Advice for People Who Help on the Phone

Elizabeth's Advice for People Who Answer Telephones

These are my 10 commandments for answering telephones. I'd love to say that I always followed them, but the best I can say is that I always try.

Never lie.

In particular, avoid the temptation to say "You can't do that" if what you mean is "I don't know". It's also very easy to say something you're not sure of, and then get sucked into defending it with complex rationalizations. Most people, even when they don't understand what you're talking about, will get an uncomfortable feeling that you're trying to snow them. The ones that do understand what you're talking about will instantaneously write you off as a lying jerk who's not even smart enough to know what you don't know.

Trust criticism.

People who say critical things are usually unfair, and often whiners who complain all the time, but they are also usually partially right. You should feel absolutely justified in saying that they are mean, nasty, don't comprehend the problems of your job, wouldn't acknowledge outstanding service if they got it, and don't deserve it in the first place. When you're finished with that, go back and pay attention to what they're saying, because 99 times out of a hundred, you genuinely screwed up, and you need to fix something.

It's like not wearing your seatbelt; most of the time, you can forget your seatbelt and nothing at all will happen to you. Sometimes, you don't wear your seatbelt and you die. Nobody deserves to die because they forgot to wear a seatbelt. It's completely unfair and out of proportion. Nevertheless, not wearing your seatbelt is stupid. Most of the time, you can make customer service mistakes -- forget a call for a week, hurry a customer to get them off the phone, make up stuff you don't know, work in an area you don't understand, talk down to customers, rearrange things to make your life easier even if it makes theirs harder -- and they will be so glad to have gotten any help whatsoever that they won't complain. Some of the time, they say you are not only a bad employee, you're probably a bad person, and you ought to be fired at least and probably shot. This is completely unfair and out of proportion. Nevertheless, making these mistakes is stupid, and ignoring the complaints is downright moronic.

Never turn your brain off.

There are two situations where it's easy to turn your brain off and go on autopilot. First, when you have a common problem, it's easy to listen to key words in a problem description, decide it's the problem you're used to, and apply the solution for that without actually thinking deeply about what the customer is asking for. Customers describe problems in unexpected ways, and they may inadvertently use a description that kicks you into autopilot when they want something completely different. Often, you end up trying to fix something that's not even broken, which will frustrate both you and the customer.

It's also easy to turn your brain off because you hear an unfamiliar key word; somebody calls about a program you've never heard of, or running an operating system version you're not used to, and you make the blanket assumption that you don't know and you can't help. In fact, experience on one program or one operating system generalizes pretty well, and you probably have more experience and more flexibility than the caller. Looking at the problem briefly may let you solve it (the downside here is that the user will think you are the world's expert on the application because you were able to guess that "Save" was probably on the "File" menu).

Put yourself in the caller's place.

Yes, it's annoying to deal with someone who's so panicked and incomprehending that they can't cope with questions like "Is there anything showing on the screen?" but there are probably situations in your life that you find equally intimidating. Try these:

Your car has started to make this noise, intermittently, after you've been driving it for about 30 minutes. It's something like a combination of a donkey braying and glass marbles being dropped out a second-story window. You can't describe it, you can't imitate it, you can't cause the car to make the noise at will, you're not certain where it's coming from, but you're pretty sure that when the noise happens you also are getting a faint smell of something burning, and so you have taken the car to a mechanic, who is giving you a completely unbelieving look and seems to be trying to tell you that it can't possibly be doing that, but if it were doing that it would be liable to catch on fire at any moment.

You are at an extremely fancy dinner. You have 17 eating implements, or at least you think so, but there are three that don't seem to be knives, forks, or spoons, and you're not entirely clear what they might be. You have just been served something that closely resembles Jello, and the rest of the table appears to be waiting, with growing impatience, for you to start eating it. Or maybe it's not edible at all, and they're waiting for the food to be served. But an awful lot of them seem to be looking at you...

