How do you get better at your job when you have been told you suck?

Armymanis

How do you get better at your job when you have been told you suck at it? I thought i was doing a great job having only been at this for 2 months and learning all i can. I just got told today that I suck and need to improve big time on how i talk to customers and be actually pleased to talk to them. The fact is, i am really pleased. When a company does not give you the right tools to do your job and looses your access papers, you get really nervous and freeze up and start looking to other people for answers. I am doing help desk fyi, and find it very fun to be on the computer all day answering calls so this news really hit me hard. I was sad for around an hour after work and just figured out I need to improve on stuff. Also I was called in the tickets I write up, to not call the people User in the subject line. Call them customer or by their first name. I get by their first name is a lot more personal but whats the difference between the customer and the user? They sound the same to me. They both have a problem and want it solved.

Also, any tips on how to improve when your slowly but surly being given the right access tools to programs and stuff? I finally got my own desk today which i was pleased about.

Forsaken_GA

I haven't read all of the responses in this thread, but enough to know that I'm probably going to be a dissenting opinion.

First off, if the person did not tell you what specifically was wrong, go ask. And then ask for another employee who they'd consider the standard. For ticketing responses, go look at that persons tickets and see how they're wording things, and how they're interacting with the customer. Then go compare that to your own ticket responses. You'll see some difference, and you should be able to figure out how you can modify your approach.

As far as phone skills go... I personally avoid using peoples names. It makes me uncomfortable, and when I'm uncomfortable, I feel that comes across on the call. All the other little tricks that folks may come up with just pisses me off when I run into them as a consumer. I don't feel like being manipulated. The #1 way to make the customer on the other end of the line happy is to focus on their problem. They don't want to call you anymore than you want to take their call. They want to get off the phone as soon as possible. They want you to just fix the problem. So you're already starting behind in the game, in an antagonistic position. If you make the customer feel like their issue is the most important thing you have to deal with, it goes a *long* way towards offsetting the initial hostility buildup. If you actually manage to solve their problem, especially in a timely manner, you'll have a fan. My phone style is that I always give the customer my complete attention. I ask intelligent questions so that the customer understands that I understand their problem (and because they usually don't give me near enough, so I need to ask those questions... but knowing which questions to ask shows that you're good at your job). If I ever have to spend long periods of time researching or tinkering with something, that would result in long periods of silence in the line, I explain to the customer that I need to do some research, and ask them if it would be ok if I called them back in 15 minutes. Most of the time, they were ecstatic at that idea, because it meant they weren't bound to a phone cord while I was busy doing my job (every once in awhile I'd get one guy who refused to get off the line because he was paranoid about having to wait in the phone queue again). Now, if you promise someone a call back, you absolutely positively have to follow through and actually call back, or you've blown any good will you may have generated.

But yeah, when it comes down to it, just make the customer feel like their problem matters to you, and actually fix their problem, and you'll do just fine on a helpdesk.