davidrickard.net

It’s really rather simple:

Act dumb.

Yes really. Allow me to explain.

I browse a lot of forums, and in many cases I’ll see a barrage of people complaining about various technical support departments at ISPs, service providers, and whoever else. They’ll be wailing that they didn’t get the help they wanted, and nothing worked, and how much the support sucks, and so on.

I’ve called support for Virgin Media, Be, Zen, Orange, and various others over the years. I work in IT, and I do a lot of troubleshooting myself. I often have an idea of what the problem is, and sometimes what might need to be done to fix the issue. I could easily phone up the support line, tell them what the issue is, and demand they do what I want to fix it. I might be right – but there’s an equal chance I’m NOT right, and could send them on a wild goose chase trying to deploy the wrong fix. I don’t know their systems or their networks, so who am I to tell them what to do?

And that’s the issue most people have. They may, or may not know what needs to be done, but the service provider know their stuff better than you do, so let THEM decide what to do. Hence why I say ‘act dumb’. I had an issue with my cable modem. I phoned up, and just told them what they asked for. I did exactly what the guy on the other end told me to do. An engineer was dispatched, and the problem was fixed. Simple. Other people with similar issues (it was an attenuation issue) go through countless engineer calls, and visits, and personally I think that’s because they pre-empt things, and try and tell the support person what to do. I never do.

Yes, I could phone up and say ‘I work in IT, therefore I know what the issue is’. They probably get loads of calls like that every day. As I say, some will know what the issue is, others will only think they do.

I had issues with my ADSL flaking out (back when I was on ADSL), and I jumped through all the hoops both Zen and Be had, which included moving the router to the master socket, and running through all the tests they wanted to do. As a consequence of doing that, all the BT engineer visits I had, which led to a No Fault Found, weren’t charged to me. If you read all the paperwork, in theory I should have been charged about £75 for those visits, but I wasn’t as they were raised as per the processes BT set up for the ADSL providers. We jumped through all the right hoops, so I wasn’t liable for the costs. If I’d phoned up, told them I wasn’t going to move the router and demanded an engineer, I would have been stung. I’ve seen people do that, and wonder why they get charged.

Don’t get me wrong – there ARE plenty of ‘bad’ support lines out there, and poorly trained people manning them. They may be working to a script, but think of it this way; if you were in a play, and one person is working from a script, and you turn up and decide you don’t want to use the script, you’re going to very quickly end up in a mess. Same goes for these support lines really. Let them follow their script, and don’t pre-empt them. Let them ask the questions they have to ask (have you turned it off and on again?). If they can’t handle it, they’ll escalate it anyway. I’ve gotten in and out of support lines in no time, and had all my issues solved pretty quickly, without any shouting, swearing, or demanding to speak to their supervisor.

So remember. Just act dumb!