Pet peeves when providing technical support: ... "your software doesn't work!"

[josborne]

Want to rant about your customers?

OK, so I am sure many of you end up in a situation where you have sold a system/application to a customer, and the customer calls you to request technical support.  Sometimes providing technical support can be a nightmare.  Here is my biggest pet peeve:

Customer:   Hello, what can I do for you?
Customer:     Your system doesn't work.

Me:  Oh, sorry to hear that.  So... what do you mean?

Cusomter:  I mean it doesn't work.

Me:  OK, but exactly what is happening?  

Customer:   I turn it on, and it doesn't work.

Me:   ARG!  OK, tell me EXACTLY what you see on the screen!  Tell me exactly what is happening, and send me a screenshot!

So maybe that conversation isn't all the humorous, but the old "it doesn't work" line is sooo useless.  I spend so much time digging to get useful debugging information.  My request to all my customers:  HELP ME TO HELP YOU!

What are your pet peeves when it comes to support?

[crossrulz]

I actually had a customer ask me to do their job for them because they couldn't figure something out.  <sarcasm>Sure, let me cut some time out of my super busy schedule to do your job for you.<\sarcasm>

And somewhat similar to your story, I worked with a guy who was using my drivers.  He came to me constantly saying "your code doesn't work".  So I went into the lab with him and he used these drivers in ways that I didn't even think was possible with the API I setup.  And the API couldn't have been any simpler.  "I want to turn the power supply on."  "Then why did you call the RESET case?"..."I can't talk to your FPGA."  "That's because you just closed it."  I wasn't the only one he did this to.  Apparently whenever he ran into any kind of issue he would refuse to spend 5 minutes troubleshooting and would just go blame whoever designed whatever he was attempting to use (UUT, test fixture, my drivers, the test rack).

[KathrynB]

The favourite from my customers (and I need to be careful as they could be on here) is often it doesn't work, when the hardware isn't switched on - usually because a third party has turned it off and not told anyone.

That or asking am I "familiar with our temperature controller, can it do XYZ", which is usually by followed "what kind of temperature controller is it? Who made it? What model?"

I think people often get so hung up in their world they can forget that people on support deal with more than just that one persons setup, especially when something goes wrong.

Best I ever had wasn't LabVIEW related, but two people running views on a database, one ran a big view which took all the data in, waited a couple of hours then processed the data, someone else in the meantime ran slightly more restrictive views (they put in an extra search term) and processed all the data in smaller chunks. The outcome, the data was processed twice, which was not a good thing, however, the fault obviously lay with the programmer (me) who had just altered the layout of the UI and not touched the underlying views of the database. Everyone involved got an explanation of what a view was, how they managed to do what they'd done, and just why it had happenned. The two who had succeeded in double processing the data were recommended to either talk to each other or cancel screens where they don't want to process data...

[SnowMule]

"Help.  I can't print." 

Of all the computer hardware out there, why are printers still stuck in the 1990s...

[altenbach]

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@SnowMule wrote:

Of all the computer hardware out there, why are printers still stuck in the 1990s...

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It actually was slightly worse in the 90'ies: PC LOAD LETTER.

[pallen]

This doesn't happen as often as it used to now that all my customers are awesome.  But, at one time the typical request for assistance was something like this.

Customer: The machine is down.  How soon can you get someone up here?

Me: What's wrong with the machine?

Customer: Your software is broken.

Me: But we haven't made any program changes for weeks.  When did the machine quit working?

Customer: Don't know.  Production is down. When are you coming?

Me: If the machine has been working all this time and then suddenly stopped, it's not going to be the program.

Customer: Nobody did anything to the machine.  It's the software and that's under warranty. 

Typically the conversation would go back and forth until I was able to determine that indeed some kind of work had been done on the equipment.  Often an over zealous "engineer" would attempt to decrease cycle time by altering all the carefully set pneumatic cylinder flow rates to wide open.   Or perhaps some other electrical work had been done that wasn't done correctly.

In all the cases that happened this way, the program was never the problem. 

[joaopam]

I don't know about you, but what really drives me insane is something like the following situation:

User: Hello, [input your application, hardware, etc., here] isn't working. Could you check it out?

Me: Sure, but what's happening? What's the error?

User: I don't know, it just doesn't work.

Me: Okay, but there's no error message?

User: It doesn't work.

Me: Ok, I'll be there as soon as I can. But I'm kind of busy now.

User: Ok but be fast, because this is really urgent (side note: it always is)

So you stop everything that you're doing and go check out what's happening. 

In the user's desk:
Me: So, what's going on?

User: Aw, that problem? Forget it, I've already fixed. Thanks.

An alternate to this ending is:
Me: So, what's going on?

User: Check it out and... Aw. Thats odd... It's working now. I swear that it wasn't before. Maybe it's just because you are here...

[Hooovahh]

LabVIEW sucks, it's so broken why would anyone use it?

But seriously in the past I've had customers that behaved similarly where they insisted it was software, so I book flights, rental cars, hotels and travel there.  Then it turns out it wasn't software.  Few weeks later the same thing so this time it was agreed that if the issue wasn't software they would pay for the trip, with all expenses, and a hefty hourly rate.  It was not software, and from then on they only called if they had done troubleshooting them selves.

[JÞB]

I reciently had this sort of experience:

Customer: All the data is missing! You broke it

Me: Please join my GotoMeeting so I can see what you see.

Me: That looks like data to me.

Customer: Data4 is GONE!!!!

(Gotomeeting note: Issue: Data4 is missing)

Me: OK, I see that,  Pass me mouse and Keyboard please.

I Un-colapsed col D. 

Me: Is that Better?

Customer" Oh! Yes that'll do it THANKS!

(GotoMeeting Note Un-colapsing ColD Resolved "Missing" Data4 issue)

Me: Anything else I can help you with?

Customer: No that fixed it

Me OK I'll send you the gotomeeting notes via e-mail and log this issue resolved.  Thank you for your cooperation!

<Actually it was a column in the TestStand Step Settings table but the above illustrates the situation>

The Point-  See what they See.

[Hornless.Rhino]

At least they said thank you 🙂