Really? Where did you receive your training?

[AmayaSasaki]

Working customer service tech support in a call center, most calls are the garden variety, "I forgot my account password/security questions", or "It won't turn on" or "I forgot my passcode to my device and locked myself out", etc.

Then there's the "special" ones, the ones that I mentally term the idiot know-it-alls. Most of you probably know the type: "I know everything; I know it better than you do," but reality is that they have so much of no clue that it must be in the negatives.
That was my idiot customer of the day yesterday, though I think Mr. Know-It-All stands a very good chance of winning idiot customer of the week award for me.

Goes like this: Customer is asking for troubleshooting assistance for a product released only the day before. As tech support, I would get a slightly advanced peak before release so that I can have a clue how to support it on release date, though not usually by a lot, but I do get training in advance.

I ask the customer if he has a specific setting turned on since that setting is required to use the feature he's calling about.

Customer "informs" me that the setting has nothing to do with it.

I gently explain to him that the feature is designed to work only if this setting is turned on.

"That's not true," says customer.

"Sir," I say, "that is how I was trained."

"Well then, your training was wrong," replies customer.

....Wait... what? I was dumbfounded. I could have showed him the article from our support database that would tell him the same thing if he would have given me the time of day, but that wasn't going to happen. It took everything I had at that moment not to come back with a snarky, "Oh really? Where did you get your training?"

I still couldn't help myself entirely and managed to tone it down to, "Oh I'm sorry, I didn't realize you knew more than I did."

"I do," replied the customer. "Now is there someone there who knows more than you do?"

I so wanted to come back with, "Well, you do apparently." Instead, I told him to wait a moment while I got a senior advisor. Technically if we have the customer on hold for 5 minutes and haven't gotten someone on the other line yet, we're supposed to check in with the customer, but with this idiot know-it-all, he had been such a jerk that I decided I was just not going to deal with him any more than I had to and just let him sit on hold.

When I finally got the senior advisor on the line and explained the situation to him, then brought the customer on the line, the customer still had the nerve to additionally say to me that I should stay on the line to learn something, never mind that the senior advisor is also going to tell him that having that setting turned on is required for the feature he's trying to use. Seriously, who in their right minds calls in to tech support for assistance with a newly released product/feature and then proceeds to tell tech support that they don't have a clue and that their training is wrong?


Then there was another stupid idiot, neighbor, after I got home... but that's another story for a different area.

[retro]

Tell me about it. We weren't often given that much training and sometimes the first we knew about a new product launch was when the first call came through about it.

Fortunately, most of the time it was a simple matter of transferring what we knew about a previous model. I worked in a phone network call centre, so Android to Android was similar, iOS to iOS was similar. We tried to help as best we could but we were able to refer back to the manufacturer in certain circumstances.

[EricKei]

It really makes me wonder why he needed to call you guys if he knows so much about the software...

[MoonCat]

I'd have stayed on the phone with him so I could hear his response when the senior adviser tells him that the setting does, in fact, have to be turned on.

And I probably would have told him that my training was originally created by the company that released the product - so if I'm wrong, so is the manufacturer.

[Ironclad Alibi]

I'd have stayed on the phone with him so I could hear his response when the senior adviser tells him that the setting does, in fact, have to be turned on.

At which point he will accept the answer and accuse you of not telling him.

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

Seriously, who in their right minds calls in to tech support for assistance with a newly released product/feature and then proceeds to tell tech support that they don't have a clue and that their training is wrong?

@#$%ing near everyone whom I've ever dealt with in the IT field.

It's the same damn story. Customer comes in with problem. Customer admits to knowing nothing about computers apart form how to turn it on and get to the internet. Technician diagnoses problem. Customer flips shit because their mother's brother's cousin's lover's ex-boyfriend's former roommate said that it was something else.

I got so pissed off that I did the repair in front of the customer to show them they were flat out wrong.

Case in point...PC with dead power supply. It's not turning on at all. No lights, no fans, no hard drives spinning up. 99 times out of 100...it's a powersupply. ESPECIALLY since the night before we had one hellacious lightning storm in the area.

Nope, heir mother's brother's cousin's lover's ex-boyfriend's former roommate said it was a setting in Windows.

