I wasn’t actually involved in this call, but I was sitting beside the person who was. Let’s call him John. Now John is a lovely guy with a great phone manner and even better technical skills. As far as call centres go, John had it all. Except for one minor flaw: when he was seriously provoked by a caller, he tended to get a bit loud. Loud enough for the entire call centre to hear him.
Now for a bit of background: John had gotten into an argument with the caller about our “scope of support”. For those of you who have had the good luck to have never called a Technical Helpline, I’ll explain what scope of support actually means. When you buy a computer, you get a warranty with the machine. In the vast majority of cases that warranty will explicitly state that the computer will be supported as shipped. Added a new piece of hardware that doesn’t work? Changed the operating system? Third-party software not working? Tough luck, none of it is covered by the warranty. None of those items shipped with the computer, so it’s not something that the helpline will help you with.
Scope of support can also mean that the helpline will troubleshoot faults with the computer only. In other words, they won’t teach you how to use your brand new piece of kit. You want to learn about computers? Take a night course, or learn the hard way – teach yourself.
So back to the story, the caller wanted John to teach her how to use a piece of software that came with the computer. As required by the “scope of support”, John referred her back to the manual. Of course, she was having none of it. Twenty minutes later, and they were still arguing about it, when this happened:
As I said ma’am, I cannot teach you how to use your computer.
<Caller responds>
There’s a full manual for that program and you should read it. I’ve explained this several times now, and at this stage I’m just repeating myself. I am not going to repeat my self again. Thank you for…
<click>
I don’t believe it. She hung up on me. She actually hung up on me! I’ll show her.
<John rings her back>
Hello there. This is John from Technical Support, I was just talking to you about a query you had about your computer?
<Caller responds, obviously thinks that John has called back to help her>
No, I’m not calling you to teach how to use that program. I already spent over 20 minutes explaining why I can’t so that. The reason I’m calling is that you hung up on me. That was an extremely rude thing to do. So, lets see how you feel when I hang up on you.
<click>
That’ll teach her!
John sat there with a satisfied grin on his face for about 30 seconds. That was until he got a tap on the shoulder from the Account Manager who just growled, “Office. Now”.
In fairness to John he came out about 10 minutes later, sat down and shrugged his shoulders, “Written warning”, followed by a cheeky grin and “It was worth it!”.