Confessions of A Former Technical Support Agent

I have done many different types of work in my life and technical support was one of them and I don't even remember how I started in it.

I have to say that it was not one of my favourite jobs. I did it for a few years. I started by doing computer upgrades at a shop and then moved to mobile phone support for two major phone companies.

The thing about technical support is that people seem to think that they are the end-all of every technical problem in the world and that they know how to use every device in the world. The truth is that your first contact with support is either customer service or a level one support agent, and neither know diddly squat about anything. Their job is to assess the issue and assign it to the correct department. They know squat.

I was a level one agent at one point and had no desire to move up to any other level. The lower the level, the less responsibility. The whole dollar increase in pay to move from a level one to a level two just wasn't viable for me. I was happy just assigning tickets. Although I did know a bit more about the devises I supported than I needed to know. I played down so that I wouldn't have to support them because it wasn't my job and I didn't care.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM ISN'T FREE?

No. It isn't.

Back in the day when I was doing computer upgrades in the shop, operating system upgrades were not free. If you wanted to install a newer version of Windows, for example, there was a fee for doing the work, $50 at the time, plus you had to pay for the system which at that time ranged from $125 to $290. Back then, updating the system on your computer would delete absolutely everything on it and you had to start all over again. Therefore, we also offered to do a system backup which cost an additional $75.

Yeah. It wasn't cheap.

I don't think anyone has any idea how many times people wanted me to do the installation of the system for $50. Meaning that they wanted me to "throw in" the operating system and do the backup for free.

First of all, do your own backup if you want it free. Secondly, if you want to call Microsoft right now and ask them for a free operating system, I will wait with a stopwatch to time how long it takes for them to stop laughing at you.

KICK THE SIDEKICK

Before smartphones, there were "dumbphones". They were mobile devices that did not have internet access. You could only make calls with them. Wow! Imagine that?

There was a device called Sidekick. It was able to access the internet albeit very slowly over the mobile network using a cellular frequency.

They were the biggest piece of garbage and a complete and total hell for technical support.

I had been laid-off from the shop so I went on to do support for a little mobile provider called T-Mobile. Interestingly, at that time the T-Mobile technical support call centre was located in Canada, Toronto to be exact. Although, T-Mobile wasn't and still isn't licensed to operate in Canada. The Toronto call centre supported American customers.

I was assigned to support customers with either a Blackberry device or the dreaded Sidekick. Since Blackberries very rarely needed support because they actually worked, the majority of calls were for the dreaded Sidekick.

T-Mobile had this rather interesting way of grading their staff. They would have each call ranked by a number ranging from "1" up to "5". With "5" being a "perfect" call and a "1" meaning a talk with the supervisor. It was like being in kindergarten. The scores were either given by the customer or someone internally monitoring the calls. Anyway, most of my calls were either a "2" or a "3". On a freaking banner day, I might have one call that scored a "4". Never a "5" because... I just didn't care. Never a "1" either. I wasn't rude to people. I just didn't care. Your Sidekick problem wasn't my problem. I was just there for the paycheque which in itself was a joke. $11.50 per hour to play therapist to people who buy garbage. Although, since T-Mobile was paying us in U.S. dollars, the pay worked out to only about $8.00 at the time. I'm sure they could have afforded to pay us a lot more...so, I didn't care.

Back to the Sidekick.

Those things would freeze for absolutely no reason. You wouldn't even have to be using it at the time.

There was actually no fix for it. We could only try to do a factory restore with the customer at first. That process generally took about 20 minutes because the concept of pressing three keys simultaneously was a very confusing and complex problem for the average American, at least those who were "nieve" enough to buy a Sidekick.

Most of the time (98%) the factory restore didn't work. so we just sent a replacement unit. Until that one froze, then they would get another, and another, and another, until the customer realized that the Sidekick was nothing more than an expensive piece of rat turd.

Most of the time I just wanted to skip the factory restore and just send a replacement, but that was against procedure and would have resulted in a call score of a "1", and we certainly couldn't have that.

NOT ANOTHER NOVEL

After a year of not caring at T-Mobile, I was laid off. Not because I didn't care, but because they moved their call centre back to the U.S. and as far as I was concerned they could stay there.

I had moved on to another mobile service provider. One that actually offered their service in Canada. That company was Bell.

I was a level one technical support agent and the wage was actually quite decent for a level one. $20.00 an hour, which was very good at the time.

This was about the time that smartphones started becoming popular.

As I stated earlier, level one agents are not required to fix things nor are they required to know how they work. Level one just creates tickets and sends them to the correct department. That itself can be a chore since sending a ticket to the wrong department would have resulted in it being sent back to be reassigned.

We also had to set ticket priorities. There were five levels of priority. Level one was the most important and had priority over everything else. Level five was the lowest and would only be looked at after all of the other priority tickets were solved. In all honestly, level five tickets never got looked at because there was always a higher priority ticket. I personally didn't use priority five for that reason...unless, I will discuss that later.

One thing that people never understood was how to use text messaging. I think they still don't.

The proper name for text messaging is SMS. That stands for Short Message Service, and the keyword there is "Short". A couple of sentences only. It was not meant to write a Stephen King novel.

I can't count the number of times I had to explain to someone that the reason their SMS wasn't working properly was that they were trying to send a 1000-page novel and that the service was not meant for that. If you needed to send something longer, use e-mail.

Then there was the nurse who complained that she was having problems sending a patient's vital signs by text message.

Let me understand this properly. She was using the least-reliable way to send vital signs? I hope I never get her as my nurse.

YOU DON'T HAVE A 'FIX IT NOW' BUTTON?

Generally speaking, we assigned network problems as a priority one ticket due to the number of people who can be affected.

One woman reported a problem that we had determined to be a service outage. We still collected information from customers so the network engineers could pinpoint the problem, but that took time.

When she asked me how long it would take to fix. I told her I didn't know but the average time to fix a network outage was about three hours.

She became quite upset about it. What was she thinking? We had a "Fix It" button that just solves all network problems immediately? They have to find the problem first, then send someone out there, fix it, test it. That all took a lot of time.

I'm sorry lady if you have to go a few hours without your phone. You might miss a few important social media posts, and we can't have that. Social media would have to shut right down if you were not there.

I promptly disconnected the call and set her ticket priority to a five. They might have had a chance to look at your ticket a year later, or not.

Word of caution: Don't tick off technical support.