About the habits of our users and technical support

We have an office, a warehouse, many shops around the country and a bunch of technically savvy users who can sell board games. It is interesting to observe how this entire ecosystem evolves in terms of working with technical support. Therefore, below is a calm observation post without any advice or conclusions. This is just life.

For example, sellers realized that not all exit admins are equally useful. Older points are able to change monstrously quickly with the necessary information. Therefore, now for different occasions they ask different engineers. Should someone do the work at least 10% faster than usual or somehow show the quality somehow, and immediately the calls in the spirit will begin:
- Hello. Support?
- Good day.
- And who is visiting today?
- Misha.
- Ahhhh ... And when is Valera?
- Valera tomorrow until 15. So something broke with you?
- Yes, no, no, everything is in order. Everything is good today. Tomorrow will break. At 11:30.

And why? Because Valera miraculously not only changed the monitor, but also very impressively disassembled the “tails” of wires on Taganskaya. He is not the first person who undertook to solve this problem, but the first who solved it to the end. This is what sellers confused there:



And here is what he did:



God knows what a feat, but the point impressed. About this his skill (and the fact that he loves cake) almost immediately became known to all sellers of the network. Actually, not everyone even guessed that you could ask the admin to do this. After a couple of days, a couple more photos naturally appear in the report:





This will continue another 14 trips, according to the number of stores in the city. Moreover, the elders themselves are far from humanities. How to disassemble the cables - so "no, we ourselves can’t, we are afraid, but what if we spoil it." And how to solder the power supply with a promo soldering iron from the Brigade, because it’s faster than waiting for the arrival of the visiting engineer - so please. Themselves repaired. The cash desk was idle.

Not always very tricky users knock in support. To begin with, you need to call support, then wait for the engineer (or connect it remotely), they don’t know anyone in person ... You also need to write a ticket in a form that is not trivial for everyone. Since our work is very closely connected with communication, and the atmosphere in the office is not to say that it is very formal, it starts to steer a natural interface. What to do? That's right, you need to look around and find someone who fumbles in the matter. Animators will not understand, call center operators are busy. Therefore, the solution is damn simple and always unambiguous - there is a 1C team. They help everyone with software. If my keyboard doesn’t work, it’s not difficult to help, right? Almost software. They take something tasty and try to bribe the developer with it. From this, the developer gets fat over time.

This continues until one of the 1C friends has too many friends, or doesn’t stop climbing on the door. Accordingly, then he writes an angry letter in support, saying that you are throwing off your users to me. And begins to lose weight and refuse. The correct process is restored for about two weeks, friends grumble a little, but they understand that this is peace and order. And the friends themselves are temporarily becoming smaller. Then it starts again:
- Hello! Tima, something doesn’t work here ... This is for you, right? Can you connect and see quickly, are the clients standing? Last time they asked me to reboot, and I rebooted before that. And you do right away ...
Tim is a honey, all the shops love him. Naturally, he will not refuse. And you have to re-gain weight.

Calls to the wrong address sometimes give rise to very strange situations. For example, since we have many, many shops in a terminal farm with 1C, an office, a warehouse and a couple of other facilities, if the channel disappears, it is not always clear who to knock on. The store has a plate with typical symptoms and phones for solutions. So, once we went on to pay for one of the backup Internet channels. As luck would have it, the connection fell, the switch to the reserve in the store passed. The seller called the "iron" administrator in the engineering service. And asked URGENTLY to decide. But I must say that our IT specialists support each other in every possible way and do not throw a ball. It is urgent - ok, there will be. And the admin began to dial the provider. True, he didn’t know specifically, the provider changed on a point: he was guided by the listing, and not by the current status in the database. As a result, it turned out that:
- There is no Internet, because the accident.
- A specialist went to you.
- The specialist is looking for a cliff on the line.
- Need a replacement equipment.
- Replacement of equipment will be made within 3 hours.
- Another physical cliff detected.
- Oppa! Everything is connected, but you have not been our client for three months now.
Ours did not know about the contract, but they did not know about where the iron had gone. Two loneliness found each other.

This struggle for the result before victory manifested itself again when the sales director brought a broken laptop. Several buttons on the keyboard were not pressed. But not WSAD, but random. Gave to the service. A few days later, the conclusion comes: the buttons were repaired, but you still need to change the screen backlight. About the fact that the screen worked somehow wrong, Dima, handing over the laptop, said nothing. He himself was at a meeting, so they tried to question a person from the same office. Yes, everything is in order with the laptop, he says, he could not get enough of it. Buttons have been missing for the last few days.

