MMMiii!

I was reading blog posts from Google Reader when I came across Dawud’s latest post “Are Your Readers Morons?” and I remembered what happened at work. Although it was first about how your blog readers could be morons, it’s pretty open to every kind of relationship, be it your clients, readers, customers, or what not. And like he said, “it all begins with building relationships.”

We had a discussion at work today last night. One of my teammates was asked why he was on a call for over an hour. He replied that his customer was stupid and couldn’t follow his instructions. My team leader kind of lectured him and told him to put himself in the customers shoes. Is he properly guiding the customer? If the customer is hard of following, shouldn’t he do something about it? And these “stupid” customers call because they don’t know, that’s why they need help. And these people are the reason why we tech support people exist. It’s because of these “stupid” people why we’re here and we have this job, and we’re earning from these people’s “stupidity.”

Now, we shouldn’t really call them stupid. Aside from the fact that they’re just not trained like us, or they have other professions, I’m sure they could come up with something where they’re better than any of us at tech support.

I do admit that sometimes, I really want to bash my head against my desk or even on the computer monitor because my customer couldn’t follow simple instructions. But then again, I start thinking, “maybe it wasn’t simple enough.”

We have to guide, not tell. Guide them to do this or that, not just tell them this or that, unless they say they really know what they’re doing. But like my Team Leader said, most of these people won’t call if they knew what they’re doing. So they’re not really stupid. Just untrained, or uninformed, or something.

I won’t deny the fact that I feel stressed out sometimes if the customer doesn’t follow well and I already think that my instructions were already as simplest as they can be… and you have to think of how to even simplify it some more. But in the end, if you solve their problem, they’ll thank you so much for being patient with them or like they just can’t thank you enough. You get that feeling of real appreciation that can’t easily be replaced.

When I get regularized in June, I’m going to look into good vacation deals for all the stress I’ve built up and going to file for a vacation leave. I want to go somewhere and forget about everything for a while, without stress of hearing the phone toot and deal with irate or difficult customers.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!