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Some of our clients, in typical client fashion, like to *severely* overestimate the resources required in order to troubleshoot an issue.
If someone’s requesting one or two people to be on a conference call so they don’t have to relay the information later, that’s fine.
Forcing a conference call between two or more people whose presence may not really be needed at all is decidedly *not* fine.
**1)** There’s a component in the software I support that relates to marketing. I can’t provide guidance on SEO, or marketing strategies, or why some ad didn’t get as many clicks as they hoped, but I can tell you whether or not the component is functioning correctly.
There are a *lot* of people who use this component who think that their marketing guys (aka, people who DO know SEO/marketing strategies, but not necessarily how the component or the system works) should be in on the call to troubleshoot. And because they need to make themselves useful, they interrupt the troubleshooting with inane questions that I can’t answer because lmao, not a marketing specialist.
**2)** Someone was having issues with the way one system connected to her account with ours. She wanted a call with the guy who was setting things up on the other system (two way sync) and with us. Annoying, but understandable. What wasn’t understandable is the 6 other people she CC’ed on the ticket who had nothing to do with the issue, she just wanted them in the call for some reason.
**3)** I had a guy one day who asked if the system could do a thing, and the answer was very much no. So he then requests that I hop on a call with him and some third party guy of his. I asked what the purpose of this call was, he told me he wanted the third party guy to help explain why they needed the system to do the thing.
**Translation**: If I have another person growling in your ear about it, you’ll have no choice but to give in to peer pressure and give me what I want. (I’ve been on those types of calls before. They’re not fun.)
Asked my manager if I could deny this conference request, stating I’m more than happy to explain to *our* client why we can’t make the system do the thing they wanted, but I was less than comfortable doing so when some rando who’s unfamiliar with the system is just going to help this guy fight me. Call would’ve been entirely unproductive. They allowed me to just let him know we can’t do the thing he asked and that I’m happy to explain to HIM PERSONALLY over the phone what I’d just explained via email.
Never heard back from him.
**TL;DR: Not everything is a dire emergency requesting the presence of 12 people.** I honestly think this has gotten worse since Covid.
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