Tech in the Trenches

Carl T. Holscher fights for the customers.

Beyond the Reboot #4: Understanding Human Psychology

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On September 17, 2013

In Observations

You have listened to your customer. You’ve communicated clearly with them. You’ve gone a step further and empathized with them. You’re well on your way to providing great customer service. Now it’s time to get inside your customer’s head. Don’t rely on fixing problems as they happen. Anticipate their needs and try to identify where they will encounter trouble before they do.

Learn your customer’s habits and preferences. Anticipate what they are going to need before they need it. If you have a customer you know becomes easily frustrated by big changes, work to prepare them well ahead of the change. Learn how to defuse the hotheads and encourage the timid. Ease all of your customers into upcoming changes.

Getting inside your customer’s heads will make you seem like a mind reader and they’ll not only notice but appreciate your effort in doing more than they expected. You’re making their lives easier by skipping a call to support. It will make your job easier because you’ve stopped a problem before it started.

A great example of this is when things change unexpectedly. Recently, Firefox started bundling a basic PDF reader into the browser. This caused it to replace the Adobe Reader plugin that can handle advanced features like entering information into a form.

I had a customer call saying his documents were no longer working on a certain web page. I went to see him and he showed me how he opened a web page filled with PDF forms he needed to complete. The PDFs were either not loading at all or loading without any of the forms being editable. He has no idea what had happened. Nothing had changed as far as he knew but he couldn’t get his work done.

I was aware of Firefox’s new feature and checked the version number. It was the latest version. Good news, I had my culprit. I turned off the built-in PDF reader and enabled the Adobe Reader plugin. Now the files opened as they always had. He was so excited. He said, “Great! Now I can get on with my day!”

This was a minor issue for me, but this was ruining his day. Being aware of the new PDF reader feature, I knew immediately what his problem was and while I couldn’t prevent it, I was able to resolve it very quickly.

A big change that happened recently was an upgrade to the Exchange servers. Exchange is Microsoft’s email server. It powers many company’s email systems and provides calendar and contact sharing and syncing to mobile devices as well. If you email at work, then you’re most likely using an Exchange server.

Often times these upgrades are seamless and the customer notices very little except for a few hours of downtime over a weekend. Or perhaps their company webmail looks a bit different.

However, in this move Entourage, a Mac email client would not longer be supported and Outlook would be the new email client for a large number of customers. This caused a lot of strife because people live and die by their email. And they’ve come to understand their program and build work flows and habits around it.

Changing their habits cause a lot of stress and frustration. Ahead of this change, I worked extensively with a few customers I knew would have problems with the new client.

Not for any technical reason, just that it was new and it was different. My email works just fine. Why do we need to change it? I explained to them that the company was moving forward because the new servers would allow for more features and better security. I explained that the new email client would reduce the need to always repair the Entourage database.

This is a common issue with the Entourage email client where all data is stored in a single file. Over the years, and decades, this file grows to enormous sizes and as a result becomes unstable.

Outlook stores messages, calendar events and contacts in separate, small files. This allows the number of email messages and calendars to grow to much larger sizes without the fear of corruption and lost data.

After explaining this to my reluctant customers, they were ready for the change. Sometimes it’s a matter of finding the benefit to the customer. Many times they view IT upgrades and changes as nothing more than inconvenient for them. I try to find the value for the customer and share it with them. It makes the transitions easier and they’re happier as a result.

Beyond the Reboot #3: Ability to Empathize

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On September 16, 2013

In Observations

Time to put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Once you know the problem and are communicating, show some empathy. Don’t just say you understand their problems. Show them you understand what they’re going through. They have hit upon a problem they can’t solve and it is frustrating them and preventing them from doing their work and getting on with their day.

Even if the problem is simple in your eyes, it could be a huge deal to your customer. Today, I got an urgent call from a customer who had lost the connection to two network drives. Now, to me it is a very simple thing to remap a network drive. To my customer, her data was gone and she did not know how to get it back. She was very upset.

I arrived quickly and assured her all of her data was safe. She had only lost access to the data, not the data itself. I explained what had happened and how I was going to get it back as I worked.

I mapped the drives and I saved them as shortcuts so if they became disconnected again, she could still access her data. I also showed her how to remap the drives so she could do what I had done next time. I gave her the tools to solve the problem in the future.

Recently, I got another call from a customer who thought she had lost 300 pictures of her son from her Blackberry. They were just gone! One minute they were there, in the pictures app and the next, they were nowhere to be found.

