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Loving Life Partner posted:I dunno if it's my chilled out demeanor, but abuse calls are really rare for me. Maybe one a week out of 400+ calls. Out of curiosity: how long have you been doing the job? After a couple months I was pretty contemptuous of everyone and didn't give a gently caress.
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Jun 6, 2012 03:51
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:Out of curiosity: how long have you been doing the job? After a couple months I was pretty contemptuous of everyone and didn't give a gently caress. It'll be 2 years in October. I sometimes go into robot rep mode, it all depends on someone's tone and willingness to work on the problem together when they ring in. If someone comes on combative right away (YOU PEOPLE hosed up), I will probe a bit to find out if there's an error on our part, if there's not, they get policies and procedures straight down the line. If someone calls in and is confused in addition to upset, willing to listen to me, and concede facts to me, I will do everything I can to help them out. Just today I had someone call in with an overdraft situation. I explained what happened, policies and procedures, he was pretty nice about it, and he also did something that made me want to help him; he attempted to fix the problem himself. He went online when the payment bounced and paid it a few days later, then the second attempt at the first payment bounced him again. I conferenced in his bank, explained everything that happened, and asked as a professional courtesy to have the second overdraft fee waived, $35 back in his pocket, and I made an accommodation to waive our $20 return fee. I'm sure he didn't know how to explain to the bank what happened to get that fee waived, and if he had been a dick, I would have never done it. So yeah, it pays to be nice, and I like to reward people for it, I hope it changes the tone of the world even if slightly.
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Jun 6, 2012 04:21
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JackRabbitStorm posted:It's hard to show empathy when you're lying through your teeth for the client.
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Jun 6, 2012 20:22
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Loving Life Partner posted:It'll be 2 years in October. This is a good attitude and you deserve some props for it.
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Jun 6, 2012 22:48
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Took calls for two hours today and actually enjoyed it. I am usually a very introverted person but for some reason I had fun helping dumb college students active their Apple ID and telling grandma how to update from itunes 8 to 10. I am sure that will change soon though. My first full day is Sunday which is supposed to be a busy day. Also does everyone use ABC (Achievement Based Compensation)? It is completely opaque and complex at all call centers?
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Jun 7, 2012 00:16
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Sup fellow call center Goons. Late to the thread, glad I finally discovered it though, have been taking my time reading through it over the past week or so. I live in the midwest and work for a health insurance company, basically we get phone calls from doctors offices and quote benefits for members policies as well as working actual claims. I also deal with customer service aspects as I'm cross trained to support quite a few different products. I have to say, dealing with the doctors offices isn't really bad, I mean the only people who ever really get a bug up their rear end and are dicks are chiropractors and optometrists for the most part, but usually unless it's a really small clinic (like the two previously mentioned specialties) we are just dealing with nurses or staff, so I guess people would consider that business to business? I've been here a couple years, and it's such a world of difference between this particular center and the previous one I worked at. The last company was similar type of calls, but on the pharmacy side of things, and all of the typical fuckery I have seen mentioned in this thread applied there, on top of the fact it was almost seriously the definition of a soul sucking position, if we were in ACW more than 30 seconds after a call, a supervisor/QA would come running to your desk to see what the problem was, and what was taking so long, we got 5 minutes a day of personal time, which seriously.... you can barely take a poo poo in 5 minutes, and then oops! Hope you didn't need coffee or water or have to take a piss or do anything else the rest of the day! The pay was also only around $12 an hour. Current place I work at actually pays well, after a few years and a few raises I'm up to over $19/hour, and we get incentives, I think the average person in my department counting incentives makes around $40,000-42,000 a year. Our benefits used to be pretty great but now are fairly meh, well, the benefits themselves didn't change but we went from no deductible to a high deductible with a health savings account, which I don't really mind being I don't go into the doctor hardly ever, so it's just free money. You can chill in ACW for a few minutes after a call and nobody cares, we get 20-25 minutes of personal time a day, and nobody cares if you go over as long as you meet the monthly adherence goal. Our facilities are nice, we get free starbucks coffee (Well, the grounds) and as much as we can drink, most of the sups in my area are actually really chill, though it has the usual call center office politics and general cloak and dagger type people who always are trying to backstab someone. The work still drives me insane sometimes, but I don't have a college degree and I'm making more than pretty much all my friends with degrees right now (Sure that will change as soon as the recession ends.) and it's pretty hard for me to see getting more elsewhere, although my friend recently started at a different health insurance company and is making $18.20 starting basically and they have a Union, so I guess if you have any health insurance companies near you, might be worth applying, as it seems to be generally quite a bit better than other poo poo. I would never go back to sales, I did collections and sales for a brief stint when I was like 19-21 and holy gently caress that was seriously the worst ever. Hang in there fellow goons! I'll be back with some stories as soon as I get time to type them up.
