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: : : 001: MY NAME IS PAUL SUTHERLAND, and I am a Telephone Support Specialist for Pascal Information Technology Solutions.
002: Yeah, that guy who people call when they need someone to scream at? That's me.
003: [laughs] No, actually, it's not as bad as all that.
004: Oh, sure, don't get me wrong, most of the people who call are upset—
005: See, here's what you have to remember about doing telephone support. You have to remember that the people don't want to call. Just making the call in the first place is an inconvenience to them. They have to put down what they're doing, go find the phone number—little things, but they add up. So you can pretty much safely assume that people don't bother to call until they're at their wits' end.
006: Sure. And that's the thing that most of my co-workers—if I can speak frankly here—that's the thing that most of my co-workers forget. Because half the time the problem that the callers have is something totally basic and obvious. Did you remember to turn the power on? [pause] You should be seeing a big button? Marked POWER? [laughs]
007: Right, so it's not easy for us to remember that these people are actually suffering. Most tech support people are like why are you bothering me with this question that you could have figured out super easily if—if you'd just spent your entire life fooling around with computers like us [laughs]
008: And most of the people calling in know that the tech support people are going to be looking down on them like that, and that gets them annoyed, on top of whatever annoyance drove them to call tech support in the first place, they lost a bunch of data or whatever, and on top of that they usually have to wait on hold for a while, especially now that they laid off about half of the support staff.
009: So, yeah, it makes sense that they'd be upset. And so my job as a phone support guy—the way I see it, my job is to make them feel less upset. And actually fixing their problem is only one part of how I can do that.
010: I can try to understand why they're upset. I can make them feel like they're within their rights to be upset, like that's OK? I can listen to them, and do my best to respond to them at their own level? I can help them to understand that I don't think they're stupid?
011: It's actually very easy. I can usually defuse even the angriest caller in, I don't know, thirty seconds. A minute.
012: I just have a good ability to understand people, I guess.
013: Do I like it? Uh. It's OK? I mean, I like helping people to feel better. But do I want to be doing night shift phone support for the rest of my life? [laughs]
014: That's a good question. Let me think about that one for a second.
015: I'd like to be a Morale Officer.
016: Yeah, you know, with the economy so bad and all these layoffs and everything morale everywhere is just really down.
017: Oh, you know, I would be in charge of like setting up theme days. We could do, like, Pirate Day. Arr!
018: Or we could have afternoon parties where people could have tea. And some little gingersnaps?
019: Or when I wasn't planning stuff like that out I could just walk around, you know, circulate among the offices, building better morale through compliments. Hey, nice tie! Lookin' sharp! Hey, Jane, that new haircut is really flattering!
020: No, I'd be totally sincere! It's not hard to find something nice to say about someone if you think about it for a second.
021: I really think that this is my calling.
: : :
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Further Reading:
Recent input in the Narrative Technologies weblog:
:: Towards a Methodology For Producing Internet Games : by David Mark Glassborow
[fresh as of 3/17/03]
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