Have you tried calling technical support?

[Chanlin]

I'm not sure if this is appropriate to unsupportable or not, Mods feel free to move if need be.

I work for a prepaid cellular provider which is an MVNO (mobile virtual network operator). This essentially means that we don't own our own network, but instead lease bandwidth from a 3rd party provider. In this case it happens to be one of the larger more well known cellular networks in the USA that we lease from.

Yesterday we had what should have been a routine phone call placed by me to said 3rd parties IT line to clear up a very routine issue. The issue in question was that the software we use for processing account changes would not let us make a change to a particular account because an order was stuck in the status of Pending. The system prevents changes to a line as long as there is a Pending order to prevent errors in the database from two different or conflicting changes being submitted at the same time.

Standard procedure for an account with an order stuck in this status for more than 24 hours is to call IT and request a ticket be opened to remove the offending order from the database. It fell on me to place this call.

Me:
CITG: Clueless IT guy

quick aside: i will admit I did not have information that maybe I should have, but this is because my boss has never seen fit to tell me this information and I was to previously unaware that it might ever be required of me because it has never come up before.

CITG: Thank you for calling <company> IT, this is CITG, can you please give me your name and the location you are calling from.

Me: Hi CITG, my name is Chanlin and I'm calling from <my company> located in Toledo, OH.

CITG: Ok, you said your calling from <my company> in Toledo?

Me: Yes.

*insert 2 minute pause here in which I can hear him typing. He hems and haws a few times too*

CITG: Is your store maybe under a different name, cause I'm not finding anything.

Me: Well it could be under <official company name LLC> but I've never had to give that before. It's always worked previously with <my company>.

CITG: Do you have a location number for your store?

Me: *insert confused tone* Um... I'm not actually sure. To clarify this is a call center. We are an MVNO and we lease from <company> (anyone in this industry should, and I tentatively say should, especially IT in this industry, should know what an MVNO is). If we do have a location number I've never been told it, but I doubt we have one since we are not a <company> store.

CITG: Ok.... (confused tone on his part) ... whats the store manager's name?

Me: <CEO's name> is the CEO and <VP's name> is the VP and <OM's name> is the senior OM. OM is the one listed as the contact in all of the software provided to us by <company> and CEO and VP are listed as contacts for our main account with <company>. Also if it helps my employee number which was provided by <company> is <number>

*insert another pause*

CITG: Uh... well what was it you were needing help with?

Me: I just need to open a ticket to have a pending order cleared from <software>.

CITG: Have you tried calling technical support?

Me: This is technical support for <software>. <company> provided it to us and this is the technical support number listed for it. Just to be sure I dialed <insert number here>.

CITG: That is us, but I'm not finding your store and I don't think I've ever heard of <software>. I need your store location to be able to open a ticket.

Me: Um.. ya know what don't worry about It. I'm going to check with my boss if we have a location number and I'll try calling back.

So i call the boss, at home since it was around 9:30pm, who informs me we have no location number and in his own words whomever I called and spoke with was a moron and was told if I should have the same problem I should offer to create an authentication proof using my <company> provided employee number.

So I call back and get someone different. And had the exact same opening conversation where I give my name, my company name and Toledo, OH as our location. Two seconds later I'm asked what the call is pertaining to, I give the guy the <software> pending order problem and all goes normal from there.

I know some people and be clueless sometimes and i probably could have handled things a bit better by asking to be transfered but yeesh.

[Eric the Grey]

I'll be the first guy was following a script off a cliff, while the second one took some initiative to work around it. The CITG either just didn't want to go any further than "get this information" if he could help it.

That being said, someone should make certain they have your companies name listed correctly to avoid future issues.


Eric the Grey

[Chanlin]

I may just ask them the next time I call. I really didn't worry about it on the second person, mostly because it was after close and I was being asked to round up the call asap.

In any case this is the only time I've ever run into an issue like this. I will admit I did not consider a script or any such thing. Like I said before to I might have had some better information myself to help him find what he needed to find. What got me the most out of the entire call was his suggestion to call technical support.

[Polenicus]

I'll be the first guy was following a script off a cliff, while the second one took some initiative to work around it.

I suspect this is the case, because no call center has just ONE script, and a lot of phone center support is knowing which one to select.

When I worked in a call center for an ISP, we had what was called a 'Knowledge Base'. Basically, a searchable collection of articles. You'd put in the error, and it'd spit out a list of possible matches for articles describing how to fix the problem.

However, anyone who has ever worked in tech support knows that often the first error the suer gives you isn't the root problem. Fore example:

Our ISP used a front-end software, that dialed, signed you into auxialiary services like e-mail and chat, and managed your connection. It was kind of clunky, but it did have the nice feature of being able to call a toll free number during setup, and use the number you were calling from to poll for local access numbers.

However, especially with earlier versions of the software, when the dialer went south, the errors the software produced often weren't applicable. For instance, sometimes the dialing credentials would get messed up. The software would try and access them, be told that it was conencted to the internet when it in fact had never dialled, and then tried to authenticate with the username and password. That would naturally fail, so it would report 'incorrect udername and password'.

The smart techs would always ask questions before searchibng the database... "What is the error?" naturally, but also "Can you hear it dialling and connecting?" "Have you changed your password recently?" etc etc. almost always with this problem the user, when asked, would say 'Oh, yes, I noticed that it wasn't making those funny noises anymore!"

Then they'd go straight to the 'rebuild dialling credentials' script, and be done.

The slightly less smart techs would plug in the error, and go to the incorrect password article... which, as a preface, told them to check to make sure it was dialling and connecting. Which they'd check, and would lead them to he 'rebuild dialling credentials' script.

The truly dumb ones would decide, because the error said it was a password issue, it MUST be a password issue. And would take the user through endless password resets, grilling them on how they were entering their password, and general labor under the conclusion that the user was typing it in incorrectly. Eventually they'd have to come to a lead (Me) to get the password reset to something non-random, like '123456'.

Usually by this point, they'd have been on the call for 30 minutes or more, with the customer thoroughly convinced that our software is junk, and pissed off at the thinly veiled implication that they can't type their password in right.

I'd check, find they aren't dialing, reset their dialing credentials, and have them fixed in five minutes.

Had one tech actually submit a complaint against me for doing that... she felt I had udnermined her credibility and made her feel stupid by pointing out she had missed step one of the article she was following.