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Jun 7, 2012 01:09
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Boomer The Cannon posted:
In sales, it should be: It's hard to show empathy when you're lying through your teeth for the client, when you have a script that must be read verbatim under threat of being written up. I worked with one guy who failed a call because the script said "May I please have your email address?" but he read it as "May I have your email address, please?" Instant zero score, even though he successfully converted the call. rockinricky fucked around with this message at 03:48 on Jun 7, 2012 |
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Jun 7, 2012 03:46
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rockinricky posted:In sales, it should be: What the gently caress? Why would anyone think being so harsh is a good idea?
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Jun 7, 2012 07:44
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Benzoyl Peroxide posted:What the gently caress? Why would anyone think being so harsh is a good idea? You know, I'm very curious where the iron fistedness of call centers come from. It doesn't make any sense. I'm fairly certain there haven't been any studies done that show these type of policies are beneficial profit/business wise (If so, please link me, I'm very curious.). Its weird. Fast food places aren't even that tyrannical to their employees.
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Jun 7, 2012 07:52
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Tennis Ball posted:You know, I'm very curious where the iron fistedness of call centers come from. It doesn't make any sense. I'm fairly certain there haven't been any studies done that show these type of policies are beneficial profit/business wise (If so, please link me, I'm very curious.). Its weird. Fast food places aren't even that tyrannical to their employees. Based on working both phones and IT for a call center (outbound lead generation primarily), only sick people would run one, so you get evil on a day to day basis in most call centers. Also note that nobody who advocates reading the scripts verbatim has made/taken so much as one call in their lives.
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Jun 7, 2012 08:52
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I subscribe to the empty vessel theory of call centre management. Nothing runs the way that logic or common sense or any other reasonable principle would dictate because the people hired/promoted to call centre management don't 'need' any of those skills: they are just hired to be vessels for the messages from up on high. You don't want someone running a call centre who has thoughts or suggestions or complaints - you want them to keep the monkeys moving, the budgets low, the customer's out of the executive's faces and sell the bullshit with a smile. That's it. Eventually you end up with empty vessels hiring empty vessels, without realising that they are hand picking qualities of apathy and borderline retard intelligence. Then one day someone in legal tells you the sales agents need to be careful they are covering all areas of the policy, so you end up with a rule that the script must be followed exactly - meaning verbatim and not just 'the same'. Then one day someone watches a management webinar that says people feel assured when referred to by their first name, so you end up with a rule that agents must use their name 3 times in a call and tell you with a straight face that you're meant to adhere to that even when the call is 20 seconds long and a wrong number. Then one day they see an episode of The Office, and you get a team building football analogue bonus score board opportunity. Then you lose your job because as long as everyone has to say the customer's name 3 times, read verbatim from a script and the budget can't afford another $4.95 iPlunge prize for getting 3 perfect quality scores that month so they may as well give the job to people in the third world. I'm not bitter. G-Spot Run fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jun 7, 2012 |
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Jun 7, 2012 14:24
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^pretty much that.Tennis Ball posted:You know, I'm very curious where the iron fistedness of call centers come from. It doesn't make any sense. I'm fairly certain there haven't been any studies done that show these type of policies are beneficial profit/business wise (If so, please link me, I'm very curious.). Its weird. Fast food places aren't even that tyrannical to their employees. It usually comes down to the client wanting to control liability (since the FTC loves to crack down on call centers loving up). If an agent can only read the script verbatim, then any deviations that could cause problems for the company are easily avoided by "the agent had no authority to say anything of the sort, here is the ironclad policy". It's still a stupid way to manage people, but as noted above, the people running call centers generally aren't the brightest.
