THE FIX IS THE EASY PART

Nobody calls tech support on a good day.

Think about it. By the time someone gets me on the phone, they've already restarted it twice, Googled it, asked their kid, sat through hold music, and talked themselves into the idea that they broke something expensive. They're not calling about a printer. They're calling about the meeting they're late for, the photos they think are gone, the feeling of being the only person in the room who doesn't get it.

I've been on the other end of that call since 2009. Retail counters, my own practice, a computer lab full of teenagers, a sales floor, a help desk where I talk somewhere between 40 and 75 people a week through whatever's on fire. Different rooms, same lesson, and it took me way too long to learn it:

The fix is the easy part.

The 0 to 10 question

There's a question a lot of companies ask after you hang up: on a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend? It's called Net Promoter Score. The 9s and 10s are your promoters, the people who go tell their sister about you. The 0s through 6s are your detractors, the people who go tell their sister too. Just not the good version.

Here's what nobody tells you when you start in tech. Most of the time, the 10 and the 4 got the exact same fix. Same password reset. Same driver update. Same "unplug it for 30 seconds." The difference wasn't the technical work. It was everything around it.

What actually makes a promoter

I've taken that call more times than I can count, so here's my unofficial list. None of it is technical.

Slow down first. People can hear you rushing. The minute they feel like a ticket number, you lost them, no matter how fast you fix it. Take ten seconds to let them tell the whole story, even the parts that don't matter. Especially the parts that don't matter.

Never make anyone feel dumb. Not with a sigh, not with jargon, not with that little "okay so" before you explain something for the third time. Everybody's an expert at something. It just isn't always this.

Narrate what you're doing. "I'm going to open your settings and check one thing" beats ninety seconds of silence and clicking every time. Silence on a support call sounds like something's wrong.

Teach one thing. Not ten. One. A shortcut, where the setting lives, what to do next time. People don't just want it fixed. They want to feel a little less helpless than they did an hour ago. That feeling is the whole product.

Own it when you mess up. I've broken things trying to fix things. Everybody in this field has. The people who became my regulars weren't the ones who never saw me make a mistake. They were the ones who watched me say "that's on me" and make it right.

Follow up. This is the one almost nobody does. A text the next day, "hey, is the Wi-Fi still holding up?", costs nothing and lands like a gift. Most people have never once had a tech person check on them. You become their tech person right there.

Detractors are made, not born

The detractor usually isn't a bad customer. They're a good customer who had a bad hour and then got treated like a problem instead of a person. I've watched calls that started with yelling end with "thank you so much, what was your name again?" Not because of anything clever on the technical side. Because somebody finally listened.

And the flip side: I've watched perfectly fixed problems end with a 3 out of 10, because the person was rushed, talked down to, and left with no idea what just happened to their own computer.

You can't upsell your way out of that. You can't market your way out of it either. One bad experience travels further than ten good ones.

Why this is the whole business

When I started Money Grinding, the plan wasn't to be the cheapest or the fastest. There's always going to be somebody cheaper and somebody faster. The plan is to be the person you'd actually call again. The one you'd hand your mom's number to.

Every 10 out of 10 turns into a text that says "you need to call my guy." That's the only marketing that's ever really worked for me. No ad budget beats a friend saying "he's patient, he'll explain it, you'll like him."

So if you run any kind of business, here's my challenge. Next time someone brings you a problem, forget about the fix for one second and ask yourself: when they tell this story later, what's the version they're going to tell?

That's the job. The fix is just the part they paid for.

— g