According to the Dallas Morning News, some “Hot Jobs worth warming up for” will be in the sector of customer service and support for cell phones and other multifunctional devices. These things are increasing like rabbits and companies not only need people to help design and build them, but to help their customers use them.
This opens up the chance to learn about supporting customers in a high tech environment. As anyone can see, just by looking around their homes and neighborhoods, complex technical devices make up half the furniture and tools. And with all that complexity comes the need for someone to help people use them and troubleshoot them. I call it the VCR Effect.
In simpler times, people didn’t have much trouble using the available technology. It was all relatively simple and easy to work on. The guy next door could take a correspondence course in TV repair and stand a pretty good chance of fixing your set. Which was a good thing because reliability wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Now, everything we do seems to involve a computerized device that requires either multiple steps to do anything or is supposed to be simple to use if only you could figure out which button to push while not hitting any other tiny keys.
Enter the customer support representative. In these days of creating the great customer experience and proliferating commoditization, making sure customers are happy is not exclusively the province of the sales rep. People need more help after the sale than ever before and with upgrades occuring every few months, companies would sure like their customers to continue buying from them rather than take the opportunity to buy the exact same upgraded device from someone else.
If you have a technical bent and are great at explaining complex things in a way that everyone understands, this may be the type of career you are looking for. And you may be the type of person these companies are looking for.