The Shortest Tech Support Career Advice Ever

All you need to develop a successful career in the IT and Tech Support industry is an interest in technology and the confidence to search out, record and retain the little details that make computers do what we want them to do.

You don't need certification, you don't need a degree. You just need to be confident in your ability to find information and harness it.

The new gig: Hitting the ground running

Starting a new job means getting an idea of what the work environment will be. While some companies take the time to provide an orientation period, in many cases once you're in, you're moving. If you have the time to do so (say, the weekend before you begin your new job), try the following:

Spend some time getting familiar with the area around your new place of work: This will give you an idea of the environment, possible places to go for lunch, where to go when you're almost out of gas, and other useful bits of data.

Spend an hour or so checking your favorite online map site for alternate routes to and from your new gig - where do you go if the freeway is at a standstill? Can you get from here to there on surface streets alone?

Get an idea of the size of the company. A company with 120 employees "supports" differently than a larger, more spread out company.  The kind of support you provide (ie: sterling) should not change, but the manner in which you provide that support might be different.  Do they have a system in place to log requests or is it a more informal "can you help me with this?" environment?

Learn the location of the restrooms, fire exits, break rooms and vending machines. This information will help keep you sane when it's time to get up and walk away for a moment.

Read over any information your company provides in regard to internet usage. This is a big one especially as some companies are beginning to crack down on the use of streaming media sources like YouTube and Pandora. Find out what's OK and not OK to do at work before you try learning the hard way.

Learn people's names as quickly as you can. Start with your immediate supervisor and coworkers, then work your way out from there to the other teams and support people.  Always learn the names of the admins, secretaries and receptionists. They're the ones who really run things.

The more you know about where you're working, the easier it will be to work there!

Steam

We all get bad calls. Every so often, a call will come along which will just does not go well for all parties concerned.

When that happens, and it will, take a few minutes. Get out of the queue, get up, take five minutes or however many you can manage. Remember that the call wasn't about you as a person regardless of what the customer said - the call was about the customer being frustrated that he could not do what he wanted to do.

Even though some customers get angry and even abusive at you on the phone, you are not the target.

Seek out new resources

One of the easiest ways to avoid work is to be certain that whatever the problem is, it isn't the area you're working in.

Granted this allows you to get off the call or reroute the email message, but it doesn't benefit you to just foist the case off and be done with it.

If and when you can, seek out and make note of resources which might be useful when a issue is Not My Department. If you can clarify whose department it is, or direct a customer to a product that might be able to fulfill his needs when your product cannot, that will improve your support chops and the customer's experience at the same time.

Be Pleased With Your Ignorance

For a Tech Support rep, not knowing something is akin to admitting defeat. After all, the job entails knowing more than your customers know.

However, finding out that you don't know something is an opportunity to remind yourself that you don't know everything - it's an opportunity to learn something new, write it down and stockpile that information for yourself and your coworkers.

Be happy when you find out you don't know something - it means you're still learning.

Widen Your Scope

It's very easy to get used to dealing with a very finite set of subjects during the course of your day.  You can end up knowing everything about a few things and very little about others.

Take some time to broaden your scope - even if you only spend a few minutes surfing on a subject that's tangential to what you do, but interesting enough that you continue to look for more information on it.  That might even lead to widening your scope farther.

It also helps to remind us that no, we don't Know Everything. And that can keep you out of Competency Level 4, which will make working with people who don't know about your particular area of expertise easier.

Where do Managers Come From?

In the Tech Support industry, managers tend to come from one of two categories:

1. Tech Support reps who have been promoted to management
2. Managers who are brought in to manage Tech Support Reps

 It's one of the ironies of the industry that if you're particularly good at your job, you're often given the opportunity to move "up" to a position where you don't actually do your job any more, but rather manage people who do what you did. 

If your manager is from category one, it's likely you'll have an easier time relating to this person. He's done the job you're doing, so he's been in the trenches and will have a basic grasp of what you're doing and the challenges that arise.  The odds are good that this manager is being challenged by his new job - the more information and data you can provide for him, the better (see The Metrics-Obsessed Management Environment) - Tech Support Managers don't want these numbers for themselves, but need them to satisfy those farther up the food chain.

If your manager is from category two, you may need to be patient with him as he gets an idea of what it is you actually do. Again, numbers tend to be important here (so, again, Write Everything Down) as does having what you actually do documented so your manager can take the information you give him in context, and communicate that information to his managers.

If you can make your manager's job easier, he's going to be more inclined to make your job easier.

