RE: The Limits of Training

["Victoria Wroblewski" <victoria -dot- wroblewski -at- eagletest -dot- com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Todd Walton
Sent: Saturday, February 14, 2009 11:10 PM
To: techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
Subject: The Limits of Training

> We have decided that we must change the way passwords work.  
> We've met a limit of technical documentation.

It's not a limit of documentation when people are unwilling to learn.
If you're constantly getting calls from different/new people about
passwords, there is likely a fault with the way it's documented.  But if
it's the same group of people calling all the time, they are just
unwilling to learn as long as they can pick up a phone and make someone
else do the thinking.

Although it's been a long while since I worked at an IT call center
(best call ever?  The person who had a spot-on impression of a
negotiating modem, to the point this person had to practice it before
they left us the voice mail), but from all my recent dealings with
customer service folks at various workplaces, I hear that not much has
changed.  There will always be people who will call with questions that
could be answered if they spent two minutes looking on their own, and
there will always be people who call repeatedly for the same simple
issues.  These people apparently want to sit on hold for 15 minutes to
solve a problem that could be solved in 60 seconds.  You're not going to
convince these people that they don't need to call.

What you can do is focus on reducing calls from people who are willing
to learn but just cannot find the answers.  For every person who insists
on calling support for every issue, there is also someone who wants to
go to that as a last resort and will be more than happy to step through
several long and involved procedures in hopes that they solve the
problem without having to call.  You can reduce the calls from these
people with well-written troubleshooting procedures, and you can also
reduce the time the support team needs to spend troubleshooting their
issues if your procedures involve clear instructions on what may be
wrong given where they found a failure point.  If you can reduce the
long and involved calls that take a combined several hours of several
people's time, imagine how many password change calls you could take?

- V

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