I have not been a phone monkey for years, but I am still in support.
It is hard to find good people. Lots of people just do not have the right personality for the job.
Sounding confident on the phone is important. If you do not sound like you know what you are doing even if you do, then the customers will never buy into what you tell them and wont want to let you off the phone.
You would be amazed at how many adults in the country find it hard to follow very simple verbal directions like :
"Right click on the my computer Icon and go to properties."
Now I have worked for Bad companies, OK companies and good ones.
The bad one, made it a policy to make us lie to customers. They also put out buggy crappy software.
I worked for a big name scanner company, they were a riot, lol. They made some great scanners and some real lemons. One of the scanners had 2 sided tape holding the glass in. The scanners were all made in Taiwan, and it was a Taiwanese company. They cheeped out on the tape. 60% of the units had the glass fall out before the box was opened.
They ended up hot swapping every one that got bought cause they didn’t want the retail stores to find out lol.
We also had a SCSI scanner that went out with a cheap SCSI cable, at the time they used 3 makers, 2 of the 3 makers had a 75% failure rate on the cables or they were made so badly they only worked in one direction lol.
The company sent a engineer to listen on calls for a week to see if a software problem was as bad as we said it was, at the end of the week he had a stack of 240plus cases. he declared it not a problem, and it took them 6 months to fix it cause it was fixed in the next driver release!
I have had at least 4 death threats over the years. I have been called names more times then I can really keep track of.
I have had to help deaf mutes(through email) cancer victims, dying people. Stroke victims who could only use one hand, college students who should have backed up their thesis, sobbing women, swearing men, astronauts, Gene Cranz(played by ed Harris in Apollo 13) kids, people with accents so strong I spent most of the time just trying to figure out what they were saying. Heck I even had a women take apart a scanner cause she thought the scsi card that came with it, needed to be put in the scanner and not her PC. That was a fun one.
It is a hard job. Made worse for the consumer now that most companies are outsourcing to India.
Now I can see the flip side as well and why customers hate us. lots of us suck ass. Were I work now, first level support was in house but handled out of another office, my boss was there boss, but he worked in my office.
We started getting reports of random hang-ups. In the Xmas season.
We changed how calls got logged in the tracking software and found out two of our own people were hanging up on up to 15 customers a day! You only were required to take 30!!!
Needles to say both were fired ASAP.
The worst aspect of a support job is most companies do not care about it much; it costs them money so they spend as little as they can on it. They never see that not staffing enough people and or putting out software before it is ready is a bad thing.
Still No mater how much company tests software it will have bugs, you just can't make it perfect.
