Eager to Code, Enjoy to Debug ~ Embark into Each Stage with Your Heart

I really believe every work will shape an individual’s thinking and affects the individual’s attitudes, either it is improving or it’s getting worse. For my personal opinion, if the work that you are doing able to sharpen your thinking skill, your attitudes will be improved as well. Attitudes improvement is the most important element that improves your work quality and if your attitude is getting worst, the efficiency and quality of your work will be dropping accordingly. You can imagine how the line graph looks like for the inter-relation of the attitudes, efficiency and quality.

Sometimes, when during the review for some of my previous cases, there will be several thinking comes into my mind:

1) “Is it me? I can’t believe I can do such a low quality of work!”

2) “Wow….I never thought that I can be that great in handling such difficult problem”

3) “Urgh…What a stupid question that I ever asked the customer. I probably was in the dreamland when doing this.”

4) “I can recall this customer…….” (Either the customer was very appreciated with your support or the customer has given you a hard life)

You can make a comparison of yourself between the current and the previous of you. Definitely you will learn a lot and figured out the different areas of your personal growth:

• Knowledge – how limited your knowledge at that time.
• Thinking – how fresh you just started your current work and your thinking not yet being built to familiar with it, how you see the issue at that time and how you see it right now.
• Attitudes – how you handle the problem at that time and what you will do if you handle it again? Probably you don’t know how to apologize with your mistakes at that time but you had learned how to be more responsible and have a better attitude if you handle it again.
• Advices – Recalling what you had learned and what the seniors had told you during that stage that you might forgotten after such a long time, how the seniors helped you to handle some tough customers and understand why the seniors asked you to do so if you can’t get the understanding at that time.
• Independent – Do you still depending that much to the seniors as last time for some of the scope that you weak on it?

Reviewing Several Improvement

>> Promises

Giving promises to customers is a quite risky thing. If you are not sure whether you will be able to make it, don’t try to give a promise by telling the customer that you will monitor closely the issue with other support engineers. However, once you had made the promise, please ensure that you will fulfill the promise instead of giving empty promises as this will affect company’s reputation and customer’s trusty to the support. You need to have the responsibility for every message that you deliver to the customer.

>> Understanding

Well, not all customers can easily get frustrated and lack of understanding. There was once when an issue has been closed and the customer came back with another question. Unfortunately, I only aware of this after two weeks when I was cleaning up some follow-up issues. I really apologized for the delay response because I really didn’t know he will come back with another question after the issue has been closed instead of raising a new issue. I provided him with the solution and apologized with explaining the reason of the unawareness. I really don’t mind if he comes back with scolding if he feels better by doing so.

Surprisingly, I got an unexpected response:

no problem  & thanks for comment.

I understand you people handle lots of tickets and there may be delay in response.

>> Learning Opportunity

I guessed every support engineers glad to see the issue has been resolved especially if the customer found the solution and resolved locally. I used to have an attitude and have a mixed feeling. I feel embarrassed that I can’t resolve the problem and the customer can resolve the issue by himself but at the same time, I feel happy to see the customer has resolved the issue locally and I can spend lesser time on him. However, this kind of working attitude doesn’t last long.

I feel such thinking seems a bit lack of responsibility and sounds like my job is to help you to resolve the problem and once you resolve it by yourself, I can close this issue and spend more time on other customers or grab as many issues as I can to hit the volume target. Let me change this kind of improper mindset.

Instead of proceeding to close the issue, I will ask the customer for his solution to resolve the problem and hope he doesn’t mind to share it out. For me, I don’t see myself as helping customers to resolve the problem for every issue. I see every issue as a discussion place and exchange knowledge. Not all customers are noob and some customers really have the technical background but they just require other kind of assistance to grab someone to discuss the problem in order to resolve the issue more efficiently. Besides that, I like to grab every opportunity from different ways to gain knowledge especially from customers so that I’m not only limited within my colleagues.

>> Detailed

Learn to analyze or “digest” every message that the customer delivers to you. If the customer is those type that unwilling to expose more of his system environment, you need to read and understand each sentence, each word, and also from the beginning until last. You need to appreciate his every single word like a golden word and remember that there are no more information that he will provide to you anymore except all the words in the problem descriptions and also his every feedback. If the customer willing to provide log files, try to scrutinize every error message of what it means especially the root cause. You can also check whether there are any previous cases reporting the similar issue and also don’t hesitate to perform some google work.

