You don’t get to pick and choose what you think is important – acting like that is probably why you’re needing to call in and report something isn’t working.

7.  Please, for the love of all that is good and decent in this world, do not call IT and read us the error message on your screen word for word with all the reference numbers and program names and so forth.  Unless we ask you to.  Which we won’t.  99 times out of 100, we don’t need to hear the whole message.  Most of the time we can get it by the first few words, or even better – by seeing it.  Send us a screenshot, or tell us what you were doing when it popped up.  It would be rude of us to interrupt you while you read that practically useless error message jargon, but it’s also rude of you to just keep going non-stop without taking a breath long enough for us to interject.  ASK what we need to help you, don’t presume to think you know what’s necessary.  You think you’re being helpful, so you get partial points for that – but you aren’t being helpful, you’re being annoying, so now you have negative points.  Bummer for you.

8.  If you had to wait on hold to talk to someone, I apologize.  Chances are there’s some kind of issue that’s causing a higher than normal call volume, or perhaps someone is out at lunch and there are less people operating the phones, or maybe it’s just a randomly high call volume afternoon.  The first words I hear out of your mouth don’t need to be “gosh it took forever to reach someone!” in an agitated and rude voice.  If you had to wait to reach someone, that means we’ve all been on back-to-back phone calls trying to get through everyone else who is also calling for whatever reason at that moment in time.  We know we’re busy.  We know it more than you do.  Don’t be an ass and get mad at us for it.  One of the nicest things I’ve heard someone say in a similar situation was something to the tune of, “Goodness, you must be busy since I had to wait a few minutes more than normal to reach someone.  I hate to be adding to that, but I do have a question for you.”  That person was awesome.  How hard is that?  How difficult is it to be polite?  From the trend I’ve noticed over the years of working IT and customer service, apparently it’s VERY difficult for people to be polite.  And that’s a sad truth.

9.  People who work in IT are usually big nerds who love gadgets and toys and doing things themselves.  It’s not always the case, but speaking for myself and most of the people I know doing similar things – it’s true.  As such, we enjoy building tools that help to automate the most common issues that come up.  What’s the number one issue in the history of IT?  ”Umm…yeah…I…uh…forgot my password.”  We hear this approximately 15 million times a day.  Give or take about 14.99 million, but it’s still a lot.  Most companies have automated tools in place that you can reset your own password, but nobody wants to use them.  The number one excuse people give when we ask why they chose not to use that tool is that they think it’s faster to call IT than to use the tool.  No it isn’t.  You had to pick up the phone, dial, wait to reach someone, give us your information, then we had to pull you up and reset it, then give it to you and wait for you to test.  All you had to do for the automated tool was pull up the site and type in your ID.  How hard is that?  How long did that take?  People use computers daily in this day and age, but they still seem afraid of anything automated.  Embrace the changes people.  Except for robot overlords.  Don’t embrace that change.  No good will come of it.

10.  Be conscious of how you breathe.  Right up there with chewing in my ear, people who breathe heavily straight into the phone are at the top of my pet peeve list.  It’s very frustrating to be trying to talk to someone and all you hear on the other end is deep wheezing because the phone is right up against their mouth and for whatever reason they’re gasping for air.  You’re not Darth Vader.  Breathe normally and quietly.  You sound like you just climbed 5 flights of stairs.  Which you didn’t.  Don’t lie.

11.  If the instructions on screen say to create a password with numbers and letters, don’t call us complaining of an error when you entered “password” and expected it to work.  Probably half of the calls to IT could be solved if the person calling had simply glanced at their screen to look for a clue as to what might’ve gone wrong.  In many cases, the error message itself will tell you exactly what you did wrong or how to fix it, but people will still call IT because they got an error and don’t know what to do.  Stop being afraid of your computer.  It would take you less time to read what’s on the screen to see if it’s something you can fix yourself than to pick up the phone, call us, wait on hold, then reach someone and try to explain it to them.  We’re here to help, obviously, but there are more than enough genuine problems to keep us busy – we’d really like it if half our calls weren’t “it says my password’s expired and needs to be changed, does that mean I have to change it to a new password?”

12.  Speakerphone is one of the worst features ever introduced to a phone.  It has some good uses, yes, but the bad far outweigh the good.  Please please please do not call anyone on speakerphone simply because you’re too lazy to hold the phone to your ear.  On speakerphone everything you do is amplified times 10.  Every key you type, every squeak of your chair, ever drawer you open and shut, and every word you feel the need to shout directly into the speaker – all of this is blaring straight into my ear.  It’s painful and infuriating and I’m not able to concentrate on how I’m going to solve your problem, because all I’m thinking about is where I’m going to hide your lifeless body that was beaten to death with the phone’s base station that you insisted on screaming into.

13.  If you call ANY customer service place and they know you by name alone, that’s not a good thing.  I don’t care how nice you are, if you’re calling often enough that everyone knows you, you’re calling way too much.  I’ve worked in a few different IT positions over the years, and in every one of them the IT department as a whole would discuss the people who called the most often.  Granted, we talked more about the rude people who called all the time and were no fun to talk to, but even if you’re nice – you’re still getting talked about.  Just understand that.  You may call and laugh when we recognize your voice, but we’re not laughing.  At all.

