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Our phone system had intelligent routing so if you were disconnected mid call or calling about the same reference number (you entered it in the IVR), it would try to direct you to the person you talked to last time (i.e. if they were available). Seemed to work quite well. Nothing worse than having to explain your problem twice to two different people.
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Aug 11, 2014 08:33
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Javid posted:If he's just a phone guy, why does it matter if he's on the phone with you vs. someone else, unless you in particular are an rear end in a top hat or something? It sets an expectation that the agent will be at their beck and call to drop whatever they are doing to assist them. Also, customers who are inclined to do this invariably have some form of special snowflake syndrome which makes dealing with them even more irksome. What the last poster said is fine though.
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Aug 11, 2014 08:40
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hanyolo posted:Our phone system had intelligent routing so if you were disconnected mid call or calling about the same reference number (you entered it in the IVR), it would try to direct you to the person you talked to last time (i.e. if they were available). Seemed to work quite well. Nothing worse than having to explain your problem twice to two different people. Every call center should do this.
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Aug 11, 2014 09:28
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spankmeister posted:Every call center should do this. It can be a complete shitemare to do which is why most companies can't be bothered.
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Aug 11, 2014 10:02
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Javid posted:If he's just a phone guy, why does it matter if he's on the phone with you vs. someone else, unless you in particular are an rear end in a top hat or something? Because every customer I had that was asking for me invariably ended up expecting that I'd do more for them, or that i'd bend the rules or that i'd bump them to the top of the queue because I "knew" them. Go ahead and do it if you'd like, but literally every single person I spoke to who asked for me thought i'd bend the rules for them eventually. You also get the problem of smaller callcenters where if one guy gets asked for all the time, you get periods where everyone has less work than the guy who "knows his poo poo" which sucks for that guy. Personal experience here, anecdotal evidence and all. But i'd really prefer it if people didn't do that.
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Aug 11, 2014 11:42
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skooky posted:It sets an expectation that the agent will be at their beck and call to drop whatever they are doing to assist them. They also waste time by wanting to stay on hold or keep calling back so they can speak to that person when it's an issue that could be dealt with by anyone.
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Aug 11, 2014 11:51
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dogstile posted:Because every customer I had that was asking for me invariably ended up expecting that I'd do more for them, or that i'd bend the rules or that i'd bump them to the top of the queue because I "knew" them. ^ This. I have a few guys doing this to me via E-Mail and unfortunately due to our policies I'm required to keep the case open as long as they E-Mail me and I can't just tell them to "just call in, I'm too busy because I got other customers like you that are expecting me to be their personal tech." Also we don't have that IVR thing (but holy HELL do we need it and I'm suggesting that asap.)
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Aug 11, 2014 14:11
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Malek posted:Also we don't have that IVR thing (but holy HELL do we need it and I'm suggesting that asap.) We used to have this one shithead that would always tell the customer "Just reboot and if it doesn't work call back" because the 2-5 minute wait was too much for him. This same shithead would log out of the queue to do homework and give out our direct extensions. An intelligent guy that was just a horrible coworker.
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Aug 11, 2014 19:05
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A laptop came in... over the weekend, while we were closed. Now, this laptop is beat all to hell and has been for a while. Its owner is going away for a week. What would a sane person do in these circumstances? 1. Drop the laptop off before the weekend. 2. Sigh, and deal with the laptop being beat to poo poo for a week since he's already had it in that state for a while. 3. Take it to a different repair shop. What does this guy do? Well, he took it to the pizza place across the street and hoisted it off on them while they were in the middle of taking an order from someone else so they couldn't tell him to gently caress off, then ran off and left us a voicemail telling us what he'd done.  Apparently this dude's been a problem for a while, but this is my first run-in with him and I'm already on the verge of telling him to gently caress off and refusing him service.
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Aug 11, 2014 20:46
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President Ark posted:A laptop came in... over the weekend, while we were closed. Sounds like the laptop should go missing. When he complains to the pizza place that they stole it just have someone tell him he's a loving moron for leaving his laptop unattended.
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Aug 11, 2014 20:51
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Ahaha so he left it with some guys at a pizza place in the hopes they would deliver it for him once your office opened back up? That's some ballsy poo poo right there.
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Aug 11, 2014 20:52
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Sirotan posted:Ahaha so he left it with some guys at a pizza place in the hopes they would deliver it for him once your office opened back up? Correction: In the hopes that we'd go get it from them
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Aug 11, 2014 20:54
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President Ark posted:Correction: In the hopes that we'd go get it from them "I'm sorry sir, we went across the street to retrieve the laptop but someone had already picked it up. We just assumed you had returned to get it."
