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If you mean "eat a bacon buttie" then yes - but we don't have a tin shed for her to eat it in.
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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He looks like a knob to me...
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That would be awesome, freeing up my hands from the BBQ and letting me have a beer in the one hand and a cigarette in the other 
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Customer:
"Would I be correct in saying not everything is upgraded yet?"
"The X section of the screen isn't showing. I restarted it, and it came back but then it went away again after a few minutes"
"Setting Y is wrong. Is there a way to change that from here?"
Me:
"That is correct, not everything has been updated yet. I'm still working on the one's I got the information for this morning"
"If the unit can't connect to the server, feature X will go away until it regains connection. Once it can connects, it should come back"
"We don't currently have a way to change that from there"
The boss:
"You have a short concise way of responding, which is good with developers, but you can make the customer feel like you are putting them off so you can do something else. I know that's not what you are doing, but it can seem that way. We want the customer to feel tended to. Make them feel like you are doing everything you can to help them. I'll reply on your behalf in case he is still stewing about your email".
I'm still looking for what I did wrong. His reply on my behalf certainly seemed elegant, but ... It was just restating what I said. I still don't get it, and I wouldn't think the customer was mad. Mad? really?
The boss would know better than me for sure, so I'll have to work on this. It is just frustrating.
If it moves, compile it
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Why are you responding to external requests if your boss does not think you are capable? Shirley that's his/her job?
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I'm not sure, I just did what he asked.
And don't call me Shirley
If it moves, compile it
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Ya know, I don't typically respond to a lot of these threads but this one got to me. The boss was IMHO, totally wrong to reply "for" you. I thought your replies were not only sufficient but answered in like kind, short.(if your text of what the asker said was correct!) I would have a huge problem with what my boss did in this respect. Totally disrespectful to you. It only meant the boss had no idea whether your comments were correct or not.
ranting, sorry.
vbmike
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loctrice wrote: I'm still looking for what I did wrong.
You'll never find it. You did nothing wrong.
loctrice wrote: Mad? really?
This customer has and is a problem.
BDF
I often make very large prints from unexposed film, and every one of them turns out to be a picture of myself as I once dreamed I would be.
-- BillWoodruff
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According ot my VP you need to give them warm and fuzzies. I've threatened to start keeping those hairy caterpillars for just such an occasion.
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Yeah, it's jsut something I'll have to work on. I tend to get irritated if people fluff to much when they are talking to me. I just want them to get to the point. I just have to keep in mind, that I have to carefully think over my emails to them because they want something different than I do.
If it moves, compile it
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Unfortunately, the world works like this. Sugar coating things up when dealing with customers is needed, and we are not the best ones to do it. I'd suggest you not to worry too much about it, and let the boss handle things like this.
"Real men drive manual transmission" - Rajesh.
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loctrice wrote: Me:
"That is correct, not everything has been updated yet. I'm still working on the one's I got the information for this morning"
"If the unit can't connect to the server, feature X will go away until it regains connection. Once it can connects, it should come back"
"We don't currently have a way to change that from there"
Yes, sorry but we have had a problem with the upgrade, and some pieces did not get through. We are working on it right now and hope to have it fixed as soon as possible.
We are pretty sure that feature X will be OK once your unit can connect to the server again, but can you let us know the result next time you try it?
As to the Y setting, we cannot change it from here unfortunately. But thanks for bringing it to our attention, I'll talk to the boss and see if we cannot do something about that for the future.
I'll let you know as soon as we have everything back on line, but if there's anything else I can help with in the meantime, please give me a call.
As my boss used to say "Tell the customer he/she is the most important person in your life right at this moment".
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Agreed - and if you say "I'll let you know" by preference give a time limit, but definitely do it as soon as you can. Never, ever promise to get back to a customer and don't do it - even if it's a quick call to say "it's taking longer than we thought, can I get back to you tomorrow?"
If you get an email telling you that you can catch Swine Flu from tinned pork then just delete it. It's Spam.
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Spot on - also a great piece of advice given to me some years ago.
tell the customer you will contact them in (say) 35 minutes (or tomorrow morning at 10:15).
Be specific with that time and make sure you absolutely stick with it, even if there is not a snowball's chance of getting whatever fixed by then.
When you contact them, give them an update, even if that is that it is still being worked on, and you will contact them again in (again a specific time).
The customer is happy even if you have don NOTHING on their problem at all.
The point is that, by being specific with the time (i.e. not 'later this afternoon' but 'At 3:25 pm' the time will stick in the customer's head, and they won't be pacing up and down waiting for the call. And when it comes in on time, their perception of you is of someone who is honest.
It may sound cynical - but if you are genuinely working on their issue and can call them at 3:25 pm and tell them that it is fixed, all the better.
The other side of the coin is to try NOT to contact them early if the problem is fixed. If you say you will contact them at 3:25 and call them at 2pm to tell them all is well, while they are happy this time, it can lead to them calling up BEFORE the time you promise in future, in the hope that this issue will be fixed early too.
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Was the customer actually upset about your reply or did your boss just assume so?
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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As far as I know they were not actually upset.
If it moves, compile it
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loctrice wrote: so I'll have to work on this.
Why?