>> Modesty

Learn to talk in modest way doesn’t mean you need to accept every blames and faults even though the fault doesn’t fall on you. What you need to learn is to have different attitudes for different responses and also try to think what causes him to gets frustrated and probably any improper terms that you had accidentally used previously during the communication.

If the customer puts the blame on you although the fault does not lies on you, try to talk in modest way by explaining why you suggest such solution and how you found the root cause and workaround instead of showing the egoism to prove how right you are. If you had explained it before this, you need to use another different way to explain the similar workaround or better wordings in order to create a “fake” impression to him that you are providing another new workaround. Why I said so? I just figured out that there are some people might disagree with what you said and try to correct you but when you heard his explanation, the meaning is the same but it’s just another different way of presentation.

If the customer has strong egoism, don’t try to have egoism competition or try to prove that you are right and he’s wrong. Who cares who is right and who is wrong? The most important is to find the solution for the problem.

>> “Screenshots” Speak Louder than Words

Sometimes, I can’t replicate customer’s problem from my testing environment but he still keeps reporting the problem does exist in his application. Can you see the problem here? What’s the point of keep arguing or defending each other with this scenario: Customer keeps mentioning the problem is there and you keep explaining that there is no problem at all. Customers like proof and something more convincing. What you need to do is to convince him by showing the screenshots and this will definitely causes him to start his own investigation for his environment or any changes that he has made instead of just fully depending to the support team.

>> Correct me if I’m Wrong

Well, it’s definitely don’t feel good when someone correcting you if you had done a mistake. However, if you think from the customer point of view and the issue itself, you need to provide the best or the nearest workaround to the customer. If your workaround does not fit the requirements and someone willing to provide a better solution, this will save the situation from getting worse and also improve the quality of the work as a team.

>> Customer’s Point of View

It’s not hard to think from customer’s point of view. You can try to remember when was your last time learning new things and during the first time when you are not familiar with the system. If a customer asking the details for every provided step, you can try to recall when was the last time you learned something that used to be your biggest weakness and think some of stupid questions that you ever asked when you need help from someone.

>> Self-Motivated

Reviewing some of the previous cases or once in a while, try to spend some time to think back some of the work that you had done in the past really can help you to understand yourself more about how far you had grown and which area that still requires improvement. Besides that, if you are feeling that you had done badly in your recent work, reviewing some of your previous work can motivates you. You can feel that actually you had learned a lot compared with those days and you will remember some customers that were really appreciated and happy with your support. You will feel better and it’s not as worse as you thought but please don’t easily satisfied that might leads you to arrogance. Then, try to remember some customers that ever causes you to feel that you had done a damn lousy work

If you are wondering is there any weird issues raised by customers for a product support, your doubts probably can be clarified by what I’m going to tell you for what I had experienced for this week. Sometimes, I figured out that there is a different pattern for the scope of issues for certain period. There might be a list of issues for last week with majority of the cases were in the same topic. The popular topic for last week probably is regarding configuring mail server and related to emails. As for this week, the popular topic is performance issue which I guessed is the toughest level and requires certain level of skill to handle such issue.

Besides of the level of difficulty, another major reason is the priority which causes some support engineers trying to avoid of handling it if they don’t have the confidence. Performance issues require more time for information analysis such as logs, thread dump, CPU graph and also some experiences in using JProfiler and JMeter. You can imagine how much time you need to spend in analyzing the information which is hard for you to provide an immediate solution in such a short duration.

However, not all customers can be as understanding as you wish. This had happened for the entire week and it seems my task for this week is to handle customer’s chasing work, weird issues, and probably someone that playing a role that willing to lend an ear to listen to their complaints (just to make it sounds better).

Browser Feature Request or Raising a Bug?

A customer was asking why the pages are loading simultaneously when the links in the application are being opened in multiple tabs. I thought it is suppose to be one of browsers’ feature and everyone prefers to load the pages at the same time instead of waiting each page to be finished loading before loads another one (Please correct me if I’m wrong). I told her the same thing but she told me that other applications do not work in such way. I really certainly feel this is not related to the application itself. It’s more related to browser issue and how fast of each page finish loading depends on the server response time. During the interaction with the customer, I almost wanted to throw out another question “Do you think you need to review your question?” or “Do you know what are you trying to ask?” That sounds bad

How to Route Your Host via Phone?