I calmly took the phone from her and checked the settings for a media card. I saw there was no recognized card. So I removed the phone from its case, popped open the back and removed the battery to find the tiny card has slipped from its slot.

Reseating the card in its slot, I explained that her photos were most likely on the card which had come loose so the phone wasn’t able to see it. I replace the battery, powered on the phone and she customer was relieved to see her son smiling back at her.

She asked how she could backup the photos so this didn’t happen again. So I walked with her to her desk. We plugged her phone into her desktop and added the phone as a media drive. We then found the Blackberry external drive under My Computer and inside the Pictures folder were her irreplaceable photos.

I assisted her in backing them up to her computer so she could sort them and then save them.

In both cases, I immediately empathized with my customer. They were both frantic, afraid they had lost important data. I reassured them their data was safe and only moments away from being recovered. I made them feel better. I fixed the problem. Then I explained how to fix the problem should it arise again.

All that stands between feeling helpless and confident is a little knowledge. Even if she doesn’t remember what I showed her today, she can be confident in the future if this happens again it is not a crisis, but an inconvenience.

You are a trusted ally to your customer. It can be hard to remember sometimes, especially when you’ve worked in the industry a long time. It can often feel like you wear a badge that says Whipping Boy but you are the customer’s hero. You are the lifeline in the battle between man and machine. Listen to what your customer is saying but also how they are saying it. Understand their emotions and react accordingly.

Learning to Love Photo Management

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On September 14, 2013

In Observations

Learning to Love Photo Management by Bradley Chamber is a book that should not need to exist. He says it right at the beginning. But since photo management is not as easy as it should be, the book does. And we are all better off for it. This is your how-to manual for managing photos.

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy and read through it quickly. It’s only 16 pages but each one has real, actionable information. This is a book I could easily hand my mother and she could follow the steps. She has a massive, ever-growing photo library and more than once I’ve needed to help her out in trying to bring some order to the madness. This book deserves to be sold with all new cameras and smartphones. I live by a simple rule. If it doesn’t exist in two places, it doesn’t exist. I don’t remember who I stole the line from but it applies to anything important.

Photos certainly fall into that category. If you want to keep a photo safe, it needs to be backed up. It needs to be kept in a safe place and on your phone is not a safe place. Many people often feel that Dropbox is a safe backup on its own. But what happens to a file that’s deleted from Dropbox? It deletes the file everywhere else too. This is why a true backup solution is needed. Bradley recommends Crashplan which is also what I use and recommend. (Crashplan link offers 20% off for new subscribers.)

The advice within these pages will take you from hoping Apple has your back and not really knowing where yours photos are stored to being in total control. I know when geeks talk about being in control of something it sounds like they’re saying this takes a lot of work. But this will not. With a set of very simple, inexpensive tools Learning to Love Photo Management will have you doing just that.

The screenshots and examples are from iPhones and Macs but the ideas are universal and can easily be applied to an Android/Windows setup or any other combination of phone and computer.

Stop worrying about where your photos are and hoping Apple is handling your backups if you lose or break your phone. They’re not. If you’re like me, or my mother, you’ve spent many hours taking and enjoying photos of children, family events, vacations and the beauty life has to offer. You’ve spent hundreds on a smartphone or nice camera setup. Spend a few dollars and a few minutes on protecting those photos for years to come.

The solutions offered in this book don’t rely on any specialized software or one particularly company so even if they go out of business tomorrow, your photos will be stored locally so you’ll always have them. The rest of the pieces are interchangeable.

It’s great advice in a small package. After reading through the book I am rethinking the way I manage my photos and you will too. It is available as a PDF download or an iPad-only iBook and it’s only $2.99. Take control of your photos and learn to love photo management. Once you do, you can enjoy your photos and not worry about losing them.

Beyond the Reboot #2: Communicate Clearly

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On September 13, 2013

In Observations

You can have all the technical expertise and customer service experience in the world, but if you can’t communicate clearly it won’t do any good. There are many barriers to clear communication with your customer.

Jargon is the biggest barrier to clear communications. Jargon is a set of terms particular to an industry. Computers have their own dictionary of terms which is enough to throw even the most seasoned computer user into despair.

On top of this, the customer service industry has acronyms like SLAs and FCR. These stand for Service Level Agreement and First Call Resolution. Even with the words spelled out, it’s still unclear to many people what these are. The SLA is the agreement on how fast technicians have to respond to the various levels of trouble tickets. The more critical the issue, the faster the response.

