Call Center Techs Have Heard It All
When twinkling holiday lights give way to a blinking cursor on a persistently black screen, technology reveals itself as the beast it truly is. And the only person who seems to care is a disembodied voice at the other end of a toll-free line.
Fatal errors? Frozen screens? Corrupt files? The folks in tech support have heard it all--from the seamstress who used her mouse as a foot pedal to the folks who look vainly for the “any” key. These faceless lifeguards of the new economy make technology tolerable--even comprehensible--to millions of neophytes dipping their toes into the icy waters of the digital era.
The computer cognoscenti might laugh off tech support as an oxymoron. But for every story veterans have about a call center tech who made a problem worse, those fielding the inquiries have 20 about first-time users desperately in search of a clue.
And at no time of year are call centers busier than right now, after gifts have been exchanged and the task of making the stuff work falls in mortal hands. Gateway Inc., which normally fields about 25,000 calls a day through its call centers, sees a 50% surge in inquiries in the two weeks after Christmas and Hanukkah. Nintendo draws 200,000 calls the week after Christmas, nearly three times its average weekly load.
Shannon O’Neil, a “Super Agent” with Nintendo’s call center in Redmond, Wash., recalled one man who called in asking why his Nintendo 64 video game console didn’t work. The man had placed the console on top of his television, thinking the “pictures would fall into his TV set,” O’Neil recalled. “He couldn’t understand what all those cables were doing there.”
O’Neil spent nearly 30 minutes with another caller before discovering the source of the problem--the caller’s fraternity brothers as a prank had installed the Clapper to the console’s power plug. O’Neil instructed the caller to clap his hands, and, voila, the console switched on.
Not all inquiries involve technical problems. One mother called O’Neil desperate to get a replacement stuffed Pokemon toy for her autistic daughter. The family dog had chewed up the old toy, and the mother didn’t have the heart to break the news.
“Every morning, the kid would wake up and look all over the house for this toy,” O’Neil said. “So I took the mother’s name and address down, and I looked around our company for the toy. I was able to find it, and I overnighted it to her. She was so happy that she wrote us this three-page letter and sent us a photo of her daughter. I actually have that picture at my desk. The little girl had signed it, ‘Me.’ ”
At Compaq Computer Corp. in Houston, call center workers were familiar with a woman from Alaska who called three or four times a week, usually late at night, said Ann Day, a Compaq manager of customer services. It wasn’t because there were any problems with her computer. She was just lonely, Day said.
The human element adds a wild card to technology that otherwise works flawlessly--in a lab.
“We often forget that there are people out there who are just not as familiar with technology,” said Denis Ludders, director of support at Gateway’s help center in North Sioux City, S.D.
“You’d walk someone through a computer setup, and you tell them to close a window” on their computer desktop, “and you’d hear them shut their windows,” Ludders said. “They will do what you say. It brings us back to Earth.”
Another customer, when asked to open his CD-ROM drive, remarked, “I can’t believe you guys put a cup-holder in here. You guys thought of everything!”
Some problems aren’t obvious. One woman several years ago purchased a new computer and installed about 10 programs on Christmas Eve as a surprise for her family. The next morning, the computer crashed. It turned out many of the programs conflicted with one another.
“The computer had to be rebuilt,” said Greg Lund, a Gateway spokesman. “She basically spent Christmas over the phone with our tech people. She called in the morning, and she must have been on the call until 5 p.m.”
In addition to humans, call centers have to deal with problems stemming from things like, oh, war.
“One soldier from the Gulf War sent us a Game Boy [hand-held video game console] that was hit by a Scud missile. The buttons were melted together, but, other than that, it was working just fine,” O’Neil said.
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Times staff writer Alex Pham covers technology.