The anamnesis is clear. The service itself broke something during the repair process. Since we also have our own repairs, the situation is extremely familiar and clear. Our man began to push: they say, they handed over the whole, only the buttons did not plow, and you stir up something with backlight. Specialists of the service, apparently, also faced this more than once - there are additional breakdowns during the repair process. Therefore, they did not argue. The laptop was repaired in a day. A month later, it turned out by chance that Dima used it only with external screens. Why? Because the "native" screen became very dim a couple of years ago.

We did not pay for the repair, which we were ashamed of for two months. Then the service gave us a certificate for a free laptop repair anywhere in the world. Naturally, we gave the first one that got into repair. They returned the car to us after the diagnosis, but without repair. With a diagnosis of "do not fix it." The certificate was not given back. The balance has recovered.

Once again, in our porch (in common with a number of other offices) a real homeless person got into a house. The problem was the failure of one of the door circuits. As it turned out, the man was very strong, so he got in at about 23:00, just tearing the door off the electromagnet of the lock. At first, no one reacted to the invasion, because the first thing the homeless did was rearrange the light bulbs in the entrance. Why - I don’t know. But if there is a big strange person and changes the light bulb - probably this is support. Actually, one of the admins drove him out. And further the administrator himself, a big and heavy landlord tried to kick out of the entrance - they told him that someone not ours was rummaging around. Naturally, his suspicion immediately fell on an atypically dressed man.

In one of the shops, sellers put everything in order on the evening of March 9th after the 8th grade. In the best traditions of admin tales, they found a wallow cable, brazenly sticking out of the wall. Senior point pedantic. He knows that if something is just lying around in the store, it is an inappropriate expenditure of resources. It seems to me that he even turns off Num Lock to save electricity. So, then he does what hundreds of accountants did before him throughout the country. Raises the tail and sticks it in the right place. In a white box. There are many holes, each fits. And it calms down, because harmony is restored. And this is the end of the day, the cars are already off. It turns off the light, locks the store and happy leaves for home. In the morning it turns out that there is somehow no network, and not only in the store, but also nearby. And funny engineers are already running around.

Once, when moving equipment, one of the hard drives on the server died. In general, it's okay, everything was in backup. Just a few stores in the regions at the time of recovery (about half an hour) had to knock checks at the cash register equipment in manual mode. Three days later, they are ringing indignantly from Chelyabinsk:
- When will it be possible to use the cashier?
Since then, we know that we must speak not only about the beginning of technical work and their term, but also about the end.

Illiterate users are divided into ordinary and heroic. Ordinary - this, for example, when a cleaning lady watered a router for several days in the accounting department along with a flower (it was under it) - we, accordingly, recognized this by ticket. And heroic - this is when in the same bookkeeping they dismantled the wires, found some thin extra, 6 millimeters, two cores, a millimeter of insulation. Selflessly and decisively cut with scissors. As a result, half of the neighboring entrance was left without electricity - this is how the building was once used to be a temporary hut for wiring, and has since been left behind.

There are many routines: as a rule, repairs and upgrades. Users regularly break keyboards (just technical wear and tear), screens themselves often burn on their own, power supplies, coolers and hard drives regularly fly. Another frequent replacement is UPS batteries. It’s unpleasant with them that we have part of the backup sources without monitoring, so we sometimes do not immediately find out about the need for replacement. The standard work in the last year is also the replacement of RAM. The sellers realized that it was possible to simply and quickly upgrade, doubling the RAM - and then it would be more comfortable to work. It is cheap and does not affect the usual work environment. In process of distribution of this valuable information on shops, new tickets for such a task got up. But with upgrades there is another ambush - many are very afraid to write, even if the computer is breathing in the cold. For example, in one store we had a long candy bar on the Atom, which was launched on the occasion of an emergency replacement. Many times they offered to change it, but sellers persistently refuse: "everything is set up here, do not touch it." It works - do not bother. Sometimes in similar cases with planned upgrades, people really resist replacements.