First Call Resolution simply means an issue that was resolved on the first call. This often applies to a help desk where the first person a customer speaks to solves their issue. Terms like this needlessly confuse customers and make them feel even more confused and frustrated.

When speaking to a customer don’t use jargon. Speak in plain terms anyone can understand. It can help to pretend you’re talking to a parent or friend in your life who is clueless about computers. Speak to your customers in the same way, with a friendly understanding and caring attitude.

Just as jargon is too specific, being too vague is also a barrier to clear communication. Recently, a customer was working with a network team member to move a database to another server. It was a web-based application and after the move was complete, nothing showed up for the customer. She contacted the network technician stating what she was seeing. His response was, “What system are you using?”

My customer came to me for help because she didn’t understand the question. This could mean any number of things. What browser are you using? Are you on a Mac or a PC? What is the URL you’re looking at? We had to email the technician back and ask what exactly he was requesting which added time and frustration to resolving the issue. Be precise when communicating with customers.

It’s very easy to assume everyone understands what you mean. It’s easy to overlook something trivial like saying “system” when you know what system you’re talking about. Try to be precise as possible especially when communicating. Otherwise you’ll find yourself going back and forth with a customer to clarify and not make progress resolving the problem.

There can be an actual spoken language barrier. I support customers whose native language is not English. I work with customers who speak Korean, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, and French. While they may be able to speak English and hold a conversation, when it comes to certain terms they may not know the words to communicate the issue they’re having. Many of my customers consider my ability to speak “computer” a second language. Imagine how hard it must be to know the terminology in their native tongue and in English.

It takes some guesswork and some demonstration to get a clear picture of the problem. All the more reason when you’re communicating with your customer to use simple words if needed and find a common ground on which to communicate. If your customer can’t understand you and you can’t understand your customer. You’re not going to get anywhere.

Always be clear and direct with your customers. The more time you spend clarifying, the less time you can spend solving problems.

Beyond the Reboot #1: Fix the Right Problem

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On September 12, 2013

In Observations

The problem that gets reported is not always the real problem.
This can be due to a lack of technical knowledge by the customer. It could also be caused by similar symptoms from very different causes. Listening closely to your customer.

Recently, I had two good examples of things not always being what they seem. The first saved me from having to reinstall the Microsoft Office suite which can be very time-consuming. The second was very unclear but frantic.

First, I received a support call stating Microsoft Word was crashing and it needed to be repaired. Upon arriving at the customer’s desk, I saw the customer working on a document in Word so I knew this was not necessarily the problem.

I asked her to show me what was happening. And she did. When she opened a file from her desktop, Word froze and had to be force quit. I tried with another file on her desktop and it opened successfully. I tried three more files. They all opened.

In the span of a minute I’ve gone from Word being corrupted to a file being corrupted. A much easier fix. I was able to open the file in Wordpad and copy the data out of it then create my customer a new Word file which she was able to open. She was eternally grateful and I was happy I didn’t have to reinstall Microsoft Office.

The second support call today came in as “My Computer Is Locked !!!!”. That was the entire text of the ticket and it was categorized under VPN Assistance.

So I went to go see the customer and when I arrived I was greeted by a PointSec lockout screen. PointSec is a type of encryption used to encrypt the entire hard drive of the computer. It will trigger a lockout and ask for a special username and password if the customer’s credentials for Windows are entered incorrectly too many times.

I entered the administrative credentials for the program to bypass the lockout. Instead of a VPN issue, I have an encryption lockout. I went from a very difficult VPN issue with many possible points of failure, to a much easier issue that resulted from too many incorrect login attempts.

The problem reported can be very different from the real problem the customer is experiencing. It pays to listen to your customer and have them show you the problem. Many times a customer does not understand what is going on and draws their own conclusions. There is nothing wrong with this, because not everyone is a computer expert.

When it happens, know to look deeper and ask the rights questions or have the customer show you what is happening. That will tell you more than anything the customer could describe over the phone or in an email.

Not everyone has the benefit of being able to stand at the desk of the person experiencing trouble. If you have to work remotely, use the tools you have. Walk the customer through what they’re trying to do and ask them to tell you exactly what they’re doing and what is happening.

Often times this will result in the customer realizing they’ve skipped a step or clicked something they didn’t mean to. If there is an error, this will tell you exactly where in the process the customer is encountering trouble and you can troubleshoot from there. I’ve had a customer read their entire screen to me as we go through each step of an installation and advise them on each click.

Listen to what your customer is really asking and you will be able to offer the best possible support no matter the situation.

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