We argued with me explaining that without the computer being able to turn on...we can't GET TO Windows to futz with settings and her saying that it can't be the powersupply.

So I grabbed a screw driver and my spare power supply I use for testing. Disconnected the old one and connected the test one. WaBam! Computer came on and went into Windows. Let her test it a bit while I took her old power supply apart and showed her the blown capacitors, the carbon scoring, and the areas where the circuit board was charcoal.

Stank to high heaven too.

She got huffy but still had me put in a new power supply. Never saw her again. Honestly didn't miss her.

[AmayaSasaki]

Yeah, you get those type too that say they know nothing, but because someone that they usually ask for help with computers told them it was X, then it must be X, regardless of what you, the expert say.
This is simply the first time, however that I've gotten a customer on a new product release feature tell me that they know more than I do. Wait, this just came out yesterday to the public, whereas I got to look it over a few days in advance in pretty good detail, especially the feature he's talking about, and now he wants to tell me that he knows more than I do? Moreover, he's actually not claiming knowledge from what a friend of a friend said. He's actually saying that he himself knows better than I. That was a first. I deal with more of the software end, so I try to go through all the steps, but then you get the customers who are like, nope, we don't need to do any steps because it's hardware, so give me a new product for free, never mind that their product is out of warranty, and I haven't determined yet for certain that it is hardware and not a software issue.

[Trixie]

I get customers agruing with me over policy on things, mostly the coupon policy. And others that argue with me over things we carry. Granted there are times when we do get something new in that I've missed seeing but not much.

Bonus points if they say:

-I get it here all the time.

-It said on TV that you carry it.

-You DON'T???

And it's at that point that I call a manager because I'm done.

[Sapphire Silk]

What idiots like this forget is when software updates to a new version, settings and defaults sometimes change as well.

[otakuneko]

I would get a slightly advanced peak before release so that I can have a clue how to support it on release date, though not usually by a lot, but I do get training in advance.

Lucky you. When I was doing support for Red Checkmark ISP, it was a different story...

On the other hand, it's entirely possible the documentation--and therefore, sometimes the training--is wrong. I know this from very, very annoying experience. I've opened quite a few tickets with our Technical Writers group over the short two years I've been at my current job.

[AmayaSasaki]

I very much doubt the training is wrong in this case.I don't get much advance notice, just a couple of hours in a room a few days before release, one of those deals where they take your cell phone at the door to hand back when you leave. However, it's enough to know what the setting is. Also, it's a new feature to this one product that I'm cross trained to support, while the other one on a slightly different platform, but intended to interact, works fine as the training said. The same information I had in my training is also available to the public in the support database, so he's just flat out wrong, but thinks he should tell me that I'm wrong.

[kmariem]

I had a case once where I actually did know more than the comp tech I called once. It creeped me out.

I know slightly more than the basics (yes, I did try turning it off and on again). When something stopped working, I ran thru what troubleshooting I knew to try, eventually giving up. When the tech answered, I said "I'm having a problem with this. I've done this, this, this, that, and this, I've even tried this which doesn't normally help, but I tried anyway!" She was silent for a few moments and said I should probably call back the following day to speak to a more experienced tech. From what I understood, she'd been taught the basics of troubleshooting (which I'd done), and I'd mentioned one or two things that she didn't know. Good person, and she likely could and did help 95% of the people that called for help.

[notalwaysright]

We just talked about this in class, and the moral was "check the obvious first." Basically, my teacher had spent a bunch of time trying to fix something, and when he finally called support he launched into how he knows all this stuff about computers. The tech said, "okay, well I'm going to have to you reboot the computer." Fixed it.

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

I had one like that awhile back. I told the guy exactly how to fix the problem and he didn't believe me. Accused me of wasting his time, not knowing my job, being useless, the whole shebang. He ended up hanging up on me.

Here's the best part: I checked his account notes later only to find out he fixed his problem by doing....exactly what I told him to.

Now I will say the training I received at my current job was rather meager, I'm something of a techie at heart to the point where other people I work with regularly seek me out for assistance. Other reps there are like me, others are not so technically inclined, but for the most part we know our jobs and know how to find an answer if we don't know it right away.