What is my target of the month?
Difficult cases that either requires a certain technical knowledge or potential “hard-to-deal” customers will be my target everyday since the beginning of the month. What is preventing me from taking the initiative to handle difficult support cases before this? I afraid of ‘Escalation’ process when the case on your hand has been requested by the customer to be handled by other Support Engineer and this easily happens in difficult support cases.

How do I get rid of this mindset? There are several things that come into my mind when I was asking myself with this question to review my scope in handling cases. The first question appears in my mind that also resolves this problem is “Have you ever tried to get rid of this mindset before this?” The answer is ‘No’. So, it means that I never go to the fullest all these time and how I can be so sure that I can’t handle challenging cases?

One of the reasons is to expose and communicates more with variety of customers, regardless of easygoing or grumpy customers. This is one of the methods to research and observe how the customer thinks and what kind of feedback or solutions (i.e. direct to the point, detailed step-by-step) that majority of the customers that require from us. It’s extremely difficult for IT people to think from user’s point of view. What is the main difference on how IT people and typical users think about a great system? Majority of IT people thinks that a great system should be implemented in high technology level. As for typical users, they have no idea of what high technology you had implemented behind of the system and how much effort that you had contributed in the system as long as the system is “EASY TO USE”.

IT field is a broad area that gives you the opportunity and exposure for new discoveries everyday. I used to handle similar area of cases and providing the same advice everyday. If one day you figured out that there is no more new discovery in your daily life and if you are working in this field, it’s time for you to find the ‘Spark’ in your job. I lost the ‘Spark’ because I’m providing the similar advice everyday which I had the familiarity. It’s no point doing the same thing and you had familiar with it. You are staying the standing at the same position everyday. You don’t even have a chance to gain any new knowledge and have any new discoveries in your daily job or even moving forward. It’s time to move on to the next level and find another ‘Spark’.

If you are not willing to do so, I encourage you to better move on now. Why I said so? When you had reached a certain level and you are lacking the knowledge that you suppose to have, you are experiencing a stage called “Knowledge Doesn’t Tally with Experience’. I guessed this is what I’m experiencing right now. Some people measuring your knowledge based on experiences. When you are being thrown with some basic questions by others and your experience telling them that you should know and if you can’t answer the questions, it indicates that you are experiencing that stage.

Weekly Customers’ Stories
As I had mentioned in my last week post, I will try to share out more about some funny or interesting stories about customers that I encountered during the entire week.

Nasty or Funny?
What I would like to share about the first customer is regarding with a nasty customer that had been discussed internally and I curious to know how nasty he is (I heard that he likes to play ‘Escalation’ game). However, without really looking into that detailed on his raised issue (it seems involving a lot of support engineers), there is something captured my interest. ‘Environment’ field is to be filled up by the customer to provide their system information (e.g. Operating System) in order to provide additional information to assists us in our investigation for the root cause of their raised issue. As for this nasty customer, he has filled up in the with “Windows – Yucks ”. What will be your first impression if you view the support issue? Do you feel this customer is trying to be funny or a friendly person? However, don’t judge the issue by its words. Some customers look nice in wordings but ends up by transferring their frustration to you. However, some customers sound frustrated and impolite in wordings but you can’t imagine that at least he/she will say “Thanks” to you as an appreciation for your help.

The Example is There, My Dear
This issue was escalated by my colleague that requires some development queries and why the code doesn’t work although the customer had followed the example provided in the documentation. In order to find the root cause, I need to test the code in my testing instance and find the solution for him as well. So, I left a comment as following (not an exact but similar scenario):

If you wish to implement this, you can try to add the following lines into the script:

…
Update tblsummary SET summary=”xxxx” where field_id=’10000’;
…

The tblsummary is the table that stores up all the information for that page and summary is the fieldname that you wish to update which is based on the field_id (e.g.10000).

I even provide documentation that includes with sample scripts. However, he replied to me as following:

I have problems with the field. I provided the screenshot that shows the error of invalid field_id. For your information, the ‘summary’ field is exist. Here is what I put in the script:

Update tblsummary SET summary=”xxxx” where field_id=’summary’;

For the next replies after that, I need to explain to him on how to find the id for the field and test every single field and provide him every piece of code for each field. In the end, he said thanks for all and now he has all the pieces for writing his first Java service now. Phew! Luckily, the suggested codes able to resolve the problem and he didn’t ask for any further assistance on how to write a Java service.