Most companies would do their CS agents a lot of good by allowing them to be themselves a bit more. The amount of times you can hear the inner turmoil as an agent knows they’re saying something wrong, but that’s what’s on the script is painful, and you waste about 30 mins just breaking through “the company code”
I had the same fucking experience setting up a modem. I was doing everything on their instructions, but it simply won’t register on the network. Customer service kept trying to get me to rent their first party modem. I had to spend almost a day, calling 4 separate times until finally someone forwarded me to an engineer. And boom, fixed in 30 seconds.
Please try uninstalling your OS and all applications, reinstall, unplug your modem, blow on it, and plug it back in. Call us back after you’ve done that and after waiting in the queue for an hour give this reference number to an associate who will promptly tell you there are no notes on your case but they will be happy to start from the beginning with you.
I’d tried that, of course. Repeatedly. I’d handled, manipulated, fondled, molested, and all but fucking probed some Alexa gizmo, testing every feasible input, and of fucking course I’d yanked the power a few times. So in desperation, I… called the help line. (Eugh!) I finally get through to someone who has me do one or two of the steps I’d already done or two times. And it worked. Because go fuck myself.
A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.
Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”
The penguin was obviously meant to be Tux, but I had to rely on Explain XKCD to realise that the bearded dude is meant to be Richard Stallman, specifically in reference to an earlier XKCD.
I had to call the electricity company to resolve a fucking clusterfuck of their making the other day (long story short my electricity meter is faulty), and after 3-4 calls I got to someone who said “jesus christ” after I explained my situation and how they’d made it worse trying to resolve it…
She didn’t fix it, it’s still not fully fixed after a further 4 days including 29 hours without power, but gee did I feel like I was speaking to a fellow human who was trying to help in that conversation above all others I had with them
Back in the ADSL days, I once had to call my ISP because my service was down. No matter how many times I explained that the physical copper line was cut because a truck hit the phone pole, the person on the other end followed their script and asked if I tried restarting the router.
I always suspect they hate the scripts too. But they’re almost certainly sanctioned if they stray from the script, even if it ultimately helps the user out in the end.
Yep. Though there are times you can get away with it. I was told by a supervisor that, no I wasn’t going to get written up for telling a customer to “shut up and listen to me, if you hang up the phone I cannot solve your issue.” They did however tell me that I was to act as though I had been thoroughly chewed out, as something like a dozen people heard me say that.
When I worked at a callcenter the general guidance was “if they don’t want to be helped, let them reach back out whenever they do” which was really helpful for people who just wanted to pick a fight since it gave a clear guidance of “hey, if you dont want to do this right now now here’s how to get back in contact”
They mostly hate the script way more than you do. Most phone support just wants to get you off the phone, ideally after resolving your issue, but thats not always the priority. Sometimes ya just gotta clear the queue.
Dude same. I worked on a stupid niche service called Ground Station, and my favorite call ever was telling a customer their satellite crossed LOS with the ISS so we couldn’t transmit at their scheduled time (you never transmit directly at the ISS for obvious reasons). Somehow even that took multiple explanations for them to get that it was not our fault, and that we’d be breaking the law in pretty much every country on the planet if our antennas did not stop us from doing so.
Most companies would do their CS agents a lot of good by allowing them to be themselves a bit more. The amount of times you can hear the inner turmoil as an agent knows they’re saying something wrong, but that’s what’s on the script is painful, and you waste about 30 mins just breaking through “the company code”
Relevant XKCD:
The most unbelievable part of this is someone using Haiku as a daily driver.
it’s getting there :(
I had the same fucking experience setting up a modem. I was doing everything on their instructions, but it simply won’t register on the network. Customer service kept trying to get me to rent their first party modem. I had to spend almost a day, calling 4 separate times until finally someone forwarded me to an engineer. And boom, fixed in 30 seconds.
I always keep the isp provided router for the rare case i need support. On the flip side if the problem goes away it’s a me problem.
Please try uninstalling your OS and all applications, reinstall, unplug your modem, blow on it, and plug it back in. Call us back after you’ve done that and after waiting in the queue for an hour give this reference number to an associate who will promptly tell you there are no notes on your case but they will be happy to start from the beginning with you.
You forgot to switch the ends of the Wi-Fi signal, that’s why you had to start over.
I once had “blow on it” work.
I’d tried that, of course. Repeatedly. I’d handled, manipulated, fondled, molested, and all but fucking probed some Alexa gizmo, testing every feasible input, and of fucking course I’d yanked the power a few times. So in desperation, I… called the help line. (Eugh!) I finally get through to someone who has me do one or two of the steps I’d already done or two times. And it worked. Because go fuck myself.
A stuffed penguin doll and a poster of some bearded dude with a swords.
Perfect! Put her on.
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The penguin was obviously meant to be Tux, but I had to rely on Explain XKCD to realise that the bearded dude is meant to be Richard Stallman, specifically in reference to an earlier XKCD.
I know, I got it, but the description of it and RMS… IDK, I found it really funny 🤣🤣🤣.
I had to call the electricity company to resolve a fucking clusterfuck of their making the other day (long story short my electricity meter is faulty), and after 3-4 calls I got to someone who said “jesus christ” after I explained my situation and how they’d made it worse trying to resolve it…
She didn’t fix it, it’s still not fully fixed after a further 4 days including 29 hours without power, but gee did I feel like I was speaking to a fellow human who was trying to help in that conversation above all others I had with them
Back in the ADSL days, I once had to call my ISP because my service was down. No matter how many times I explained that the physical copper line was cut because a truck hit the phone pole, the person on the other end followed their script and asked if I tried restarting the router.
I always suspect they hate the scripts too. But they’re almost certainly sanctioned if they stray from the script, even if it ultimately helps the user out in the end.
Yep. Though there are times you can get away with it. I was told by a supervisor that, no I wasn’t going to get written up for telling a customer to “shut up and listen to me, if you hang up the phone I cannot solve your issue.” They did however tell me that I was to act as though I had been thoroughly chewed out, as something like a dozen people heard me say that.
When I worked at a callcenter the general guidance was “if they don’t want to be helped, let them reach back out whenever they do” which was really helpful for people who just wanted to pick a fight since it gave a clear guidance of “hey, if you dont want to do this right now now here’s how to get back in contact”
They mostly hate the script way more than you do. Most phone support just wants to get you off the phone, ideally after resolving your issue, but thats not always the priority. Sometimes ya just gotta clear the queue.
I used to have lots of interesting and fun conversations with customers when I was at AWS.
Dude same. I worked on a stupid niche service called Ground Station, and my favorite call ever was telling a customer their satellite crossed LOS with the ISS so we couldn’t transmit at their scheduled time (you never transmit directly at the ISS for obvious reasons). Somehow even that took multiple explanations for them to get that it was not our fault, and that we’d be breaking the law in pretty much every country on the planet if our antennas did not stop us from doing so.