Pogue’s latest post in the NY Times Blogs about technical support is sure to strike a chord in anyone who has ever bothered to call a technical support line. Every once in a great while I’ve bothered to do so it I have to admit a certain degree of loathing to the whole process. What I hate about it is always getting asked the “dumb” questions.

• Have you read the FAQ’s?
• Have you installed the latest updates?
• Have you tried rebooting?

or the worst question of all: Have you tried reinstalling? Like I have the time for that. Seriously.

Those of us who are engineers know that there is no random variable in software. While the application might call rand() most developers aren’t evil enough to actually code in failures that occur at random intervals. At least I hope they aren’t that evil.

What is funny to me about Pogue’s are the anecdotes showing the extreme examples of what supporting customers looks like on the others side. Well worth the read. Pogue introduces the whole affair with “It’s time to place half of the tech-support blame where it belongs: at the feet of Them. The Users.”

He’s being funny yet at the same time making a great point. Everything we do around support involves two parties: the customer and the provider. Reaching for excellence requires effort on both sides.

Next post has some comments about how the process of support can profoundly influence the outcome.

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This entry was posted on Monday, May 5th, 2008 at 5:02 pm and is filed under support.