People Don't Want to Work or Think More Than They Have To
A great list, but the first point reminded me of my favourite support story. The application was a medical analysis tool, and there was a pre-analysis algorithm that could be run over a study to assist a human then scoring it.
A user called up with an issue that could only be one of two things - she'd gotten an error box when she'd tried to run the automatic analysis. There are only two errors at that point, and the text in the box tells me which fix to apply. Unfortunately she'd decided that the error box was due to a corrupt file.
"Please read out the message in the error box" => "The file is corrupted"
"Can you please read out the exact text in the error box?" => "It says 'the file is corrupted'"
"I haven't seen that message before, can you please read it out word by word?" => "The. File. Is. Corrupted."
"Okay, I haven't seen that error before, can you please read it out character by character, so I can go to the developers with the exact wording" => "T-h-e a-u-t-o-m-a...." (the start of the sentence "the automatic analysis settings have not been enabled", the solution for which is ticking a box)
This user had called asking for assistance and still refused to read the literal words in front of her until I got down to the character-by-character readback...
A great list, but the first point reminded me of my favourite support story. The application was a medical analysis tool, and there was a pre-analysis algorithm that could be run over a study to assist a human then scoring it.
A user called up with an issue that could only be one of two things - she'd gotten an error box when she'd tried to run the automatic analysis. There are only two errors at that point, and the text in the box tells me which fix to apply. Unfortunately she'd decided that the error box was due to a corrupt file.
"Please read out the message in the error box" => "The file is corrupted"
"Can you please read out the exact text in the error box?" => "It says 'the file is corrupted'"
"I haven't seen that message before, can you please read it out word by word?" => "The. File. Is. Corrupted."
"Okay, I haven't seen that error before, can you please read it out character by character, so I can go to the developers with the exact wording" => "T-h-e a-u-t-o-m-a...." (the start of the sentence "the automatic analysis settings have not been enabled", the solution for which is ticking a box)
This user had called asking for assistance and still refused to read the literal words in front of her until I got down to the character-by-character readback...