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Jun 7, 2012 15:06
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Boomer The Cannon posted:Fixed it. This too. I was explaining to my fiancée how much I have to lie at my job. To both clients and management. Ugh, so sick of this job KeanuReevesGhost fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jun 7, 2012 |
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Jun 7, 2012 15:17
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JackRabbitStorm posted:This too. interesting
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Jun 7, 2012 15:22
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Bovril Delight posted:interesting Which part?
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Jun 7, 2012 15:41
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Null Set posted:^pretty much that. Another rule we had at my center had to do with expensive products. We took calls for a carpet-cleaning machine that cost about $700 (rental version is red, buyable one is blue). If a caller asked how much it cost, we were supposed to basically 'dance around' the price question by giving benefits. "Before I tell you how much it costs, let me give some features and benefits first, may I have your ZIP code to see what offers are available in your area?" Bullshit, the offer was the same everywhere, it was a nationally broadcast commercial. The idea being that if the agent gave the price right away, it would scare the customer away. Thank God I don't work there anymore.
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Jun 7, 2012 17:19
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So we had an interesting day today. One of my coworkers took a call and had to pretty quickly transfer it up to our supervisor, but not after giving the guy his full name. Turns out this guy has been to prison before for intimidation and assault, so the company is now taking legal action to prevent this guy from physically coming after our reps. And the rep who gave out his name has already had to delete his facebook out of fear that this guy would find out about his four year old daughter. Man. Never thought call center work was dangerous.
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Jun 8, 2012 00:30
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I'm not surprised people at our call center don't think twice about telling people what subcontractor we're with and where the drat call center is. What I am surprised with is how loving often it happens. People don't need to know that stuff on an in-bound customer service program, especially when they're pissed off about the possibility of losing their homes.
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Jun 8, 2012 01:09
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I wish I could conceal carry a pistol at work. I am seriously worried about a borrower coming up and blowing our brains out at the mortgage company I work for. It's incredibly easy to locate our call center and there have been several times where local borrowers have just walked in behind employees to try and deliver documents that should have been mailed. My only hope is that they decide to go after the main offices which are about a half mile away.
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Jun 8, 2012 01:19
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Since we're government contracted and subject to some very serious privacy laws, our security is pretty good. You need a badge to get in and we aren't in the same building as our reception area, which is good. However, we also get a good amount of death threats. This is why, when I married, I kept my maiden name at work. They can try to find me, but they're going to have a tough time of it if they google my work name.
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Jun 8, 2012 02:21
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Effexxor posted:Since we're government contracted and subject to some very serious privacy laws, our security is pretty good. You need a badge to get in and we aren't in the same building as our reception area, which is good. However, we also get a good amount of death threats. Yeah, we have badges that get us into the building, past the front desk, and then onto the elevator or into the stairwell. Three different scanboxes just to get to your floor
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Jun 8, 2012 03:11
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Nobody should ever have their life threatened over their job. But, it's call center 101 for reps to never give out their last names. I never do this. First name, last initial if they insist on more. Firm but polite redirects if they ask for my last name. This has never failed me.
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Jun 9, 2012 06:22
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Yeah, or I'd use a nickname/alias. Let's see... I had an old lady wish that I'd die of AIDS on Christmas Eve because we wouldn't send techs out in several feet of snow for her. One guy wished that the plane who crashed into the IRS would hit our call center instead. One guy threatened to hunt me down and gut me like a hooker fish. When I told the supervisor, I got 'lol just warn him three times and hang up'. Thanks, jackass. And one guy threatened to find us and shoot us. It's good times. Thank god I just do IT at the campus instead of for DSL now.
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Jun 9, 2012 06:32
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martyrdumb posted:Nobody should ever have their life threatened over their job. But, it's call center 101 for reps to never give out their last names. I never do this. First name, last initial if they insist on more. Firm but polite redirects if they ask for my last name. This has never failed me. When I first started my call center job, I was on outbound. The client required us to use our first and last names at the beginning of the call. "Hello, this is <firstname> <lastname>, calling on behalf of <client> looking to see if we can save you some money on your long-distance calls." Then I got on inbound, where it's first name only.