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Aug 11, 2014 20:55
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President Ark posted:Correction: In the hopes that we'd go get it from them Just don't go get it, leave it with the pizza place and let him go pick it up and deliver it to you if he still wants it fixed.
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Aug 11, 2014 20:56
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Too late, we already have it. Of course, we then called him and he refused 90% of the service because it was too expensive, so it gets to sit on the bench for a week
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Aug 11, 2014 20:58
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Today has been only high-level, challenging I.T. work: User reports monitor won't come out of sleep mode. PC was turned off. User reports iPhone not syncing Exchange calendar. Instructed user to turn calendar sync off, restart phone and turn calendar sync back on. User deletes Exchange account from phone, needs account re-added. SVP secretary reports SVP's color printer has unknown issue, won't print in color. All three color cartridges empty, printer display reads "NO COLOR TONER, PRINTING B&W ONLY"
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Aug 11, 2014 20:58
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President Ark posted:Too late, we already have it. Slip a pepperoni into the CD tray.
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Aug 11, 2014 20:58
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m.hache posted:Slip a pepperoni into the CD tray. Is that a euphemism? 
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Aug 11, 2014 21:00
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President Ark posted:Too late, we already have it. How many toppings are you going to bake into the lid?
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Aug 11, 2014 21:00
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m.hache posted:Sounds like the laptop should go missing. When he complains to the pizza place that they stole it just have someone tell him he's a loving moron for leaving his laptop unattended. Agree. If there's no proof that he dropped it off with the pizza place, they should have just kept it. I sent out an escalation today. A set top box I was remotely accessing had a black screen on all channels and something was obvious wrong with the box. Resolution: Pressed the power button. I am the special user  7:30AM on a Monday will do that to you.
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Aug 11, 2014 21:02
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When he comes to pick it up you should just give him an empty pizza box with a keyboard and a screen drawn on the inside.
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Aug 11, 2014 21:03
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Fellatio del Toro posted:When he comes to pick it up you should just give him an empty pizza box with a keyboard and a screen drawn on the inside. p-p-p-powerbook v2 e: p-p-p-pepperonibook
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Aug 11, 2014 21:06
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President Ark posted:Is that a euphemism? It is now.
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Aug 11, 2014 21:12
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…from Facebook. My boss got two emails from people about a faculty member who needed her school password changed and, instead of calling the help desk, posted on Facebook. These users make advanced degrees seem meaningless.
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Aug 11, 2014 21:29
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One thing I can't stand is people who don't tell you about a problem that's been ongoing for a long time, and expect you to treat it like an emergency. Cases in point (both from one client): - User has a problem with their iMac - some apps open slow and a few are giving him errors. I can't find the system in our remote tool so I end up going on site. iTunes is giving a message about the version being incomplete or corrupt, after some quick Googling I got that fixed. That turned into requesting that 2 network printers be installed that the guy didn't have, he was handing work to someone else to print off instead of asking us to help out. I ask when some of his issues started, thinking that a recent power outage at their office could have contributed. Nope, problems have been happening for over a month and he just now decided to complain to his boss, who complained to us to fix it. - Same user had an older Mac Pro about 6 months back that had a bad video card in it. He sent me video taken with his phone of the screen corruption he was seeing, and pictures of the system serial number. Turns out not only is the hardware out of warranty by at least 3 years, the version of Mac OS is also behind (he was on 10.6.8, current is 10.9). Call Apple, they won't touch it because the OS isn't supported and the hardware is past warranty. I pass that info along to user and his boss, get no response for a week. User's boss calls and emails in PISSED off that the machine still isn't fixed, I show him the emails and let him know what I'd told the user, he's still upset and trying to hold me accountable. I find a local shop in town that's Mac certified for hardware/software, suggest they take it there since it's out of warranty and no Apple Store will touch it. What does the idiot do? Drives 30 minutes across town to an Apple Store only to find out they won't touch it, then drives back to the store I told him to go to, and gets even MORE upset that he had to wait almost 2 hours and spend over $500 on repair work. I become fairly certain that said boss and his underling are borderline retarded. - Same boss calls us last week about an Adobe issue he and others are having - they've seen random errors recently and weren't sure what caused them. I asked for more info, just get a vague response about how Adobe apps will randomly give error messages. Ask how long it's been happening..."oh, it's been going on for a couple years now, since before we used your company as our MSP, but it's been more frequent lately."  I swear if I had my way, we'd drop these idiots like hot crap. Doesn't help that ~95% of their hardware is past expiration and they refuse to spend any more than bare minimum to duct tape and band-aid everything to keep it running. BOOTY-ADE fucked around with this message at 22:35 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 22:33
