To be honest, i prefering the teching the "technophobe grannies" because they do what you ask them to.
I remember when a woman said she didn't know much about computers so could i talk to her daughter.... yes fine i said... thing i didn't know was that her daughter was 7 years old! But despite being such a little nipper, she was fantastic.... did exactly what i asked, nothing more and nothing less, and people like this make my job easy
However, if every call was like this i wouldn't work there because it would be so boring!
The flipside are the people who think they know everything and are not prepared to listen to what you say... to give one example... one tool we have (thanks BBKing
) tells us how long the modem/ stb has been online.
Me: "Could you please reboot your modem now"
Customer: "I have just done that"
Me: Wonders why the uptime is showing 1day 3hours and 7 minutes...
My solution to this is not to argue with them about it, but just say that i need to test the line with the stb/ modem turned off... in reality it is just an excuse to make them reboot it... but they don't have to know that.... it gets done what i want
There are people who think they know everything and infact don't.... for example the other day i had an argument with someone who told me there was no relationship between ICMP traffic and ping requests.... no matter how many links i provided them they wouldn't believe me!
I think what i am trying to say is that there are a mixture of customers.... from ones who don't have an ounce of common sense, to those who may not know much technically but at least have some common sense. I think how difficult it is to tech them depends on how much sense they have, not how much technical knowledge. This applies to techs as well- there are people who know a lot more than me technically who will turn to if i am stuck, but they are not necessarily as good in the role as me.
I am not the god of all techs, i make as many mistakes as the next man (and yes i did tech someone for nearly an hour who had the ethernet cable unplugged
) and i will freely admit that. But there are some techs who have the wrong attitude and develop a superiority complex because of the job they do. It is people like this that cause the problems, not the customers.
MB