Macrotize

Tech Support is full of forms, formats and "expected information" - in most cases, you'll wind up with templates to use for recording case information, escalating cases, and in some cases even formats for responding to customers via email.

I've mentioned writing everything down previously, and this is another piece of the puzzle. If at all possible, use macros, "hot keys" or programmable keypads to "pre-load" standardized template information - one click is always faster than copy/paste, and that extra moment or two you have where you don't have to go looking for that one piece of information could add up to more time to get the actual work done, and better metrics overall.

Right now, I'm using a USB programmable keypad which I've loaded with a number of templates and stock responses for email.  I like this one because I can change key assignments on the fly (which is good for changing the "notification of issue" hotkey to the "resolution of issue" hotkey when said issue has been resolved).  Anything that lets you substitute one keystroke for six or more is a good thing.

The Metrics-Obsessed Management Environment

Caveat: This article, and most articles in this blog regarding management and how to deal with them, use management jargon. I'll try to call out jargon by putting it "in quotes".

One of the manager's primary tasks is to communicate with... his management. He needs to be able to summarize the current state of his team and explain how well or poorly the team is doing in a concise manner.

This usually means numbers. Managers like numbers, and the higher up the management food chain you go, the more those numbers are used to explain how things are going.  In the end, numbers are used to explain the state of the entire company to shareholders.

Consequently, managers of Tech Support teams like to find ways to apply numbers to what the team does - assist customers - and generate as many different types of numbers as possible. This is what I call the MOME, or Metrics-Obsessed Management Environment.

Numbers and data are the best protection in a MOME. The more numbers and data you have, the easier it will be to respond to any questions and concerns your manager (who is, after all, answering questions from his manager) may bring up.

The most common metric imposed upon a Tech Support reps is the simplest one to count: the number of calls, emails or other customer contacts made in a day.  In some systems, this is automatically compiled by the program used to track the calls or emails. In some cases, though, it isn't.  This is where writing everything down comes in handy.

If you know the number of calls, emails or contacts that is set as the base, or minimum average, writing down your cases - even just jotting a quick summary on a pad somewhere - can help you keep an eye on how you're doing with what I've heard called the "Salary Continuation Program".  If you find yourself falling behind, notes on the nature of the case will help you spot problem areas either in your handling of the case or perhaps an issue with the product or service which should be brought to the attention of your engineers, management, or other higher powers.

The second most common metric is call times, or calls / emails per hour. This one is a little trickier to manage from the Tech Support rep side, but if you know how many calls or emails you do in a day, you can take that number, divide it by the number of hours you are "in production" (that is, working on customer issues) and get a rough estimate.  Again, if you find your "per hour" metric isn't matching up to what management sets as their expectation, you can look over your notes and use the types of cases you worked and the nature of the issues to provide some context for the numbers themselves.  Managers like it when a rep "proactively" spots, analyzes, and defines "areas for improvement" before a manager has to bring it to his attention.

Most Tech Support reps see all these metrics as the enemy. But, if you're willing to put in a little effort, you can get them on your side.

Search and Ye Shall Find

We tend to become blinkered when we're supporting a particular product or service - the powers that be show us "the sources of wisdom" (usually a Knowledge Base or a series of FAQs or pre-written hotkeys) and leave us to support the thing we're being paid to support.  If the problem we're encountering isn't covered under those few bits of info we're pointed at, we tend to default to further escalation or making something up to appease the customer.

However, there's a vast wealth of info on the internet - exercise your search engine chops when faced with a problem tangential to your product - maybe it's a piece of 3rd party software that isn't playing nice, or an error code in a program that accesses your service. A simple search for the error message and the product will turn up more info quickly.

Even if it isn't the exact answer you need, it should be more info than you had earlier. And of course, write it down or bookmark it for the next time you run into that situation.

The customer is listening

The majority of Tech Support these days happens over the telephone.  Most telephone tech support happens over a telephone headset.  It used to be that these headsets were pretty rudimentary and not all that sensitive.

However, that's not the case anymore. Headsets pick up all kinds of sounds - typing, writing (I get customers speculating on my typing speed), the sounds of your coworkers who are also on calls... and anything that you're doing with your mouth is picked up clearly on the phone.

This is something you should always be aware of - customers can hear heavy breathing, snuffling, coughing, wheezing, and most definitely eating and drinking.  There are some things you can do to mitigatge the sounds you can't eliminate - mostly by moving the boom "mic" away from your mouth a bit and calibrating with a friend or coworker - have them call you or you call them and then work to determine a "good" distance for your mic to be from your face.  The voluntary sounds are just that - voluntary.  If you absolutely have to take a drink or eat something while you're on the phone with a customer, excuse yourself and use the mute or hold button. 