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A user walked into my office two minutes before I was going to walk out the door to ask if any boxes from UPS had shown up with lone hard drives inside of them. Why no they haven't and why are you asking? Oh it's just that Joe Blow left their external hard drive in a hotel room and had the hotel ship it back to him. Only he never got it. And it's been missing for ALMOST TWO MONTHS NOW. Are you loving kidding me?? "Luckily" due to Joe Blow's position he "probably" didn't have access to any patient information. And his manager is insisting that it's a personal drive. Yeah ok then why charge the company card to get your personal poo poo back? I'm sure at some point he plugged the thing into our network. That is the extent of the information I have since I was out the door and Joe Blow is off at some conference somewhere. I called my boss to give him a heads up. He was pissed. We'll be chatting about it tomorrow since I guess after 1.5 months another day isn't going to make much of a difference!!!  (This is how I ended my day after coming back from a 12 day vacation. Yay!) Sirotan fucked around with this message at 22:44 on Aug 11, 2014 |
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Aug 11, 2014 22:41
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Ticket came in this morning where database backups were running for 30+ hours on a client system. Now we support our software on their servers that host a database, we dont support their hardware. I jump in and confirm via job history that jobs started running for 30+ hours so I asked them if this happens in their test environment too. They say yes so I RDP to that and while im doing that they tell me that their testing environment is also on the same SAN and physical host as their production system... So I ask if I can kick off the backup manually so I can see what happens when it runs, they agree so I kick it off and start watching things like perfmon, resource monitor and SQL activity monitor. I notice that their disk response time across all 3 of those monitoring tools are spiking at 2000ms. I point this out but they disagree about it being a hardware issue. OK fine ill look at the SQL logs and there are errors about disk io taking longer than 15 seconds to respond... They still want to argue that its not their hardware so I say fine let me get my manager to confirm. I bring my manager over and he confirms and backs me up 100% saying that as of now it looks like the host or SAN is struggling and they needed to look at it. They hung up on us and didn't bother again. I know that sometimes issues like that might be caused by software but we have limited access to their environment and dont have access to the SAN/Host so for now all I could do is point out the storage issues.
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Aug 12, 2014 02:59
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Dick Trauma posted:Today has been only high-level, challenging I.T. work: Solution: Document is in fact opening in viewer, but nothing is showing. Scrolled down past white space on the top of document to where the content was. Then I got to have this conversation: "So is there any way I can edit this document" "You'd need the full version of Visio, which costs money. I'll check if we have any spare licenses available." "But I can't, like, open it in Word somehow?" "No, you'd need the full version of Visio." "...What about Powerpoint?"
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Aug 12, 2014 03:45
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Sometimes you really just get the best tickets. Customer calls and complains about a "line on the screen" on a laptop, check the serial number and it's out of warranty, has been for about a year even with 3 years extended warranty. Ask customer to send in a picture of the screen to see if I can still help some way since they say it's been like that since they got it. The line is thick as gently caress and completely obscures the left part of the screen, the start menu is inaccessible. Somehow I find it hard to believe someone has been using this computer for 4 years without noticing or complaining about it. Then, a tech calls in with a ticket, I check it and it's a desktop that no longer powers on, issue description "No response when pressing power button, no leds, no fan, no hdd activity", I had sent the tech with a motherboard and PSU to get that computer going again. The tech then tells me "Yeah, so the computer boots fine, the monitor is dead." I want to get to a place where I can start looking at the computers myself because I can't handle poo poo like this when people can not tell apart the computer from the monitor and everybody's time gets wasted. We actually had one customer call in because our tech was "intimidating" when he discovered that a laptop that also wasn't powering on just needed the battery re-seated. Guess what you always ask a customer if a laptop doesn't power on, the one thing that is always in every laptop ticket if it doesn't power on? "Customer re-seated battery but issues persist"
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Aug 12, 2014 08:20
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Knormal posted:I had one of these today. User reports Visio document won't open. His PC doesn't have Visio but the crappy free viewer/IE plugin should be on every PC in the department. LibreOffice apparently supports vdx/vsdx files (http://fridrich.blogspot.ch/2012/12/libreoffice-visio-import-filter-20.html)
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Aug 12, 2014 12:29
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I'm not sure where to ask this, but I figured I'd get a decent response here. I'm new to this infrastructure role, and I've never dealt with backups at all before. The company I work for has a number of small remote locations dotted around the world, and most of them have on site tape based backups. They are M-F with month end records. The amount of data is low, 500 GB for a whole local backup. My boss is considering replacing them with USB based storage via VEEM. Using a similar set up of USB HDD for M-F and month end. My initial opinion is that HDD isn't reliable enough for a backup, but he argues that by keeping a serious of 10-15 HDD rolling backups, it wouldn't be an issue if one failed, because in the event of needing to enact DR and drive failure, you'd still have a previous week to roll back to. What do you guys think? Is there somewhere I can look up best practices for USB based backups?
