everything's not lost.

off to berlin, then sylt, then salzburg… all within 4 days.. that’s going to be fucking exhausting. have to get up at 4 in the morning tomorrow. but i managed to squeze my tripod into my suitcase and my camera in my backpack, maybe i have time for some late nightshots in sylt… that would be the only time that’s not fully planned. wish me luck btw :)

if there are two ways to do something - do it the hard way?

a customer said, that there was a problem with the delivery of an e-mail and that she got an error message (probably from the MAILER-DAEMON), so i asked her to forward that mail (she didn’t think of that before, nor did she tell me the recipient e-mail so I could check the logs on my own).

what i got was

• an e-mail with “here you go”
• the e-mail had an attachement
• the attachement was a pdf file
• the pdf file was the scan of the mail
• the scan was a OCR scan as well, so i could copy/paste*

uhm. works for me… but hey…. why not use the “forward” button in your mail-client? :)

reminds me of the times (yes, happened more than once!) when I asked for the screenshot of an error message and got either a scanned print OR a snapshot from a digital camera when someone made a picture of the screen. once someone used the flash for the photo and I couldn’t see the error message because of the reflection.

fun times, fun times.

* copy/paste was useless by the way since the print that has been scanned was scanned a little distorted so there was no use for that :)

just read the feedback forms of the training i gave today in front of 15 people. i love it when i read stuff like this to the question like “what did you think of your trainer?”:

very professional

very competent

he knows what he is speaking about

i mean, come on, isn’t that something you’d expect from a trainer that you pay good money to tell you something about a system from his own company? :)

hm, that day started well. not. turns out, i’m a prick.

here’s what happened:

• customer sent a mail with a question
• based on the evidence i knew the answer. still, i forwarded the mail to my co-worker to check it and answer it.
• my co-worker sent the mail to the customer, including me as a CC address.
• i was right and wrote a short message back “they asked that already 4 times now :)“
• i had clicked on “reply to all” and of course, the customer got the mail as well. how embarrasing.
• the customer replied with “well, a little confusion here and there should be allowed to everyone ?! greetings, sandy”

i want to die.

working in customer care means, that you will have to find the right words to communicate facts in a language the customer most easily understands. this applies to communicating problems as well. no bullshitting around with technical terms, metaphors are hard too, so try to avoid it.

and a very big part in communicating in support is the ability to ask the right questions to get the answers you need to help the customer. i can do this pretty good, if i may say so. the other way round is a bit more tricky - bringing the customer to ask the right question in the first place.

there is a story i love to tell because a) it really happened and b) it’s a perfect example*.

meet sarah. sarah is our main contact person from a customer. sarah, of course, is not her real name. and she could be a man as well, just to clarify that it’s not about women but about people that don’t have a clue ;)

now to simplify the premises let’s just say sarah is the main contact and there are 15 other contacts in other locations. each contact has it’s own access data. it’s a bit more complicated than that, but enough background information for now. here’s an email she sent to me:

Hi Thomas,

can you please change the passwords for some locations?

thanks
Sarah

if you don’t get it while reading it the first time, you might be my target audience at work.

here’s what i should have replied:

Hi Sarah,

i’ve changed the passwords for some locations.

bye
Thomas

and not a single bit of information more. of course, i didn’t reply with this mail, because - believe it or not - i’m more interested in helping than in proving my point. the way i replied was a short, friendly message like “sure thing, no problem. just tell me the locations and the prefered passwords each”.

before you might think, that her mail could have been just the question, if it is possible, to change passwords, i have to disappoint you - the mail is a direct quote as written above, no misunderstanding here.

other fine, but not so funny examples are mails like these:

Hi Thomas,

I’m getting an error.

bye
Harry

(…)

in these cases, i refuse to think about it for even a second and only respond with a nice “what kind of error message” message. there’s an error message on the screen that is telling you something, if you want me to do something about it, at least have the courtesy to read and forward it. i’m good, but i’m not that good.

the good thing is, most of the customers are learning to forward the full error description, but it’s a hard process to teach ‘em.

* and to be fair it’s quite funny as well :D