Remember, they can hear us just as well as we can hear them!

Frustration!

In Tech Support, your job is to talk to people about things they usually don't know too much about.  If you're hovering around Level 4 competency (as most of us are somewhere about the third quarter of a shift) you may find yourself getting really tired of explaining basic concepts to someone who, bless their heart, just is not Getting It.

This is called Frustration, and it can be your friend or your enemy.  When Frustration is your enemy, you find yourself talking faster, talking louder, and repeating the same things over and over again in an increasingly futile attempt to Get The Point Across.  Your customer will pick up on it, and (usually) interpret it as hostility, and respond in kind. Eventually one of you will likely give up (and possibly lose a customer, or wind up with a demand to speak to a Supervisor).

You can, believe it or not, make Frustration your friend.  You have to be able to recognize when you're getting frustrated (which can take some effort on its own), but when you find yourself getting to that point, take it as a sign that you need to take your conversation in a different direction.   Can you phrase what you're trying to say to the customer in another way? Try asking what the customer sees on the screen, slow down, and your customer will be able to come "back from the brink" and work with you to solve the issue you're working on.

Search Amazon.com Books for frustration

Honesty and Tact

The most common type of question asked to a Tech Support rep begins with "How do I..."

Sometimes, the answer is, unfortunately, "You can't, not with this product."  It's a challenging situation - Sales reps will sometimes promise the customer that a product will do something which, to be frank, it can't do. Usually this is because the Sales rep isn't aware of the product's limitations.  However, once the sale has been made, and the customer gets the product, it's a Tech Support rep who will have to break the bad news to the customer.

In Tech Support, we need to give the customer accurate, truthful information about the product we support. This includes having the integrity to tell the customer truthfully that no, this product will not be able to do something.  The good news is that the "something" the customer is looking to do may not actually be the only way it can be achieved. Talk to your customer about the end result - What does the customer want to have happen? Once you know the desired result, it's likely you will be able to direct your customer to alternate methods or, at the very least, an alternate product.

Honesty is important. On the other hand, so is tact. There are ways to phrase things so you can be honest with a customer without saying negative things about your product, company, or the customer's own technical skills.  The more ways you can find to say things tactfully but honestly, the better a rapport you will have with your customers - and everyone else.

Build Connections

You've probably heard the saying, "It's not what you know, it's who you know."  In Tech Support, it's a combination of what you know and who you know.

It's the nature of the industry that products are so complex at this point that no one really knows how all of any one product actually works. This is more true of software-based products than hardware, but that's another blog post entirely.

One of the things you can do to make your job easier is to make connections between yourself and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) - people who know a particular product, or part of a product, backwards and forwards. Getting on friendly terms with a SME will give you a valuable resource when you hit the boundaries of your experience or knowledge with that product.

Build connections with the support staff - receptionists, facilities, security - of you become a person to them, you're someone they'll be more inclined to want to help you, even in circumstances where the issue is "I was dumb and ..."

Build connections with other departments in the company - that way if an issue goes beyond the product or service you're supporting, you have someone you can talk to who might be able to help, and that means you don't have to foist the customer off blind to another department. Customers like it when you can provide a clear path to solving their problems. You'll know who to ask, or at least who you can ask about who you should ask.

Build Connections.  It helps.

Your Job Is To Talk To People

Regarless of what Metrics-Obsessed Management Environments (MOME - yes I'm working on making this a meme) have to say about Tech Support, your job, at heart, is to talk to people and help solve their problems.

We tend to focus on the "solve their problems" part, which means we focus on the problem rather than the person we're talking to. This results in Script Monkey Syndrome - we have a fixed set of steps we need to go through, and some of us just read the steps off the script in front of us, expecting the person on the other end of the call to understand exactly what we mean when we say it and above all else, follow these steps (written by a tech) to the letter.

Of course, if these people could easily understand technical instructions written by technical people the odds are good they would not in fact be calling us.

Take a moment to get an idea of where this customer is, knowledge-wise. Use your script (if you have one) as a guide to the steps and not as something you just have to recite at the customer as fast as possible to Get This Person Off The Phone. 

Communicate.

Besides, if you do that, then this customer might learn something, and not have to call you again for this particular issue.

Slow down,

In a Metrics-Obsessed Managerial Environment (MOME), "call times" are one of the most commonly used metrics.  If you're in a call center environment, it may the only metric, or paired with "number of calls taken". Consequently, your first instinct upon taking a call is to Get This Person Off The Phone ASAP.  And for most of us, we figure the fastest way to get someone off the phone is to communicate with them as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, talking as quickly as possible about technical issues which the person you're talking to may not understand is a sure way to make your call last at least twice as long as it needs to. 

