This strip marks the second appearance of Chip. Do you remember his first?
What are some of the worst experiences YOU’ve had with telephone support? Whether on the giving or receiving end? Sound off in the comments below!
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-Krishna
The most annoying ting in telephone customer service is when you navigate the maze of prompts, are hanging on hold interminably, and then they drop your connection – so that you have to do it all over again.
Whenever possible, companies that do that to me are put on my personal blacklist of companies I will go to great lengths to not do business with again.
Who’s Chip? Kind of looks like Bob with a goatee
He’s related to Bob – but look at the hair!! and the Polo shirt. Definitely not Bob.
From a Support Perspective, most difficult caller? That would be the elderly gentleman with two detached retinas a 35″ LCD monitor and a magnifying glass, I kid you NOT! Due to his vision problem he kept fudging the colors and ended up with white text on a white background! This was prior to remote control abilities and it took me over three hours to get his colors reset to standard to solve the problem. Ended up using one of the high contrast settings afterwards. I really couldn’t even get mad at him because he was so damned polite and patient!
Phone support?
Check out this classic from Nerdcore Hip Hop artist MC Frontalot:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54paewuj2ho
Guaranteed laughs.
I did phone tech support for years… A few years doing a DOS based performance utility (PC-Kwik, if you’re familiar with them…) and a few years doing a high-end medical practice application, so I’ve had experience with a variety of customers…
One of the most memorable (especially since I’ve been bitching about the modern, cell phone version of it at work lately where all the guys bring their cell phones into the office washroom) was some guy who called from home expecting to be on hold a lot longer than he was, so he brought is speakerphone into the bathroom to kill his hold time doing something there…
I answered quicker than he expected and was still new at my job, so I kept politely trying to get him to hang up and call back when he was available to actually work on the problem at his computer… And I was afraid of what would happen if a customer ever called my boss to say I hung up on them…
So, I politely argued with him, while listening to all the sounds possible. I have this vision of a huge, fat, sweaty guy, based on the amount of grunting and groaning preceding each loud *plop* and *splash* followed by the panting and catching of breath.
My internet didn’t work, so I called the company and after half an hour got somebody on the line. I explained: “internet doesn’t work, I ensured every cable is connected, tried using another cable and another pc, but it still won’t work”. The answer: “Did you ensure you connected all cables? Maybe try another cable? Or even another PC?”