During the live chat support, a customer was asking for assistance on how to configured subversion because he can’t see his commit message and I had given whatever information that I had known and requested all the relevant information to troubleshoot this. After several conversations, finally, he willing to provide the log files and requested me to wait for him so that I can provide him the solution immediately. That’s fine. I can give it a try.

After further investigation, the log shows the error message “No route to host”. If you google this error message with subversion, most of the suggested solution is to check the network connections. So, I told him that it’s related to network issues and it shows that the application can’t connect to the repository. He needs to check the network connections with his network administrator. In fact, that’s out of the support scope since it’s more related to the environment itself. He told me that he doesn’t have a network administrator and he asked me to provide him a solution for this.

I had provided a lot of troubleshooting steps such as checking whether it has been blocked by firewall but he asked me how to check this? For the entire conversation, he has been asking several times of having a phone support. If he’s requesting for phone support, why don’t I just initiate a request to go into his environment and check what’s going on? However, not much progress for that because I only able access to his installed application but I really don’t familiar with his network environment. I really don’t understand how phone support can be better than accessing to his environment since not much investigation can be done through there but he still requesting phone support.

After a few conversations, he gets frustrated and requests to escalate the issue since I can’t help him to resolve the problem. Instead of proceeding to close the chat, I apologized to him and told him that I will escalate the issue to a more experienced support engineer. In fact, I really don’t mind to escalate to someone else if there are others can provide better solutions and more experienced in handling such problem. I really hope he will accept it and the bubble thought that comes into my mind: “Release me from your problem and it will be good for both of us”. Unfortunately, he replied me “Let me pass you the control of the screen and can you try to check it for me again?”

Well, trapping in subversion issues is not the first time for me. I think I had familiarized with the trap.

Chasing…..

This week’s live chat trend is chasing issues’ progress. There was a customer asking the progress of his raised issue which related to performance. So, I tried to grab some other support engineers to review the issue and provide assistance. After two hours, the customer came back and still asking for the progress and I made another promise to him. In the end, it involves several participants to comment and providing different areas of solutions. I guessed I was lucky that the customer does not get frustrated when there is no update after the first chase.

Lend an Ear

Another chasing work happens again today for another performance issue. The customer gets angry and has escalated the issue for several times to get different support engineers to handle his case. Since there is a “fire” burning there, probably there is a need of “strategy” on how to calm him down and gain back his trusty:

1)      The first thing is to convince him that you are reviewing his case and check what’s going on. This is to show that you are also taking care of his case although you are not the support engineer that handling the issue.

2)      Tell him that you will contact the relevant parties or the support engineer that handles the case and see how it goes to ensure that you are starting to do your work and try to grab the person to response to the customer as soon as possible.

3)      Try to make him feel that you are “innocent” when he asks for immediate solution on the spot. Due to the reason that you are just starting to review his case, tell him that you need more time to investigate the problem which is hard to provide any immediate feedback for cases that requires troubleshooting.

4)      Another effort assurance is to tell him that you will grab more support engineers or discuss with others on how to resolve the problem.

He was so angry and complained to me about how irrelevant the support engineer requesting the information as he has provided all the important stuff at the first place. He wants an immediate solution for this.

5)      Explain to him the reason of the request to prevent misunderstanding in terms of communication between our side and customer.

He started to feel lost of trust when he told me that he has paid a lot for the product support and he expects better quality of support and currently this is not what he is expecting.

6)      Earn back his trusty by being humble. “Can you please give us another chance to handle this case and see how it goes? I will try to discuss with others to work together for this issue and will get back to you as soon as possible.” Try to ensure him that you will pass this case and highlight the priority to other support engineers that are on duty if you are off work.

So, he calms down and said thanks for that. Surprisingly, he even telling me that he willing to provide other stuff if we need more information from them. I never expect he will say this since he was so angry in the beginning.

7) Try to give a beautiful closing. Saying thanks to him in return for his patience and understanding for willing to give us another additional time to spend on his issue.

That’s the end of the conversation but after a few minutes, the support engineer that handles this case sent a message to me and said thanks for the “damage control”. I never expect the situation can be that worse based on the usage of the term “damage control”.