I'm having one of those days when I'm certain there is no hope for humanity.

The following is a ticket that's been going on far too long. I've fixed the bad spelling, simply because it was making me almost as insane as the lack of information.

Ticket: I'm having trouble with my email
Reply: What sort of trouble? We need as much detail as possible in order to assist.

Ticket: Its not working
Reply: What about your email is not working? Can you send but not receive? Receive but not send? What is the error message? What are you using for incoming/outgoing email? What are you using for email username?

Ticket: Its just not working anymore at all
Reply: Please answer the following important questions so that we can troubleshoot this for you. (questions repeated)

Ticket: Look, my email stopped working yesterday. I don't know why and I don't have the information you keep asking. Someone else set this up for me. Fix it because I have important email I need to get to!
Reply: I've tested your account and, from everything I see, it appears to be working fine. Can you get the person who set this up for you to take a look at your email and/or maybe reply to this ticket with more information?

Ticket: No! I can't! It was working fine yesterday and now it isn't. If you can't fix this then please tell me who can!
Reply: I understand your frustration, really I do. I don't see a problem on this end. I am able to log into your account just fine and I don't know what settings you have on your computer so I can't really help you until I get that information.

Ticket: Stop reading my email! I never said you could log into my email! There is important email in there that you should not be reading and email that I need to get immediately! Either fix this problem or forward my email to (gives me an email address we don't have on file and have no way to know if its him or not).
Reply: I didn't read your email, I promise. I just connected to your account and verified that it was working. I can't forward email to that address, for security reasons. If you can log into our billing department and update the email address we have on file to the email address you want your email forwarded to, I can take care of that for you.

Ticket: What does billing have to do with my email??? How many people at your company are reading my email???? You talk about security but everyone is reading my email except for me!!!
Reply: Billing has your email address, not email, on file which proves who you are. If you log in there and update it, then I will know that it is okay to forward your email.

Ticket: You keep running me around in circles. All I want is to read my email. This is costing me a fortune because I can't read my email.
Reply: I'm sorry you are frustrated. I am more than happy to help you. Please reply with either the information requested before or to tell me that you've updated your email address on file with us. Those are the only two solutions I can offer you. I will wait for this information.

(I intend on answering any other reply that isn't what I asked for with a copy/paste of my last reply)

As always, some customers never realize that hosts are human too. They expect miracles all the time!!

To be honest, I don't think I would of kept my sanity as long as you. I'd love to know how that ticket ends. :D

My first guess is that it's not the owner of the account, or he would have been able to answer most of the questions.

He's the owner, but I think his webdesigner set it up for him. I actually chatted with him in our support room several times during all of this as well...it wasn't any easier. :P

--Tina

Ouch. If I can make a suggestion though, and assuming this doesn't violate your own internal policies, it may be worth calling him to go through his email settings. I've often found that a 10 minute 30 cent phone call can alleviate hours of frustration for both parties where non-functional email is concerned. 90% of the time it's a typo in the username/password/mailserver name, a rogue firewall/anti-virus setting, or their ISP has started blocking port 25. Much easier to validate his settings in real time on the phone and probably more cost effective for you ultimately.

My $0.02. Put it towards the cost of the call :D

Simon.

definitely make sure you ask him if the caps lock is off!! :D
have had a couple of people that didn't realize it was on....of course throwing their user/passwords off.

Originally posted by AQHost
Ouch. If I can make a suggestion though, and assuming this doesn't violate your own internal policies, it may be worth calling him to go through his email settings. I've often found that a 10 minute 30 cent phone call can alleviate hours of frustration for both parties where non-functional email is concerned. 90% of the time it's a typo in the username/password/mailserver name, a rogue firewall/anti-virus setting, or their ISP has started blocking port 25. Much easier to validate his settings in real time on the phone and probably more cost effective for you ultimately.

My $0.02. Put it towards the cost of the call :D

Simon.