You have an important presentation to give in 15 minutes, and you are copying it onto overheads. On page 4 of 120, the copier has jammed. You're not certain whether or not the smell of melting plastic is growing stronger, but it's certainly annoying. You're staring at the diagram inside the copier, which seems to want you to do something to a lever marked 4. Unfortunately, there's no context pictured around the lever, and you can't find anything marked 4. You have manipulated everything you can find that does have a number on it, although several of them didn't seem to move, and two of them moved quite a lot and don't look to you like they exactly went back to where they started. Also there was a snapping noise when you turned one of the knobs. There is no overhead visible, but there does seem to be a lot of toner about and your hands are getting pretty black, and you are starting to have visions of appearing in front of a company CEO with a large smudge on your nose, a permanent black stripe on your shirt, and no overheads, not to mention having to explain how you destroyed the copier.

If you can imagine how you would feel in any of those situations, and you are not disgustingly self-confident, you can imagine the peculiar emotional state many people are in when they call. They simultaneously want you to do something useful, and to reassure them that in fact they are not horrible stupid people with problems that no person of average intelligence could ever have. They are probably perfectly nice, normal people when the world is not conspiring to torture them, but right this moment things are going to hell in a handbasket. Plus, they are torn between thinking that they are being completely stupid and there is some perfectly simple solution which is going to be humiliating to have pointed out, and thinking that they are facing irretrievable disaster, and they don't like either option very much.

Never trust customers on matters of fact.

Not even "My system is down." Certainly not on "Of course it's plugged in!"

Always trust customers on matters of opinion.

They're entitled to their own opinions, and if they want to do it upside down and backwards because it works better numerologically, even though it takes them four times as long, it's their life. They're entitled to hate perfectly nice software programs, to think that the latest and greatest version is putrid, to want their screen purple and green, or to refuse to change anything from the system default, ever. Don't argue about it; at all costs don't tell them that they really do like it; and never, ever, ever, decide that they were just kidding and they'll thank you for installing the newer, nicer version.

Do not criticize or contradict other helpers in front of a customer.

"Gee, what idiot worked on this last?" is a bad move. If the idiot in question witnesses the exchange, you have forever damaged your working relationship with this person, and even if they were being completely idiotic, you are not going to be able to discuss it rationally. Even if the person being criticized isn't there, you're encouraging the customer to be nasty. It may make them bond to you, as a soul sympathetic to their plight, or it may just make them unhappy about the whole experience. What it won't do is help get their problem fixed. If the previous person who worked on it was an idiot, you need to get that dealt with -- you may even suggest to the customer that they discuss it with the idiot or the idiot's manager to see what's going on -- but you don't need to sabotage someone who, like you, is trying to do a difficult job, is probably overworked, and has better days and worse days.

If you really want to make everybody's life difficult, there's always "Oh, we have a lot of trouble with that group. I don't think they really do much, and they always do such a poor job when they get around to working on something". This will get back to the group in question either as "Everybody knows you're no good" or as "The help desk people hate you" and either one will make them feel miserable and oppressed without giving them any information on how to improve.

Similarly, don't argue in front of a customer. Customers want to feel like they're dealing with people who know what they're doing. "No, I think it's the red wire that will make it explode" is not the kind of thing they'd like to hear. If someone is trying to give an answer that's functional, but wrong in the details, or sub-optimal, it may be best to let it go, and correct it after the call is over. Obviously, if they're saying "Oh, rm -rf / is a great way to get a little free disk space" you may need to intervene extremely hastily, but do it with as much grace as possible. Scream "What kind of a moron are you, anyway??!?" only when no customers will hear you.

Stay calm.

Keep breathing, slowly and effectively. Take breaks, move around, do what you need to stay focussed on the world at large and not just one customer's little piece of it. When it gets too much, move furniture, throw things, jog around the building, go to the bathroom and cry, laugh hysterically, whatever works for you. As long as you keep your grip, nobody here is going to die. Besides, the customer is probably tense enough for both of you.

Know what you're doing.

Don't memorize procedures without knowing at least roughly what they do and how, and use voodoo system administration only as a last resort. Logging out and rebooting may work much of the time, but they have significant side effects, they are often only temporary fixes, and sometimes they make life much, much worse. In general, applying random procedures is a terrible time waster, and often leaves the user wondering about your competence. If you don't know how something works, you can't actually fix it.

(However, some days the machine is inhabited by evil spirits, and voodoo may be appropriate. The important thing is to be able to tell this from a machine that's acting up for mundane reasons.)

Be flexible.

There are no hard and fast rules. Do the right thing for your employer, your customer, and yourself, and if that requires breaking rules, making up policy, and standing on your head, so be it.