The New York Times - Hello, Tech Support? I Need a Hug

The New York Times

By Aaron Donovan

WOBURN, MA. -- The raised voice at the other end of the phone betrayed the caller's frustration. His new multimillion-dollar computer network was not working. "You guys support this system," he said."This is costing us millions. We need it up now!"

But the voice, which belongs to Rick Lavery, 28, was in fact not really on the phone, and he doesn't have a multimillion-dollar computer network. Mr. Lavery was playing a part before a room full of his peers at Genuity, a network services company based near Boston that provides technical support to medium-size and large businesses.

The role-playing was part of a daylong seminar run by Loyalty Factor, a small New Hampshire company that helps companies improve their customer service. Genuity hired Loyalty Factor to evaluate its technical service employees and to help them learn better ways of handling their often intense telephone interaction with their clients.

John Barrett, the Loyalty Factor instructor, asked the students how they should respond to Mr. Lavery's character. One of them, Hal Thornton, offered a suggestion: "Yes, sir, it is our responsibility to keep the system up and running. We are working to fix it." That, Mr. Barrett said, was the right answer.

People like the one Mr. Lavery played aren't just customers with a server problem. They are people with an observable -- and potentially useful -- psychological profile. Mr. Lavery, for example, could well be an Intuitor, an excitable kind of person who speaks loudly and quickly and who demands compliments and attention for his point of view. Or he might be someone whose main way of experiencing the world is through physical touch and therefore will respond well to words like "up and running" and "fix."

Loyalty Factor's seminar, a mix of role-playing and Psychology 101, does not teach service representatives how to solve technical problems. Instead it teaches them how to categorize their customers and empathize with them so that even if a service representative cannot fix a wonky server, at least he can soothe the client.

The strategy is the latest salvo in the struggle against the seemingly intractable problem of poor customer service. With all the changes wrought by the Internet revolution, one thing in the digital world remains remarkably consistent: the reputation of technical support employees as rude, abstruse and condescending. Everyone, it seems, has a story to tell about being left hanging on a technical support line or of being treated as not quite worthy of even owning a computer.

"They have this major problem of upsetting their customers by putting the customer down or not really understanding what the customer is saying," said Dianne Durkin, the president and founder of Loyalty Factor. "Or they jump to conclusions. They might hear a particular turn of phrase and say, 'Oh, I know what's wrong.'"

The characterization of the technical support person as an insensitive nerd is typified by Nick Burns, Your Company's Computer Guy, the obnoxious support representative played by Jimmy Fallon on "Saturday Night Live."

"The general perception is just like the 'Saturday Night Live' sketch," said Keith Shaw, a senior editor and columnist at Network World, a weekly trade magazine for people who maintain computer networks. "Probably most end users think help-desk people are geeky and mean-spirited sometimes."

Christopher Yetman, Genuity's vice president for technical support, said he had turned to Loyalty Factor because even though he felt that his employees did a good job keeping the networks operating smoothly, the effort was wasted if they left customers smarting from their conversations.

"The same skill sets that make us good with the technical details are not the same skill sets that help them communicate with the customer," he said.

At the seminar, 25 men and 5 women who provide technical support to clients at Genuity studied different personality types derived from the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the widely used psychological test, and received advice from Mr. Barrett of Loyalty Factor on how to deal with each one.

 

Thinkers. These individuals like to ponder before making a decision. They are exacting in their quest for knowledge and slow and methodical in their approach to a problem. Distinguishing characteristic: They tend to speak in a monotone. The advice from Mr. Barrett: To keep Thinkers happy, let them appear to win arguments on technical matters.

 

Sensors. These people gain knowledge of a problem through observation. They are results-oriented and like to be in control. Distinguishing characteristic: Their speech patterns tend to be melodic and variable. Advice: Present them with a list of options and let them choose how they would like to proceed. To gain their respect, talk about your company's proven track record.

 

Intuitors. Such people are enthusiastic and excitable and tend to put most faith in their own prior knowledge. Distinguishing characteristic: Their speech tends to be clear, fast and loud. Advice: Compliment them and show enthusiasm for their suggestions; intuitors crave recognition when they think they have a good idea.

 

Feelers. These individuals value an absence of conflict, sometimes even more than solving the problem at hand. Distinguishing characteristic: Low, slow speech. Advice: Be agreeable, knowing that even when the Feeler disagrees with you, he or she will probably trust and acquiesce to your judgment.

 

(Taking a test on paper, most of the students in the class proved to be Sensors and Thinkers, while only a handful were Feelers.)

The challenge, Mr. Barrett told the seminar participants, is to quickly determine what type of person you are dealing with and adjust your strategies accordingly. In phone conversations, he said, 82 percent of the impression people convey is through the quality of their voices and just 18 percent is through what they actually say.

"A lot of times you can tell just by their greeting," said Charlie Medeiros, a team leader at Genuity's customer support center who recently attended one of the seminars and has already put his training to use. "If we say 'Hello' and the first thing they say is 'Yeah,' you know they're going to be in a hurry."

The students were taught to listen for other underlying messages in customers' speech patterns. For example, if a client says, "I see what you mean," the important word is "see," which indicates that the client is probably visually oriented. Service representatives are taught to respond to such people with visually oriented phrases of their own.

So if the customer says, "I take a dim view of that approach," the employee should respond with something like, "This approach will shed new light."

"If you're a visual person," Ms. Durkin said, "and somebody is trying to answer you and they use an auditory word, the person isn't going to relate to that. You can get the person angry."

Besides teaching students how to handle different types of people, Loyalty Factor instructors offer tips that can ease the flow of any difficult conversation: use the person's name a lot, make sure that the volume of your voice is just below that of the client, don't use words that the client is unlikely to understand and succinctly restate the problem to show that you are listening carefully.

One way to get the upper hand in a friendly way is to ask an open-ended question that makes the customer pause and think. Asked to think of examples of such questions, seminar students suggested "Can you tell me what happened?'"'What have you changed?" and "Has this happened before?"

They also ruled out some questions, like "Is it plugged in?" and "Have you paid your bill?" Genuity managers reported that while some employees who took part in the seminar were initially skeptical about the benefit of doing so, most said that they would be able to use the techniques discussed.

"Some of these people missed Conversation 101," Mr. Lavery said. "They can be so involved in computers they forget how to deal with people."

Still, Genuity's customer service representatives were eager to defend their tribe. In response, Mr. Barrett told of a client who called up a technical support line to complain that his monitor screen had gone black. Eventually the customer mentioned to the service representative that the power had failed in his building. The representative instructed the customer to tell his boss that he was "too stupid" to operate a computer.

The moral of the story, Mr. Barrett noted, is that although that remark may have been therapeutic for the service representative, it was the wrong course of action. Besides, the representative was fired.

"He should have been promoted!" a Genuity employee interjected.

"That's management material!" another joked.