Simon,
While i am not the thread starter, my question is , yes it would be easy if someon called the customer and clear it out, but how long are you going to spoon feed the customer. The problem comes when the customer may get dependant on you for every small change and would take for granted that its your responsibility. Besides, lets say you have 1000 customers and by a freak statistical probablity, 800 have problems with their emails. If you had to sit down and call each customer to help out with their problems and on a very conservative scale i say that it costs $1 for every customer (including your time which may be much more valuable than that) then you just spent $800 on problem resolution thereby throwing your economies of scale out of the window just by 1 day. Just an observation...

Wow, that is interesting. I'm not going to lie Tina, but that was funny reading his responses. :laugh: I am a highly impatient person, however there is a fine line between impatience, and just plain mean. I am glad I havn't had a client like that yet. Whew!

Originally posted by ajitknox
Simon,
While i am not the thread starter, my question is , yes it would be easy if someon called the customer and clear it out, but how long are you going to spoon feed the customer. The problem comes when the customer may get dependant on you for every small change and would take for granted that its your responsibility. Besides, lets say you have 1000 customers and by a freak statistical probablity, 800 have problems with their emails. If you had to sit down and call each customer to help out with their problems and on a very conservative scale i say that it costs $1 for every customer (including your time which may be much more valuable than that) then you just spent $800 on problem resolution thereby throwing your economies of scale out of the window just by 1 day. Just an observation...

Well first of all in the event that 80% of your users had email problems I'd venture to suggest that you had a wider issue than just providing them with support. To reverse the point how long would it take you to go through 800 support tickets like that one, and what would that do to your economies of scale?

In this case though we were talking about 1 user not 800, and clearly that 1 user had no clue what he was doing. In that specific instance, based on that specific conversation, a phone call might have been quicker and less stressful all around. It's easy enough to explain that this is a one-off call to assist with this particular problem and that all future incidents must be dealt with via the helpdesk. Certainly no-one has taken advantage on the occasions when I've made such a call and the result is generally a very happy customer.

Simon.

I'll send him your way. :D

--Tina

Originally posted by AQHost
Well first of all in the event that 80% of your users had email problems I'd venture to suggest that you had a wider issue than just providing them with support. To reverse the point how long would it take you to go through 800 support tickets like that one, and what would that do to your economies of scale?


Simon.

If the email is working i would issue an email broadcast to the customers informing them of the situation. If there are email problems, then i would post a message on our website and a message on our phone system. That way we dont have to deal with 800 tickets. A phone call may support your model but what i was coming at is sometimes it may be too expensive for you to do it. Its just my opinion..

Originally posted by AH-Tina
I'll send him your way. :D

--Tina

Ah. Ermmm. Hmmmm. Forget I said anything ok? :D

I had a customer that had similar email problems, they stopped receiving all of their email. So they were not able to receive any of the ticket responses. Finally, I had to call the customer (Cell phone, free long distance, :)). It turned out that they had mailwasher pro installed as a spam filter, and it was in uber-paranoid mode that was bouncing all emails back to the sender. I finally explained the situation to them, and got it all sorted out.

Because of that one 15 minute call, and a little bit of hand holding, I've gotten several referrals from this one customer.

I occasionally get support tickets identical to the ones above, in response to these I always state: "I need more information on your problem in order to fix it. Until you let me know specifically what is wrong, I am unable to help you. It is like taking a car to a mechanic and saying 'My car is broke' and then the mechanic trying to figure out on their own that the problem is a minor wobble in the front left wheel when going 55mph."

I find that analogies work wonders when dealing with tech-illiterate customers.

When a customer starts using a phrase like "this is costing me a fortune" I usually suggest they get a network support tech on call. If the customer really is losing a "fortune" they'll have no problem calling in their tech for assistance on an issue. This works best for customers who think their computer has all the complexity of a toaster and doesn't understand why some problems are hard to fix.

Then when future problems come up that require very technical walkthroughs that are just over the customer's head, they can have the tech person read your directions and get things going again. This works often enough that I still suggest it when I hear that famous phrase :)

Just got around to reading this thread... funny yet sad.

I'm sure it's resolved by now, but "next time" you might suggest the customer try reading their mail through mail2web. If they can do it, it proves the problem's on their machine, not the server.

-A

Sorry, but people like that should just leave WELL alone from computers. It's like me and shopping. I leave my wife to do what she's good at, and wouldn't be seen dead with carrier bags in each arm :D