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"This call may be recorded for training purposes."
"Please hold."
"Someone will be with you in a moment."
"Please hold."
"Your expected hold time is less than ... five minutes."
"Please hold."
We've been forced to accept that the beginning of any call to a company's help desk, customer service, or tech support team starts out with the same pre-recorded words, but what about the conversations you have with real human beings? Perhaps we need to acknowledge there's a bit of a pattern to those as well.
And who better to break this particular reality to us than the makers of Zendesk, a web-based help desk software client? After all, support call related frustrations are, quite literally, their business.
The company's own Matthew Latkiewicz (as well as many of his co-workers) created the video below — which they've dubbed "S*** Support Agents Say." It's basically a frighteningly accurate summary of every tech support call you've ever made ... or will ever make.
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Want more tech news, silly puns or amusing links? You'll get plenty of all three if you keep up with Rosa Golijan, the writer of this post, by following her on Twitter, subscribing to her Facebook posts, or circling her on Google+.
Leave a Comment:
As a tech support agent...If I had a nickle for every time someone calls me asking if the iPad will print (no I don't work for apple) and when I tell them no they ask: "well, can you fix it?/make it?"
/facepalm
Tech support also. If I had a nickel for every time I had to ask someone to reboot...
My favorite is when I tell them to 'hit any key to continue'...which leads to them asking "where's the 'any' key?"
@Sherrasama, you could just tell them to jailbreak it and install truprint :)
Sorry, I don't get it. How is this supposed to be frightening? Put another way - what would you expect to see going on in the video that it doesn't show?
From most of what I heard on his end, it just shows that tech support has to so much deal with users who are totally clueless. I feel awful for tech support people.
Had a call where the power strip was plugged into itself instead of the wall. That's one you don't forget.
caller: "Hi, my computer won't boot up!!!"
me: "can you check the power plugs, and the keyboard and try again?"
caller: "I can't, it's hard to see."
me: "is it behind a filing cabinet so it's hard to see?"
caller: "no, it's dark. I can't turn the lights on. The power is out in this office."
me: _____crickets chirping_______— silent
caller: hangs up.
I've gotten this a lot I ask a customer to put something into their remote like a 3 digit code, and i get beeping in my ear, or they put the phone down to do something come back [put the remote control to their ear and start talking into it and then yelling because you aren't answering them... Some people shouldn't be allowed to have technology...
One good thing came from my call center years and that’s the fact that I now have the up most patience to walk someone through a process without biting his or her head off.