By Ben Meredith
In 2010, I was gainfully employed as an Evangelical Christian college minister in Raleigh, North Carolina. That was such a rewarding and challenging job, not without its share of cordial-but-confrontational conversations; I was (vocationally) confronting students and faculty on a worldview level about deep-rooted existential questions! Over the next three years, I made a relatively involuntary career transition to software development and technical support, expecting the experience I’d had navigating difficult conversations in ministry to prepare me for what came next. I had no idea what I was in for.
I’ve always been fascinated by angry, emotional people. During that transition to software support, I had a stint in corporate retail — first selling coffee, then selling phones to hurried suburbanites — complete with grumpy middle-managers who cajoled, whined, and quota-shamed us into selling just one more insurance protection plan or nudging customers to upsize their lattes.
At the phone store, there was a specific breed of customer we called “bill wavers” who would screech into the parking lot with cars tilted on two wheels, hoist their paper cellphone bills above their heads like battle flags, then blow past the first two sales reps ducking for cover en route to me standing transfixed behind the desk — the only one making eye contact. They’d berate me with a tale of having been “on the phone with you people for the past 3 hours” or something similar while I took some deep breaths in anticipation.
I saw their anger as a puzzle, a game, a live-action escape room where if I could get to the root of it, I’d have that very same person who was insulting my heritage just moments ago fawning over and dropping $300 on the best bluetooth speaker on the shelf behind me. I found I could actually be pretty good at that game.
Now more than a decade later, I see the same thing happening on a daily basis for customers of the large tech firm I work for as a director of technical support. I’m still just as fascinated by angry and emotional folks, but now instead of getting to defuse the situations, I get to train the front-line agents to do it.
When I made that first transition from the “doing” of support to the “training” of support, I started to explore whether it’s possible to train others to make the switch from avoiding confrontation to running toward it. Without getting too deep into it, the short answer is “yes.”
Having hired dozens (and having had to fire a few), I’m here to report that there are two types of technical support agents: Those who can learn to read between emotional lines to find and address the customer’s true problem, and those who have a very short and highly emotionally draining career in technical support.