Helping your team deal with difficult users.

I manage a team of 3 guys who do tier 1 and 2 support for a relatively small (~300 employees) but someone overly complicated company. The guys are great, patient and knowledgable and seem to give a shit about the job they are doing and individually all have less than 5 years of IT "work" experience. I have queried the company 2 times last year to get a pulse on how they think we are doing and get feedback. We average about 9/10 and get good feed back on certain things and have made some improvements. We are a hybrid workforce and all my guys come in 3 days a week for office coverage and I have felt that its easier to manage/train/educate them when are in person. It allows us all to build that camaraderie that remote work doesn't really foster. I think we found something that works for us.

Now that the background is out of the way, we all know we have those users in our organizations that just make us groan every time they call because they are difficult to work with. Everything they do is an emergency, claim this issue is happening to "everyone" or don't have time to work on the issue now because they are so busy, refuse to learn new processes or hardware (recently moved to Macs). When you get them on the phone they almost always seem combative and don't want to listen to what you.

Its something I have learned form just being in the industry for 20+ years and how to deal with folks like this. I try to share my experiences with the team and what I have done but sometimes I feel like I am just a record on repeat and looking for some other resources either for me or for the team.