If you're willing to slow down and take the time to talk (and listen to) your customer, you'll be suprised how quickly you can, in fact, Get This Person Off The Phone.

There's also the advantage that if you can actually solve this person's issue, they won't be calling you back.

Tools: Online Note Taking

Back in Write. Everything. Down. I mentioned that I use an online note taker to hold all of my "boilerplate" responses, quick fixes, and the like. It's a good resource for complex command-line functions and code "band aids" as well.

Here's a few that I've found and tried out. I'm focusing on the free ones for now:

Evernote (evernote.com) - This is Lifehacker's favorite and I can see why. Cloud-based data storing certainly works for holding onto the bits of info you want to get to quickly. There are clients for just about every operating system and mobile device made in the last five years.

Yahoo! Notepad (notepad.mail.yahoo.com) - tied into your Yahoo.com account - web-based with more than a few Yahoo! Widgets (MacOS and Windows) to tie into the online app. This one is text only.

Google Documents (docs.google.com) - Full on, Word-Compatible docs, databases and darn near everything. Widgets, naturally, available.

Yep, just three. Why? Because I'm sure some of you out there have better ones, and if you do, drop a comment with them here.

Be Kind

It's depressingly easy to forget that what we're paid to do, as Tech Support people, is help other people with their problems. If you're lurking around Level 4 (see the Levels of Competency post previous) it's easy to get frustrated with just how much the people who are calling you do not know about computers, the internet, or whatever you're supporting.

Take a few moments and remember that everyone starts out as a newbie - everyone starts out not knowing the things you know.

Take a few moments, a deep breath, and Be Kind. It helps.

Levels of Competency

Tech Support folks spend 8 to 10 hours a day supporting a specific product or range of products. That's 40 hours a week, 160 hours a month, 1920 hours a year, not counting overtime.

It doesn't help that most of us in Tech Support are already up to our elbows in computer stuff most of our waking hours. We're so deep into it that we forget that not everyone else on the planet is in the same situation.

In on of the many training seminars I was asked (ok, required) to take presented me with "The Four Levels of Competency":

1. Unconsciously Incompetent: You don't know about something, and you're not even aware that you don't know about it. Anything you are not actively interested in, or that you've never heard of, you're at Level 1 already.



2. Consciously Incompetent: You know that something exists, and you're aware that you don't know a whole lot about it. Most folks you will ever deal with as a tech will fit into this category. There's a reason for that which I'll get into in a later post.



3. Consciously Competent: You know quite a bit about something, and even have a pretty good idea what areas you're not that savvy in. Every time you've ever had to start supporting a new product, you're soundly at level 3.



4. Unconsciously Competent: The subject is something you know inside and out. You eat, breathe, and sleep this subject. You have forgotten more about this subject than most people will ever know. Consequently, you forget that there are folks in the lower 3 levels who don't know as much about this subject as you do.

Most "Tech Support" humor on the internet resides at Level 4. Most smug, snide, condescending tech support reps are at Level 4. If your job is to communicate concepts to people who may not know as much about a subject as you do, Level 4 is a pretty common place to find yourself. I'd like to suggest you try moving back to Level 3.

Hey Noob - Write. Everything. Down.

The first thing I want to tell anyone getting into Tech Support is this:

Write. Everything. Down.

Tech Support as an industry has some of the least effective training of any industry out there.  Generally there's a week or so of "get familiar with the product" and then you're punted out into the deep end and left to fend for yourself.

Therefore: Write. Everything. Down.

Every time you learn a new diagnostic test, a new foible of the product, or come up with The Exact Right Words To Use in an email, save it somewhere. I use an online "notes" app for my boilerplate and how-tos since I can pull those up from a desktop widget (it also means I can get to it from any computer I'm on, which is useful if you're dealing with a 'sit anywhere' situation).

Writing Everything Down also means: If you can, Write It Down Where Your Coworkers Can Get To It. A common document dump, an online knowledge base, a WIKI-like editable web site: any of these can become an invaluable resource for everyone who supports the stuff you support, whether while you're working there or later when you've found something else to do.

Write. Everything. Down.

In a situation where you're in a Metrics-Obsessed-Managerial-Environment (MOME), writing down your casework also lets you provide hard numerical data for reviews, volume checks, projects and training.  If you have this stuff all written down, come Quarterly Review time. your email to your boss will take 10 minutes instead of an increasingly cranky half-hour.

Write. Everything. Down.

... Kind of like what I'm doing here.