“I like to listen. I have learned a great deal from listening carefully. Most people never listen.”
–Ernest Hemingway
Most of the funny help-desk stories you read are fiction based largely in fact. They make good reading and can bring a smile to your face, but there is often an underlying issue. The customer has a problem with X but does not have the technical know-how to communicate this sufficiently to the help-desk and a lot of the time the engineer doesn’t help the situation; either by not taking the situation seriously, or latching onto an idea and running with it without considering the whole picture.
In an ideal world a help-desk operative would be one-third engineer, one-third mind reader and a final third psychologist!
Our help-desk services have grown over many years into the company you see before you and a lot of this success is down to the fact we really listen. With comprehension comes understanding and once a problem is understood it is well on its way to resolution.
Often the best way is to take a step back and look at the situation from a high level. It can be quite easy to get lost in detail. Sometimes it really is a case of have you turned it off and on again. Yes, you may laugh but you would be surprised how many times this fixes a problem.
Being a good listener is not the be-all and end-all either. You must know your limits.
Stubbornness can often be a mixed blessing when it comes to help-desk work. You want to see the problem through from the initial customer contact to a successful outcome but you are pushing your knowledge to its limits. This can cause the problem to drag on longer than it ought to.
There is nothing wrong in saying you have tried to resolve the issue but it has beaten you. Pass it over to a colleague with more knowledge of the issue and learn from the experience.
Finally you need to understand that the customer is not calling deliberately to annoy you (well, not all of them…). They genuinely have a problem that is interrupting their ability to work and you are their lifebelt.
So it’s not always about the technology. It’s about the people.
“Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them”
–Albert Schweitzer
