Our leaders are cracking down on our average call length, and it’s glorious.

It’s taken them some time and a lot of data/complaints to implement, but they’ve done it.

Our tech support team is what it is – tech support. There’s approximately sixteen of us in a niche industry, and that’s typically more than enough to handle what comes our way.

As of the past year, though, our average call lengths have been…. pretty bad, mostly due to our clients. We have a number of teams and job descriptions for the purposes of training and getting clients used to the software, but this year has been especially bad with people basically keeping Tech Support on the phone for far longer than necessary.

Now, though? Our training department is rolling out some new procedures for people to schedule one on one trainings instead of calling Tech Support to be walked through everything. And we can TELL people that. And we can actually push it, because there is now an alternative.

To date, we’ve had:

• An older grumpy guy who barely knows what a browser does that somehow got sold on our $1k a month software. He’d call into Tech Support 5-6 times a day, and no call was ever shorter than 25-60 minutes. Guy will not stop talking until you cut him off and tends to go on “I’m not tech savvy, back in mah day” tangents. In between wanting to be walked through every small thing in the system because he hates our training articles and live sessions. He’s actually the one who prompted our leaders to take action on these types of calls, just because he took up so much of our time.

• New clients who basically hop on a call with Tech Support only to point at things and go “What’s this do?”

• Clients who will get three to six people in a room and conference call us, effectively blindsiding whoever picks up with an audience that wasn’t needed. Or one person will call in only to have another person grab the phone and start spitting questions.

• Clients who got told no by the department who can give them what they want, so they keep Support hostage on the phone even though we can’t help them.

• Old people who shouldn’t even be here needing help with learning to use technology. Why would you try to be a carpenter if you can’t figure out what to do with a hammer?

• Clients who basically have already settled in for an extended forced training session. One of my newer coworkers had a dude yesterday sitting back in an armchair on Zoom eating a meal while she walked him through things. This was part of an hour long call that wasn’t ending anytime soon. I told her to shut that down and get him to schedule a training session with the TRAINING department.

• Clients who know better but still demand a call for everything because they think text based communication is offensive.

• Clients who either didn’t pick up a single thing from the training courses, or refuse to use those resources or read an article.

There’s still things they’re working on, but I’m just really glad they were able to take action on a growing problem that was affecting everyone’s numbers and ability to take care of other clients.