Customer Doesn't Trust Tech Support Employee's Advice, Lives To Regret It Weeks Later

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mattstaff
Nov 7, 2021 10:00 AM EST

There are far too many irrational, impossibly entitled customers out there that insist on not accepting tech support employees' advice. It's like they call in to tech support just to pitch a fit, and take out some of the stress they've accumulated through their personal lives, on completely well meaning individuals in the realm of tech support. It's a whole toxic circus act, and hopefully less and less people go about participating in it. In this particular tech support tale, we get to read about a stubborn customer who proactively wastes his own time. Pretty good stuff. For another tech support tale, check out the time that an owner fired the IT guy, and then how the business was completely sabotaged afterwards. 

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  • 01
    Font - r/talesfromtechsupport + Join u/originaldeadlysin · 1d 1 2 5 3 3 6 2 Took the long way, but he got there. Long This is long, I apologize. TL;DR at the bottom. I posted something a couple days ago in another sub that reminded me of this somewhat similar story. I'll warn you that it was about 14 years ago so I don't remember all the tech support steps perfectly, I might get something wrong here or there, but enough that you'll get the idea.
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 02
    Font - I was doing tech support for a major cable/internet provider, the "Tier 1.5" position, basically as a supervisor for all the Tier 1 agents, helping them with weird questions, handling customers that wanted to speak to a supervisor, etc. One day I had a call transferred to me by someone who wanted to talk to a supervisor, because they couldn't get their internet working, they'd called us at least a half-dozen times, we couldn't figure it out.
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 03
    Font - I looked through the previous notes on the account, and they weren't bad, for a change. The agents had done a decent job of documenting the problem, the steps they'd taken, everything. The customer was getting their signal through the cable modem, they were pulling a proper ip address, no browsers would work, I eliminated DNS as a potential issue. Eventually I did track down exactly what the issue was.
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 04
    Font - In previous years (We're talking around 2000-2004, this story takes place in 2007), some companies, including us, were still installing proprietary software when you got cable internet. We were no longer doing that, but there was some sort of issue where that old software would get into a half-uninstalled state somehow, and I don't remember exactly what it did, but it would cause this problem. This was super rare in 2004, and by 2007 I thought it was gone, I hadn't seen one in at least a
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 05
    Font - Only 3 people in my building who knew about this problem and knew how to fix it. One of them had since transferred to the cable tv department, and the other had transferred to HR. Making me literally the only person in our department that knew how to fix it. And as this project was handled by my site, and my site alone, besides a couple possible engineers somewhere that never ever talked to customers directly, I might have been the only person in tech support that knew how to fix it. So,
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 06
    Font - I told the customer I could fix it, and he seemed totally on board. Fixing it was a relatively simple matter of uninstalling 3 programs from windows control panel. One of them had our company name in its title, but the other two had names that sounded more or less like essential windows parts. When I told the customer that uninstalling these would fix the issue, (and to be clear, I was 100.00% sure that would do it, however now in 2021 I don't recall exactly why this was the problem/fix)
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 07
    Font - Now, my manager was a fantastic manager, but his job required...well...managing skills, not tech support skills. He could be an adequate front-line agent if for some reason he had to, but he wasn't as good at tech support as I was. He wasn't going to be able to fix this. But the customer insisted. For something like that, my manager won't take the call directly (Company policy. If it isn't something the manager isn't specifically needed on immediately for some reason, it's a 72-hour callb
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 08
    Font - The customer's ok with that. He gets a 72-hour callback. My manager calls him (and let me tell you, to discourage this "asking for a manager" thing that certain customers do, he used 71.5 hours of it), and the customer goes immediately into asking for his manager. That's really rare that anyone goes that far, happens maybe once a month. So they set up a 72-hour callback for the Project Manager (guy in my building in charge of all the internet stuff).
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 09
    Font - Customer talks to that guy, immediately asks for his manager too. That's all but unheard of now, but they set him up a 72-hour callback for the Site Manager (in charge of the entire 700-person building). And yes, he asked for her manager. We're a subcontracted site, so they set him up to talk to someone at the actual corporate head office. Here's where I don't know all the details because it left our site, but about a week later, we hear from head office. He's managed, after a few more st
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 10
    Font - They're asking the management, they're going through employee records, until they find someone who's in charge of knowing the weird stuff hardly anyone else knows, with a proven tech support record, and just so happened to work on the project involving this outdated software a few years back. If you didn't know where this was going, they found me. So they set it up where this person who was either a VP, or an assistant speaking on the VP's behalf (it was never made clear to me) called the
    via u/originaldeadlysin
  • 11
    Font - So I direct him to the control panel, and to the first program he needs to uninstall. He pipes up, "Wait a minute, you're sure this is the answer? This is what that guy wanted me to do at the start of all this!" "Yes Sir, that was me. Shall we continue?" (In fairness, he was polite after this, when he spoke at all. And yes, he followed my instructions quickly and easily, and his internet was working within minutes) TL;DR Customer didn't trust in me to know how to fix weird issue, spent we
    via u/originaldeadlysin

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