Today I have run into every major issue on phone support you can imagine. Below are a few general rules to keep in mind when dealing with phone support. Some of this may seem ridicules and some is common sense. If some of our customers had followed this, they would have had a much better day.
1. Your not that important, get that out of your head right now. Your account is not keeping their company alive. They don’t NEED you.
2. At some point, you’re going to run into a new tech that is going to screw up. It sucks but it’s going to happen, deal with it and move on.
3. Threatening legal action is the fastest way to get hung up on, most techs are told to tell customers that on any threat of legal action to direct the customer to have his lawyer contact their legal department and hang up.
4. Don’t yell or curse. While it may make you feel good, it really does not help.
5. Remember that even the lowest level tech’s can make your life miserable if you treat them like shit.
6. Having your account reflect that you are a hostile customer is a BAD thing because it will reflect the quality of support you receive for everything and you will find you are much less likely to receive refunds even when you really deserve it.
7. Remember that in many companies, first level phone techs are reading off a script and really get flustered if you take them off of it. This may piss you off, but just remember that this tech is probably getting paid shit and really doesn’t make enough to put up with angry customers.
8. In general, when you treat your tech professionally and with respect, they will be far more likely to assist you and get your issue resolved quicker.
I can tell you from experience. If you treat a tech like shit, the quality of work that will be done will also be shit. You may think you have won when you get off the phone, but I assure you, you have not. My company gives a very large amount of power to its tech’s. I assure you, if you treat our techs like shit, it comes back to haunt you latter. You may have some small issue that we can fix in 10 seconds that you will have to pay us $150/hr to fix (min of 1 hour) where if you been respectful in the past, it would have been done for free. It’s incredible how many little fees’ can be waved by just acting in a professional manner on the phone.