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Jun 9, 2012 18:50
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Aerofallosov posted:Yeah, or I'd use a nickname/alias. Let's see... I had an old lady wish that I'd die of AIDS on Christmas Eve because we wouldn't send techs out in several feet of snow for her. One guy wished that the plane who crashed into the IRS would hit our call center instead. One guy threatened to hunt me down and gut me like a hooker fish. When I told the supervisor, I got 'lol just warn him three times and hang up'. Thanks, jackass. I had a customer threaten to "lock us up inside our center and burn our building to the ground" because the 144Kbps IDSL line that we provided for him went down due to an automobile accident that took down a somewhat large city portion of Seattle. This, of course, came after he explained that he needs the internet to run his business.
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Jun 10, 2012 05:15
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I do kind of use an alias, as a matter of fact. My maiden name, which was what I used when I first started working at my call center, happens to be the same name as a former president's wife, so it's pretty impossible to google my maiden name and get me. When I got married, I figured that I could either change my name, deal with tons of confusion on who I am and how to spell/pronounce my new last name, or I could just keep my maiden name at work. I feel very sneaky, to be honest.
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Jun 10, 2012 06:38
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Our email addresses are all firstname.lastname@company.com, and I have a really rare last name. It means I only ever send out emails after the call is done so that I have a way to judge if the person I was speaking with is a fuckin' psycho.
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Jun 11, 2012 01:21
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trunkwontopen posted:I had a customer threaten to "lock us up inside our center and burn our building to the ground" because the 144Kbps IDSL line that we provided for him went down due to an automobile accident that took down a somewhat large city portion of Seattle. This, of course, came after he explained that he needs the internet to run his business. We once had a customer sneak into our call centre and hold up his bill in the middle of the call floor and screamed "Can anybody help me with this?" Apparently he had been having billing problems for a long time and knew there was a centre locally...
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Jun 11, 2012 01:37
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Blue_monday posted:We once had a customer sneak into our call centre and hold up his bill in the middle of the call floor and screamed "Can anybody help me with this?" Apparently he had been having billing problems for a long time and knew there was a centre locally... That scares the poo poo out of me. Then again, I used to work in a special department that dealt with "high risk" (aka extra angry/threatening) customers, so people have made some very personal threats against me. What about the security? Do they have security measures in your center, like guards who check the badge you swiped is actually your pic in the system? Our doors set off an alarm if someone goes through it without scanning a badge. Your story is exactly the reason why I want to slap agents I hear giving out our city instead of just our state. Do you wanna die, idiot? How about you stop telling really, really angry strangers where we are? Do you think they cannot use google and find some dumbass with a public facebook and figure it out?
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Jun 11, 2012 03:58
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RedFish posted:That scares the poo poo out of me. Then again, I used to work in a special department that dealt with "high risk" (aka extra angry/threatening) customers, so people have made some very personal threats against me. What about the security? Do they have security measures in your center, like guards who check the badge you swiped is actually your pic in the system? Our doors set off an alarm if someone goes through it without scanning a badge. At the center I worked at, we were required to identify the name of the actual call center company and the city the center was in, but only if the customer INSISTED.
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Jun 11, 2012 04:22
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Tennis Ball posted:You know, I'm very curious where the iron fistedness of call centers come from. It doesn't make any sense. I'm fairly certain there haven't been any studies done that show these type of policies are beneficial profit/business wise (If so, please link me, I'm very curious.). Its weird. Fast food places aren't even that tyrannical to their employees. What I read is that a lot of the people who started up/managed call centers came from factories that shuttered so they brought a factory mindset with them.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:23
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rockinricky posted:At the center I worked at, we were required to identify the name of the actual call center company and the city the center was in, but only if the customer INSISTED. For outbound sales I'm pretty sure its a requirement of canadian law. You also need to start off saying what company/centre you're calling from. The security at the centre was key swipes. The guy guy in behind someone. There was a guard for a while just after the incident but I think it was largeely reactionary. Non call centre related but semi relevant: The office I work in our full names are used in a lot of stuff. I sort of dread it ever turning into a problem but I've largely stopped caring. Someone did try to add me on facebook, which would have been amusing had I accepted. Boundaries, people!
