Help desk declared code PEBCAK and therefore refused to help! Why hello there Friday and hello there, also, this week's instalment of On-Call, The Register's weekly column that recounts readers' tales of tech support terror. This week, meet “Ben” who told us he once worked for “a large three-letter-acronym IT company, which at the time had their hands in just about everything IT related …
I doubt that ServiceNow have a classification for UK Government staff incompetence but in my day we used to have quite a few, IIRC some were:
LUBE: Lacks Understanding of Basic English
BIOS: Basic Intelligence Operator Subnormal - Knows what a computer looks like: can't start it.
EULA: End User Lacks Ability - Knows what a computer looks like: gets as far as "Enter Password"
RAM: Read Ability Missing - this for users who classify an issue as "Critical: Department Dependent" (something nasty will happen to the whole department if this is not solved!) but fail to respond to IT requests that they answer their phone/email. This means that someone has to physically go to that office.
SCSI: "Can someone please Solve/Complete this Stupid Idiot's ticket?" - see RAM above
My favourite was always:
CAMEO: CAse Made for Extermination of Operator
Beer: It's Friday.
The obvious answer is no ticket at all, but rather a simple "take the floppy out, doofus". But if that is completely against corporate policy and procedure (or if there is no floppy), how hard would it have been to ask the appropriate desk to call the user?
I'm as hard-nosed as the best of them in certain cases, but some things are easier to just fix and move on. This is one of them.
This is true, and probably the course of action I'd have taken, but when the user launches in to being an arse when you suggest the most appropriate course of support then it does tend to make one less inclined to be the most helpful possible.
He did exactly what the user demanded - log the call with networks support as it's clearly a network problem. How much more helpful could he be!
And if you took your car to an expensive engine specialist and started screaming at him because you couldn't open the car door, then it would be a reasonable response to tell them, that since it's not an engine problem, to take it to the garage. Just because he might know how to fix it, doesn't make it his problem especially once you've been told who can.
Listening to some of the calls our support staff get is scary. Getting some of them to the point where our staff can remotely access their computer can be like pulling teeth. There are people who don't know what is meant by 'Could you open a web browser please?'. Others that don't seem to know what or where the address bar is. On one memorable occasion it appeared that one of the guys was struggling to get the user to type a six digit number.
And the one time when a caller said her microphone wasn't working. Turned out it wasn't plugged in. Now that isn't all that unusual (despite our software being geared around audio). But when asked to plug it into a USB socket it still didn't work. Eventually it turned out they'd plugged it into their colleague's monitor 'because it was the nearest socket'.
Well that's very true. Occasionally I've needed to do that and I don't have the faintest idea how to activate 'away from desk'. I also don't know how to redial the last number or get the company phone directory to display. Bloody Cisco phones.
On the plus side my old desk phone went doo-lally last year and was removed along with those of my colleagues as part of a streamlining exercise. I think everyone was happy about removing the ability of us software developers to talk to the outside world :)
I am glad that it is not just me who is baffled by completely unusable phones. Mostly people need to answer a phone, transfer a call, accept a transferred call, include someone else in a call, mute a call. Can I do this without a three-page crib sheet? No.
I've got a Panasonic phone here. In order to divert calls to another number, I have to type in 17 digits - to be fair that does include the phone number - but is still ludicrously long.
There are 12 named buttons on the phone, none of which does this and a further 12 programmable buttons, where the only way to program them is with these silly codes.
Cancelling divert is 8 numbers!
I don't know who designs these phones, but I do know that nobody can bloody use them!
There is of course no button for divert to voicemail, or pick up voicemail. What a pile of shite.
That issue, and many more that I've helped to resolve over the years, mostly at a human rather than IT level, comes from a system that is computer centric, not user centric. Even at a "three letter company" ( Of which there have been more than a few in IT - marketing like the three letter combo) most users just want the problem to go away and are not IT experts themselves. As soon as you introduce the element of users having to choose where to report the problem there's an element of auto-diagnosis. And the more basic the issue (e.g. floppy in drive) the more likely for that to go wrong. A little bit of user knowledge doesn't help here, tending to mislead. A generic support desk with expertise to direct calls to the right person ( you don't even have to tell the user who that is) is more useful. (Only not a generic support desk with a script reading non-technician, please)
Indeed, and that is why they came up with the notion of the generic service desk that logs calls for every IT problem as well as all facilities problems from a broken coffee machine to a crack in a supporting wall.
There are two problems that have crippled the notion of "service desk":
1) A truly generic service desk rarely resolves problems on first call, which irritates some users and looks bad against a key performance metric of the services it replaces: calls resolved on first contact.
2) Many companies create their service desks by simply rebranding the IT helpdesk; giving them extra work and no extra staff. This leads to a longer backlog of calls, and it's the desk staff that get it in the neck, as their performance goes down against key performance metrics... including calls resolved on first contact as while they can reset user passwords online, they can't exactly unblock the third stall on the right in the gents lavs over a phone call....
So yeah... service desk is a dream. I'm sad to live in reality.
I work in the network group here at $Co. While I won't say that our level 1 support staff is entirely useless, our group has gone around a few times with their group on how to properly escalate a ticket.
We've also had a problem with our customers (i.e., employees in the other departments) calling us directly for help because either they've gotten the run around with the help desk, or they put in a nice verbal request over the phone, and the level 1 staffer put into the ticket essentially 'it's broken, they need help' and dumped the ticket into our queue.
Fortunately, things have gotten better. Mostly.
"level 1 support staff is entirely useless"
They're not usually hired for their intelligence or problem solving skills, but merely for their ability to stick to a script and explain how to close the coffee cup holder.
The problem is when they either escalate too much or too little and this gets compounded when oversight is done within the group, so manglement try to avoid admitting they're cocking up.
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Oh God. At times over the years I've made a support call for stuff that I couldn't solve by using the limited resources and tools available to me as the user who was responsible for the team's IT (Often as simple as a permissions issue where the protocol was that I didn't have routine access to the server because of the presence of confidential data from other teams). The central IT team knew me, listened to the steps I've taken to identify/resolve the issue and usually came back with either a suggestion or a solution.(And sometimes I was able to call them with a workaround I'd found for a more general problem that we were all having that they could and did roll out elsewhere). But then a few years back a new corporate system appeared. I had to go through the "helpdesk" - seldom the same person that I'd spoken to before. Who'd take me through the usual script before passing the request on. But they never passed the information on that I'd given them . Which meant that a technician had to come out to answer the ticket, get the whole explanation again and then tell/allow me to resolve the problem, often in seconds because it was a relatively simple fix to a purely local issue. Of course soon after this started the IT guys just gave me their direct numbers - simpler for everyone and we logged the support call after the fix.
His name was actually spelled differently, but it was Polish & sounded so close that's how most of us pronounced it. It was years before he
finally learned what the IT acronym stood for & that his picture was probably in the dictionary beside the definition.
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