Answering customer service calls is never an easy job.

And when you’re working on a tech helpdesk, advising people who don’t truly understand their tech?

Well, things are about to get a whole lot harder.

The guy in this story was used to a tetchy caller, so he took a grouchy woman’s call in stride.

And by treating her like a human being, he actually ended up winning her over.

Read on to find out what happened.

Talking a caller off the (computer destruction) ledge

In the early 2000s, I worked at the helpdesk for one of the big insurance companies. We supported both corporate folks (on our campus) and small agencies across the country.

The knowledge management system was decent, and while it was there to guide us to the proper solutions, we were still expected to do our own troubleshooting and resolve what we could rather than escalate.

I’d been working there for over a year and was fully in the groove.

Oh, one more minor detail. Everyone in the company had a user ID to log into their computer and is what we used to track tickets. It was six characters consisting of their initials and three numbers.

Let’s see how this work drama got underway.

It was early afternoon sometime in the middle of the week, and one of the minor proprietary systems had stopped working. Call volume was up, but not “Monday morning password reset” levels.

I had handled a couple of calls that got attached to the ongoing issue, so all is relatively easy so far. I’m pretty sure that exact thought went through my head which is why I got the following call.

Me: “Thank you for calling the helpdesk. Can I have your user ID please?”

User: “My ID is A for annoyed, P for perturbed, D for displeased, 1, 2, 3.”

Yikes! Let’s see why this wobbly start gave him bad vibes.

There are warning signs to let you know that a call is going to be difficult. This one had flashing lights and sirens.

While I do not remember the specifics of that call, I do remember that this was her second call (with at least a 15 minute wait) for the same issues, as the first tech did not help.

None of her issues had anything to do with the system outage, and there were three separate issues, only one of which I could actually fix.

In total, the call lasted over thirty minutes.

And yet, this situation didn’t turn out as bad as he might’ve thought.

All of that would seem to add up to a really bad time, but I somehow managed to turn it around. I spent most of the beginning of the call apologizing for the original tech and somehow NOT bashing them as an idiot (while using much more colorful language in my head).

I talked her down enough to actually get an explanation of what was happening and created three separate tickets, only one of which I managed to close.

Despite everything, by the end of the call, we were joking around and she wasn’t planning on destroying her computer anymore.

The icing on the cake is that later that day she called back specifically to speak to a manager and I got my only service award from that job. Tier 1 helpdesk has always been a thankless job, but it is occasionally worth it.

This is a nice story of things actually being pleasant for a helpdesk advisor for a change.

It just goes to show that if you take the right approach, most people are generally quite reasonable and will respond well.

It’s lovely that she nominated him for an award too.

Let’s see how the Reddit community responded to this.

This person thought the employee did really well.

While others were encouraging of this empathetic and personable approach.

Meanwhile, this Redditor was amused by the throwaway anecdote.

This is customer service at its finest.

If you liked this post, check out this story about an employee who got revenge on a co-worker who kept grading their work suspiciously low.