Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Observations of customers and scheduling

I cut my teeth in the support department of the No-Name Software Company and dealt with a wide
variety of personalities on the other side of the phone.  Most of them can be filed into one of four buckets.

Nice-Smart:  Rare unicorn.  These people are truly a pleasure to work with no matter what the issue.

Nice-Dumb: These people are nice to work with too but often you have to carry the weight because they just don't understand what they are supposed to.  On the plus side, they are usually self-aware enough to know just how much they don't know.

Smart-Mean:
These people  don't give an inch.

Dumb-Mean:  Are really angry that they don't understand what you do.

 ******************
 Icarus Theorem of Scheduling: if you schedule two people to visit your home (plumber, cable installer, electrican, whatever) they will come at the opposite ends of their schedule window such that you are trapped at home for the maximum amount of time.

Correllary to Icarus Theorem of Scheduling: if the windows are different (morning and afternoon for instance) they will come at the beginning of the first and the end of the second.

This theorem scales up in such as way as the more scheduled appointments the more chaos will ensue.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments Encouraged! And the nice thing about this blog is that I rarely get spam so don't need to moderate the comments.

I've set the comments up to allow anonymous users -- but I'd love it if you "signed" your comments (as some of my readers have done) just so you have an identity of sorts.