Thursday, December 08, 2005

Get stuffed.

A user I was on a call with this morning had numerous problems. In the first place, the ticket that had been opened for her PC was completely wrong. The analyst had completely mis-described the issue and so support was not taking care of it properly. So, I had to almost start from the begining with troubleshooting and re-describing the problem.

Next, she had a second computer that support had given her in the meantime that she couldn't access her e-mail on. I needed to get her to bring up her old PC so that we could copy her Noted ID file (where the password is stored) onto her network drive so that she could then copy it back onto her loaner PC to get into her mail there.

On top of that, she had a networking issue to deal with.

All this troubleshooting took time. My Team Lead eventually sent me an IM saying that I couldn't be on a call for 30 minutes.

The irony was that the user had just finished thaking me for taking the time to solve her problems and complimenting me that I was the only one at the help desk who seemed to know what was going on.

So, in response to my Team Lead's message, I was formulating a response saying that I was taking care of three problems. After the user's compliment I said that I had just gotten a message from my lead telling me to wrap things up because I was taking to long and I was about to tell him to "get stuffed."

"I heard that," came the IM from my Team Lead. I have a loud, penetrative voice and while he may have heard me from across the room it wouldn't surprise me if he were listening in on my call.

"We're going to need to talk about this," came the next message.

I doubt it. I am now 8 weeks late for my annual performance appraisal so clearly having meetings with the employees are not very high on their program. And even if we did have this "talk" I would only admit that saying "get stuffed" was a poor choice of words. I hold by my assertion that it is rude and poor customer service to end a call with a user just because management is concerned with the metrics. If I can solve the problem then I'm going to solve the problem because that's why the user is calling. Were I to open a ticket for the user's ID file issue it would sit up at the Function Desk for an hour or so before it was sent back to me with the statement that I was capable of doing this and should call the user back or, even worse, it would be sent off to second level support who might get to it in the afternoon sometime.

If my team lead wants me to cut calls short then he can come over to my cubicle and press the release button on the phone. I'm not going to do it.

And so I thought to take a look at the actual metrics for the day. I took 61 calls for the day. The person who took the next highest number of calls was at 55 calls. Most people were taking around 30 calls for the day. So, even though I'm spending 30 minutes on a call here or there, I am still outperforming EVERYONE at the helpdesk. That's even compared to B*** who works a 10 hour shift rather than the 8 hour shift that I work and only took 40 calls.

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