Another story about a strange psychology - in 1C there is a reserve base, which is needed for a number of technological disasters on the kernel servers. At first it was simply written on it “reserve base” - users thought that it was like a second mirror, you can poke. Then they wrote "reserve base, do not enter" - they still come in, creating difficulties with synchronization. We wrote a letter explaining to everyone, changed the name to “Test base, do not choose” - there were fewer calls, but they did not pass. As a result, the 1C team had to configure the database with an error so that it crashes at the start. In case of an accident, the admin connects and changes the config in 5 seconds.

The most stupid mistake in the store - once connected the cash register after the update and did not test on a special test piece. The device came to life and realized that it was his finest hour. And he rushed to print checks as if he were not in himself. They turned it off after about a minute, when they realized that something had gone wrong. The store wrote returns for several hours - and these are rather tedious and complicated statements, and according to the norm, it requires three free pieces of paper per check.

Once we learned in advance about a power outage in the stairwell, it was supposed to be 25 minutes. We came up with a whole system of forwards of phones, prepared extension cords for those who would go with laptops, tested Wi-Fi at double load ... While the users gathered and switched to another entrance, the lights were turned back on. But we still have a wonderful backup scheme. Actually, it was useful to us when the workers shot down icicles on the building - together with ice, the brave guys with well-sharpened shovels managed to knock down the provider cable.

In distant regions, any minor inaccuracy in the instructions can turn into a psychological catastrophe. For example, when we turned a point in one of the cities beyond the Urals, sellers configured everything exactly according to the instructions. The problem is that the fields on the screenshots for an example with the name of the Moscow manager. So in the database there were 6 “twins” with passwords, naturally, of exactly eight stars. We laughed to ourselves, but understood that people wanted the best and did the best of their understanding. And the joint is not for them, but for us. Of course, we changed the instructions for the future.

There are a lot of issues with providers. A typical example - in 4 stores we have Beeline main channel. It was. One of the agreements was in dollars, the rest in rubles. In the fall, the course changed dramatically, and we called the manager to say that we either turn it off, or let's re-index it in rubles. The manager agreed and said that a statement was needed. We sent by courier. They lost him. Then we wrote it again, they already sent their courier. And lost again. We disconnected from them and told the manager about it. We switched to the reserve. For half a year now they have been sending us the wrong accounts after the end of the contract, they are looking for all three applications (two for the transition and one for the disconnection), and on the phone they say “Yes, yes, I transmitted everything. Well, we are a big company, we are doing everything slowly, bureaucratically. ” The last chord was the bell
- Good afternoon, Beeline is worrying.
- Aha! Finally! Are you on the application?
- What? No, you are in arrears.
- Yyyy, here is such a story, check your documents.
- So you refuse to pay the debt?
“No, everything was fine until you started losing documents.”
“Shame on you!” You are just some kind of moral freaks.
- Wow. Are you from Beeline? Straight from the office?
- No, the collection service N.
- Ahhh, well then goodbye.

There are strange tickets. For example, an outsourcer falls empty only with the heading "Operators, Internet access problems." A normal person would immediately close it or return it. The attendant figured out and repaired everything, thanks to him. The operators felt a sharp degradation of the channel and decided that it was necessary to write as short as possible in order to pass. Therefore, it turned out a letter "as of the last forces."

Another memorable ticket is an exchange bug. The customer has incorrectly calculated the shipping cost. He (a bug, not a client) was tracked with cold calmness by three departments. The main problem was that the buyer was not a very friendly guy. He sent a letter which, when mentioned in society, the ladies would consist solely of asterisks. Due to the abundance of variables in this system of equations, it was far from the first time to identify the symptoms of the error and the way of its reproduction. A couple of weeks later, some dialectivisms from the letter slipped through the communication of buyers.

Shopping centers have their own providers. This is a real mafia. Where a regular service costs 3 thousand rubles a month, they take 15-17 in a shopping center. We somehow decided to hack them and connect ADSL from MGTS along with their wired telephone. So the monopoly provider is so monopolistic that it did not even let the installer go to the booth. Like, we’ll do a wired phone too. Carry another 5 thousand. So we sit on the whistle of Yota in the end.

Yes, and finally - a little life hack.Each time we connect the second channel with a reserve to the store, we will definitely call the manager of the first provider and report this fact. “You know, we used your Internet here, and we decided to connect the N + 1 provider on Kursk, and work will begin tomorrow.” This is 100% true. The manager in the client care script - to offer better conditions. The manager concludes that if we connect a second provider, this is a departure. And then he offers us better conditions. It works in 99% of cases with a variety of providers.