Devoted to the call center industry, the agents on the phones, and their managers

This is from mccaskil

My calls begin with the same phrase, "XXX Help Desk, this is XXX what is your XXX number?" We service over 2500 locations and each one has a location number. Since we have a finite number of locations we have learned the troublemakers and even to associate specific employees with certain locations.

This lady is slowly earning the ire of the entire help desk.

She calls one day, with a problem printing. Printing problems are a routine occurence on any computer system and it normally takes approximately 10-15 minutes to correct her given circumstance. i being by telling her to logoff all her computers. She then stops me to tell me she has a customer waiting and needs to find a translator for her, since "she doesn't understand a word of English." She leaves me on hold while she drags this poor woman around a store looking for someone who speaks her language. She then returns to the phone, and proceeds to tell me to wait again, while she rings up a customer.

Patiently I sit and wait, to fix a problem that does not stop her from doing her job, and which only takes 10-15 minutes.

While I wait and listen to her talking in the background, I hear her discussing with customers how many problems she has had lately with the systems. How all the components have been breaking, how she is scheduled to work by herself all day long, and how she has the Help Desk on the phone right now, trying to straighten out her many problems. I sit and listen quietly to her whining to customers about how terrible her system is, you know those same folks who spend money at our stores so our checks don't bounce!

Finally, after 13 minutes she returns to the phone. Remember as I said earlier, it only takes 10-15 minues to handle her problem.

I again instruct her to logoff all the computers. These are Windows 2000 systems and so the tried and true CTRL+ALT+DEL works every time. This took several tries on each of her three computers. Once we had logged them off, it was time to logon with the account we use for troubleshooting. I give her the username and remind her that the password is different than what she is used to using. She informs me that she is not an idiot and she has been working for our company for 10 years. After this declaration it only takes her 8 tries to logon successfully on one computer. I am so glad she was not an idiot.

Once we are logged on, we need to browse for the print server on the system and print a test page. This is a very simple process and something I have walked countless people through hundreds of times. After 30 minutes, we have finally managed to get one of the three computers to print a test page. At this point, after spending over 45 minutes trying to correct an issue that should have taken me 15 minutes, I give up and log her back on all her computers.

She insists on printing her document and thanks be to God, it worked. I got off the phone and sucked down a nice belt of Mountain Dew.