A few days ago, one of my coworkers called tech support for help with a BlackBerry problem. You know what they told him? Just upgrade your firmware to the latest version and that should fix it. There’s one small problem here: I’ve done firmware upgrades before, and they’re not pretty. It takes hours to run the upgrade and get all your settings configured the right way again.

Clearly, the tech support people at our mobile carrier have no idea what’s involved in the solution they recommended. They don’t understand what a hassle the process would cause for the customer. In fact, it’s possible they’ve never used a BlackBerry for more than a few hours of training.

But the rest of us can learn from this experience. Specifically, try to educate your customer-facing staff about what’s involved in any process they recommend to customers. That way, they’ll have a better idea of the effort they are asking the customer to commit. In turn, your staff will encounter much less resistance from customers after they’ve presented the recommended fix for an issue, and everyone will be happier with the results.