14.  No matter what position you’re in within a company, don’t call IT acting like you’re better than us.  I’m not saying this because I feel that I’m better than anyone else, I’m saying it because I deserve to be talked to like a human being, not a servant who merely exists to reset your password and install software for you.  Being a manager or a VP doesn’t mean you’re a superior human being above the lowly IT helpdesk.  Just remember, better or not, you’re still the one having to call us because you have a problem.  And I can just as easily reset your password to “AssHat1″ as anything else.  So be nice.  :-)

15.  Customer service is a mixed field.  You’ll get people who genuinely love what they do, and people who only see it as a job and nothing else.  I can look back on calls I have had to make myself and there were only a few where the rep I spoke with was overly pleasant and extremely helpful, above and beyond what was to be expected by the circumstances I was calling under.  I can also look back and remember many many more times when I spoke to someone rude who wasn’t interested in helping and even occasionally disconnected the call if they didn’t understand what I was asking for.  What’s my point?  Try to focus on the good reps.  I’ve had bad days before where my tone wasn’t what it should’ve been or where I was a little short with someone who frustrated me, and people will jump on any opportunity to demand to speak to a manager and complain.  However, I’ve had far more days where I’m in a good mood and pleasant and helpful, and I can count on one hand the number of times anyone has asked to talk to my manager to compliment me.  Don’t be so quick to complain and hesitant to compliment.  Nothing can make a bad day better like hearing someone tell you that you were really awesome and that they’d like to pass along their satisfaction to your boss.  If you talk a customer service rep of any type that has really helped you, take a minute and make sure their boss knows they’re doing a good job.  It makes all the difference in the world, trust me.

Alright, the list was longer than I thought it would be, and I’ll probably still add to it in the future.  But I feel very strongly about these things.  Maybe you do too.  Maybe you don’t.  The point is, just try to remember some of these when you have to call IT or any other kind of call center.  It makes a world of difference in how you’re treated, believe me.

I do enjoy what I do though.  Not my career per se, but working with computers in general.  I sit at a computer all day, then get off work and go home to sit in front of a computer again.  I don’t mind it at all.  I enjoy the sensual backlight of my keyboard in a dark room as I fiddle with my iTunes library and blog whatever pops in my head at the time.  I love the feeling of accomplishment I get when presented with a problem and being able to fix it.  I get a rush from the admiration that some people exhibit when they thank me for doing what they couldn’t.  I will readily admit that being able to do things with a computer that many others can’t is a big ego boost.  I would never hold it over someone’s head, but still…I love that I can do something others can’t.

However, I’ll be the first to admit that I heavily rely on others when it comes to other things.  I rely on my friends for help with all kinds of other things that I’m not nearly as good at as I am with computers.  We usually trade off favors, never really keeping track, but knowing that we don’t have to worry about the other being there when we need them.  And honestly, that’s really all I want from some people.  I want there to be some kind of balance.  Pay me, make me dinner, go to a movie with me, hang out for a few hours, but don’t just call me because you have a virus and don’t know what to do only to have me fix it and then be avoided and ignored until then next time you have a problem.  Homie don’t play that game.

My friend Jayme came over to my place this past weekend because her computer was freaking out for no discernible reason and she needed help.  She spent hours at my place hanging out, watching TV, playing games, and just talking while I ran scans and cleaned up some of the assorted junk that had made it’s way into her system.  We even went out for dinner and ice cream while one of the scans was running.  At the end of the night though, the problems still persisted and we realized it was too far gone to salvage the operating system – a reformat was imminent.

I went over to her place last night to wipe the slate clean and reload her computer from scratch.  She’d already backed up all her files though, so I was able to jump right into the gritty task of reformatting and reloading all her files and software.  It took all night, but we enjoyed a home cooked meal that she and her mom made and her cousin Sarah came over to join us.  It took me hours to get the computer setup properly so she could use it again, but it didn’t feel like it.  I was relaxing with friends and having fun while working on the laptop, so it didn’t really bother me to be doing it.  I actually enjoyed it.

Then again, I’ve always gotten some kind of weird enjoyment out of loading a computer from scratch and setting it up to work exactly the way I want it to.  Changing settings, installing/uninstalling programs.  I think it’s the amount of control that I have and the organization that I’m able to implement that gives me some sort of geeky high.  Whatever it is, I’ve always loved doing it.

I intend to stay in the IT field for the rest of my life.  I want to be working with computers for as long as I’m able.  Whether that means working IT in the corporate world, or starting my own private consulting company to help small businesses and individuals, or even teaching, all I know is that I don’t want to work in any other area.  Computers are where it’s at.  At least for me.

I ofter wonder if being smart holds me back.  I work in an IT/helpdesk role that supports tens of thousands of users within a global corporation.  I work on a team with some other incredibly smart and talented individuals, and we’re all good at what we do.  But there are days when it seems like the people we’re supporting are completely incapable of functioning on their own or reading to solve a problem rather than calling for help at the drop of a hat.  The analytical part of me just doesn’t comprehend that.

I could never race to someone else for the answer anytime something goes wrong – I’d be afraid of looking stupid.  I’d research it, look around, maybe ask a friend, pretty much doing everything in my power to resolve my own issue before I spend the time calling a helpdesk for assistance.  And even if I did have to call for help, I would never be as rude as some of the people I have to deal with on a daily basis.

To clarify this, I am not in any way saying I have a problem with people asking for help.  I do it frequently.  There is nothing embarrassing about having to admit you don’t know everything.  However, there is something to be said for making an effort before you make someone else do it for you.  I have nothing against naivety, but I absolutely despise blatant stupidity and voluntary idiocy.  That is, I strongly dislike those who make the conscious choice not to ever try to better themselves, always relying on others to pick up the slack.  These are the people I support.  These are the people with salaries 4 times what I make.  These are the faces behind Corporate America.

This is why I’m going to strive my lower my intelligence.  Perhaps if I appear stupid I’ll someday rise to a position of power instead of being subjugated into a role that supports those with influence.