A Customer Spends Months Asking IT for Help He Won’t Accept, but His Problems Suddenly Disappear When Managers Start Handling His Tickets
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It’s hard to help someone who complains about a problem but won’t even consider the solution you give them.
Today, we’ll meet a software admin whose team kept running into that with one particularly stubborn user.
After switching to a new system, the man kept complaining that his work took too long.
Yet whenever support showed him a faster way, he admitted it worked before deciding he’d rather keep doing things his way.
After six months of this, the admin took over his tickets with the IT manager. Suddenly, the man didn’t seem to need much help anymore.
Read on to see how it all played out.
The user who doesn’t want help.
I am a software admin in an industry that you’d swear would be on the cutting edge. And if you think about military contractors who develop some of the tech we all eventually benefit from, you’d be right… well, usually.
For those of us in the civilian sphere, though, change comes slowly, glacially even.
We recently transitioned from our 20-year-old primary platform to a new one. Six months of blood, sweat, tears, and some new gray hairs for me. But we got it done.
Unfortunately, many people prefer the old system.
Many of my users, though, were married to the old system and not happy with the change. Their objections were partly that it was different and partly that the new system no longer allowed our operation to behave like it was the Wild West. Nothing brings out user animosity like justified permissions restrictions.
One in particular loves to send in support tickets that consist mostly of vague complaints with little directional hints thrown in.
After many back-and-forth emails (it is mandated that we never do his initial troubleshooting over the phone for… reasons), my team can usually translate his vague complaints into an actual task he’s struggling with.
Every call with this customer usually goes the same way.
At this point, it is moved to a recorded call. The conversation from here generally goes as follows:
Support: If I understand you correctly, you are attempting X task, and it’s not happening as fast as you want.
User: Yes, it was so easy in the old system. Why can’t it be like the old system?
Support: I understand. Using a new system can be frustrating, but you know how unstable the old system was. You wouldn’t want us to continue using a system that puts (insert very VIP client here)’s data at risk because we didn’t upgrade? Let’s see what we can do for this issue. Are you completing process X via steps D, E, F, G, H, & I?
After a bit of troubleshooting, they always come up with a good solution.
User: Yes… (insert vague complaints again).
Support: While those steps do work, try steps A, B, C, and D. You should get the same results, but much faster.
User: That does work, and it is faster. (Tone should be as begrudging as possible.)
Support: Wonderful. Do you think that will help you complete task X more efficiently and reduce some of your frustration?
Then, he admitted his real issue.
User: No. I don’t like steps A–D. I’m going to do it the other way.
User: (Hangs up.)
We’ve been fully in the new system for 6-ish months now, and this call happens so frequently that I had to ban facepalming because my team was giving themselves bruises and starting to plot vengeance.
As of three weeks ago, his tickets are now exclusively directed to myself and our IT manager because, as soon as we respond, the answer is usually “never mind” because he knows we won’t tolerate his pretend incompetence.
Yikes. What’s the point of calling if that’s how he’s going to act?
Let’s check out what the folks over at Reddit think about this whole situation.
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This person has a few ways of dealing with that.
Here’s how this person would handle it.
That would be a great way to keep him from calling.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about an IT employee who thought a ticket was closed, only to hear otherwise from the client’s manager.
Yes! Exactly!
He sure spent a lot of time complaining for someone who didn’t want to do things any faster.
If he wants to keep using the longer process, fine, but that’s hardly something IT needs to fix.
And since he suddenly says “never mind” when the managers answer, he clearly knows what he’s doing.
They should’ve started sending his tickets to them months ago.
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