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Blowing Out The Dust

There’s an old adage from the world of tech support. Telling the truth, it seems, may be the worst thing you can do to the customer.

Microsoft blogger Raymond Chen explains how this lie works:

Sometimes you’re on the phone with somebody and you suspect that the problem is something as simple as forgetting to plug it in…Here’s the trick: Don’t ask “Are you sure it’s plugged in correctly?”

If you do this, they will get all insulted and say indignantly, “Of course it is! Do I look like an idiot?” without actually checking.

Instead, say “Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak. Could you unplug the connector, blow into it to get the dust out, then plug it back in?”

They will then crawl under the desk, find that they forgot to plug it in (or plugged it into the wrong port), blow out the dust, plug it in, and reply, “Um, yeah, that fixed it, thanks.”

Photo © Flickr User JonDissed

Lies are failures, but this lie gets the problem fixed where the truth would only make the customer angry.But blogger Jay Young thinks the cure is worse than the disease:

What I’ve seen over and over again is that the crackpot IT lies become truths, passed around either from customer to customer, or even worse, by front-line support staff because they don’t understand your products and services either and the developers/systems people just lied to them about what was wrong and what the solution was.

Those wrong answers pervade a long, long, time. And they often prevent the real triage from occurring.

…

At some point in this industry we have to start telling the truth.

These two extremes are balanced by Adi Avnit:

I think you need to walk a thin line between actually lying (“Okay, sometimes the connection gets a little dusty and the connection gets weak“) and phrasing your request in a way the customer will be offended by it (“Are you sure it’s plugged in correctly?”). You could say something like “Could you please unplug the connector and plug it back in?”.

And the more complex the problem is, the less you need to use subterfuge in order to have the customer’s cooperation.

It’s hard to know the right solution in this situation. Do we want to fail by offending the customer, fail by lying to the customer or fail by making our lies more severe for easier technical support issues?

All of these approaches have merit, because virtually all success is rooted in failure. Learn more in Failure: The Secret to Success!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.