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Jun 11, 2012 05:25
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martyrdumb posted:Nobody should ever have their life threatened over their job. But, it's call center 101 for reps to never give out their last names. I never do this. First name, last initial if they insist on more. Firm but polite redirects if they ask for my last name. This has never failed me. Or, just lie to them.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:27
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Null Set posted:^pretty much that. A lot of it also has to do with consistency. If two agents are taking calls for the same product, for example, ProActiv Solution, and they're using the same exact script, the calls should be the same, as though all calls are being taken by a robot with many different voices. That's why they want the scripts read verbatim, even though some phrasing sounds 'off' (the 'may I please have your email address'/'may I have your email address, please' example I posted above.) IBM Watson can have that job, for all I care.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:37
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martyrdumb posted:Nobody should ever have their life threatened over their job. But, it's call center 101 for reps to never give out their last names. I never do this. First name, last initial if they insist on more. Firm but polite redirects if they ask for my last name. This has never failed me. At mine if asked we need to provide our last names, our shift, and our location including address. I swear our job wants us to get murdered.
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Jun 11, 2012 05:41
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Thankfully we are told to not give out our last names to customers for our security. We are even allowed to create a separate email account on our ISP's residential accounts to email things to/from customers, and one is provided that we can all check. I think most companies do the firstname.lastname@company.com. My mortgage company, bank and pretty much everywhere else does that, with a few exceptions. If a customer demands information about us, we give our Employee ID number. I've only had one person to whom that wasn't good enough and I flat out told her that for my security and safety as well as that of my coworkers, I was not giving her anymore relevant information, she would have to contact corporate for any further assistance. Suffice to say, she wasn't happy. e: As for the scripts, my department barely had any scripts, and they just relaxed it further. We used to have to do an opening script, closing script and any scripts for trouble calls. Now we just have to do our trouble call disclaimers, and first name. That's it. It's so loving nice. Now the rest of the retardation... Gothmog1065 fucked around with this message at 06:02 on Jun 11, 2012 |
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Jun 11, 2012 05:59
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We've been adding more and more verbatim stuff and it kinda sucks. We went to paperless scripts, and it's a pain in the rear end. Gotta keep people from getting the bonuses by having their handle times shoot up dramatically, because they're now unable to do the questionnaire and pre-application at the same time, along with the trackers that never, ever get checked.
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Jun 12, 2012 05:12
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The company I did quality for had a huge hardon for verbatim scripting. It started out as "heres basically the perfect phrasing for something but you can use some variations to fit the flow of the call. We want our agents to feel EMPOWERED to help their customers" to "why the gently caress is that agent saying anything that is not word for word from the screen." The billing system was also comically awful. I'm honestly surprised they're still in business. Level 1 agents were supposed to take billing calls and I honestly could never wrap my head around how management expected agents to take care of some of these issues on a single call, with no aftercall. The company had some sort of shiny new billing system installed to the tune of millions of dollars but more often than not it seemed someone would randomly stop getting billed for no reason whatsoever. I spent a year doing quality for them and I couldn't troubleshoot more than the most basic of billing calls. It was also stupidly easy to duplicate an account and a huge hassle to fix it.
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Jun 12, 2012 05:32
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I am so glad our script is guidelines so we can get the relevant info out of our clients, and we get more props for being conversational and putting clients at ease than for following the script. We also get to avoid giving out last names. Then again, we frequently deal with crazy people, ex cons, and the desperate. When you have clients calling in once a week threatening to chop your balls off regardless of your gender, clients that slashed the tires of their previous rep, clients that keep getting incarcerated for violent assault...
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Jun 14, 2012 16:32
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Finished my week of nesting. I feel much less useless than I did before. Had a couple great calls, a few bad calls but none that were really ugly. I had fun helping people 
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Jun 15, 2012 03:53
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