Are you going to keep this job for the rest of your life? Do you want to move into full time customer support or professional services? Do you want to be a business analyst?
If no then you might consider focusing on your technical skills rather than your interpersonal ones with the presumption that you will find a job at a company where they hire people as developers and hire other different people for roles that require interactions with customers.
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jschell wrote: Why?
Are you going to keep this job for the rest of your life?
I plan on keeping it for a while at least.
If it moves, compile it
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Sales people tend to criticize us for being blunt, but rarely realize that 'sales-mode' isn't always the appropriate response either. Once you reeled them in, you have to be professional; which means not wasting each others time.
When a customer sends a mail with a few simple questions, he expects you to return simple answers. He doesn't need to hear anymore how much we care about security and how carefully we check the quality of our work before we deploy it. He expects these things to be evident now.
Reading through an entire paragraph of fluff, only to find out that you're not sure when exactly you're going to be finished is a lot more annoying than just telling him that directly in once sentence.
And if the customer isn't a professional, you, as a developer, shouldn't be dealing with him directly in the first place because that's too much of a distraction from your actual work. Your boss should then hire someone who can assist you with these matters.
.
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0bx wrote: When a customer sends a mail with a few simple questions, he expects you to return simple answers. He doesn't need to hear anymore how much we care about security and how carefully we check the quality of our work before we deploy it. He expects these things to be evident now.
That may be true if you deal with only one or two individuals, but that isn't guaranteed, and each individual needs to be cared for and nurtured.
0bx wrote: Reading through an entire paragraph of fluff, only to find out that you're not sure when exactly you're going to be finished is a lot more annoying than just telling him that directly in once sentence.
It may be so for you, but it is a fact that differently worded replies giving exactly the same news can have drastically different effects on the recipient.
"Mrs. Jones? Your cat is dead."
vs
"Mrs. Jones? I'm awfully sorry to call with bad news, but despite the vet working late into the night, we failed to save poor Pudsy".
0bx wrote: And if the customer isn't a professional, you, as a developer, shouldn't be dealing with him directly in the first place because that's too much of a distraction from your actual work. Your boss should then hire someone who can assist you with these matters.
If only the world was as black and white as you paint it. Without knowing the OP's company, or profession, exactly, they may well be the single technical resource required to do support and development and coffee making. Saying a company should employ someone to deal with 'these matters' is just naive in extremis.
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_Maxxx_ wrote: Saying a company should employ someone to deal with 'these matters' is just naive in extremis.
Off course, it's my opinion of how it 'should' be; how it is in reality is a different matter.
However, this article is based on fairly serious research and tries to give you an estimate how much money is lost by overloading developers with additional responsibilities: http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/[^].
Turns out that it's also pretty naive to expect from a programmer that he can do both programming and play customer support at the same time. You might actually save money if you hire an extra project manager / consultant who doesn't do any coding, but focuses on attending to the customers so everybody else can focus on the programming.
.
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this is pretty much how I think/feel about it.
If it moves, compile it
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loctrice wrote: putting them off so you can do something else.
Isn't that exactly what you're supposed to do? Answer the question and then get back to coding. If the boss believes in sugarcoating communication with clients, he should place a buffer between the developer and the client, i.e. you give your boss the short answer and then get back to coding while he figures out how to sugarcoat.
Also, I find that I (and I suspect this is true for many programmers) take significantly longer than most people to write an email if it needs to contain any sort of fluff. This makes it doubly bad to let the developer directly answer the client: you waste development time on an answer that your boss and the client is unhappy about anyway.
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I can agree there. It takes me a good deal of time to write an email to a client just because I"m careful about the phrasing of things.
If it moves, compile it
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loctrice wrote: I'll reply on your behalf in case he is still stewing about your email
There is possibly another side to this, and there's a lot that we don't know here, so this could well be way off the mark, but when I read the boss part here, it sounds to me like the client has been on to him and complained. Looking at this from the clients point of view, they could be reading the second paragraph as - "oh, it'll fix itself in its own time".
It's not necessarily that you did anything wrong, and you shouldn't take it that way, but with a lot of these situations, there are egos at the other end who need handling in certain ways. Quite often, a bit of soft soap and flannel is all they need to feel as though they are the most important thing in your world.
One way to word this could have been (off the top of my head):
"You are absolutely right that feature X has disappeared. Unfortunately, this is an unavoidable side effect when we lose the connection to the server; we are looking at ways to prevent this from happening, and will schedule this into our roadmap as we appreciate that this presents a less than ideal experience for yourself."
If I were a particulary fragile ego, the first paragraph could be read as an implied criticism as well (mind you, I'd have to be really fragile to construe it that way). The reason they could misconstrue it is because there's almost a silent "well duh! we can't deliver the upgraded parts that we're still working on."
As always, communications with a client have to really be viewed and reviewed before you send them. In a lot of cases, there's a personal connection between a manager and the client that gives them an insight into how best to talk to them.
One thing I will ask - is there a reason that you didn't phone the client first? I always find that the personal touch helps to make a client feel that they are really valued. This is why I keep notes on all my clients of trivia like their favourite sports, teams, wife and kids names, etc. A minute or so of personal interaction makes it look like you really care.
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