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Aug 12, 2014 13:06
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LordVorbis posted:My boss is considering replacing them with USB based storage via VEEM. Do you mean Veeam? Are these all virtual machines? Veeam doesn't do physical servers. If they are VMs, you're probably better switching to Veeam and sticking with the tapes for now until you get some centralized storage. At that point, back them all up to the central storage - once the initial full is done, every backup is just a delta so it should be doable even on slower connections. The USB thing is dumb. You'd have to do a full every night, or one dead hard drive would break the backup chain. edit: well, you could do differentials, but still, it's dumb.
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Aug 12, 2014 13:52
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LordVorbis posted:What do you guys think? Is there somewhere I can look up best practices for USB based backups? Right here: Don't! Easy as that.
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Aug 12, 2014 14:10
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LordVorbis posted:I'm not sure where to ask this, but I figured I'd get a decent response here. We now run a similar system after having fairly regular tape drive issues (doing zinc plating on site puts some weird poo poo in the air that cleaning tapes can't seem to cope with). External hard disks are cheap as balls now, and you can get dozens for the price of a single tape drive. Our system has 2 sets of disks: A daily set of 8 x 1TB, which run Mon-Thurs on a two week rotation. We backup critical VMs to those every weekday (ERP, mail, user files). A weekly set of 5 x 2TB, which run every Friday and performs a full bare metal backup with everything. The most recent 2-3 disks from each set are kept offsite. Realistically, the worst case scenario is the non-critical VMs such as terminal servers go back a week or two, but our critical stuff always has multiple backups a week. We're about to start uploading the ERP database (15gb) to another site each night as another layer of protection.
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Aug 12, 2014 15:18
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Erwin posted:Do you mean Veeam? Are these all virtual machines? Veeam doesn't do physical servers. If they are VMs, you're probably better switching to Veeam and sticking with the tapes for now until you get some centralized storage. At that point, back them all up to the central storage - once the initial full is done, every backup is just a delta so it should be doable even on slower connections. Yeah, Veeam. And all are virtual I believe. As for USB being dumb, what I want to understand, is exactly why. Like, I could with a paper or something to read that explains precisely how tapes work, why tapes are better, and what the risks are with using USB. It isn't something that I've come across previously (been 100% support focused) so I'm not sure how to pitch the case to buy this replacement tape server for an offsite location, when (in his eyes) HDD are cheaper and do exactly the same job.
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Aug 12, 2014 15:33
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Once again one of the "team leads" on the production floor has decided to make herself a pain in the rear end. She is one of two or three people in the building who refuse to use e-mail when they have a computer issue. Instead they insist on using the overhead page system. It doesn't matter how big or small the problem is they just immediately page for someone to come and help. Someone forgot their password? Page. Computer is slow? Page. Thin Client won't turn on? Page. It wouldn't bother me so much if 95% of the time their pages weren't for stupid bullshit that could be handled with an e-mail or just a team lead actually double checking what their employee was doing. And of course my boss refuses to do anything about it. He's halfheartedly mentioned it a few times to the offenders but he views everyone as "customers" and has the whole "The customer is always right" mentality...
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Aug 12, 2014 15:35
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LordVorbis posted:I'm not sure where to ask this, but I figured I'd get a decent response here. Never rely on a single point of failure for your backups. A USB disk probably isn't as reliable as tapes, especially for long-term storage, but failure rates exist for both. You should have one copy on-site and another off-site.
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Aug 12, 2014 15:37
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Seravadon posted:Once again one of the "team leads" on the production floor has decided to make herself a pain in the rear end. She is one of two or three people in the building who refuse to use e-mail when they have a computer issue. Instead they insist on using the overhead page system. It doesn't matter how big or small the problem is they just immediately page for someone to come and help. Do you have access to the paging system? Can you just start troubleshooting the issue via page?
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Aug 12, 2014 15:41
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"So, you want me to find a file that you don't know the name of, was created by somebody who's left, was possibly stored in a location you don't know and think it was made in 2012?" "That's about it." "You can see my consternation here?" ---- Afterwards someone else in the office walked up and said "I'm never coming to you with a stupid computer question." Win/Win I guess!
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Aug 12, 2014 16:06
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LordVorbis posted:"So, you want me to find a file that you don't know the name of, was created by somebody who's left, was possibly stored in a location you don't know and think it was made in 2012?" I guess, unfortunately, smart computer questions are still allowed 
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Aug 12, 2014 16:34
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