|
Posting from a call center with big (slightly smelly cause they are thirty years old) cubicles that do an okay job of isolating sound, super comfy mesh chairs, and the biggest inter-department battles are over calls being transferred to the wrong queues. After reading this thread I realize I'm kind of super lucky!
|
#
?
Sep 10, 2013 17:57
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 18:11 |
|
|
This guy sounds like he's about the cry at any moment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVdNobKNMig&t=73s The worker is being a saint though and being completely professional. Got to hand it to the call center guy.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2013 15:11
|
|
|
Shadowhand00 posted:This guy sounds like he's about the cry at any moment: Wow, totally playing this for everyone who says the abuse we deal with can't be that bad. Perfect example. Kinda funny how the commenters on youtube think it's fake. Nope, just an average day for us.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2013 15:29
|
|
|
supkirbs posted:Wow, totally playing this for everyone who says the abuse we deal with can't be that bad. Perfect example. Kinda funny how the commenters on youtube think it's fake. Nope, just an average day for us. Haha holy loving poo poo. I've had those customers. The bad thing for me is it pisses me off because it went off for that long. That agent is awesome for doing his job without getting any information from the guy, but I also feel for that caller who was told to call someone at X extension and never gets them, we get that poo poo all the time.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2013 15:48
|
|
|
Joke's on you if you actually want to help the customer and not just min/max your metrics so you don't get inevitably shitcanned after some stats sheet is printed up and an idiot director highlights your name on the list. Of course it is a risk if some QA creampuff listens to that call and hears you giving a fake extension or transferring the idiot off your line. I couldn't stand the idiots that just yell and yell and yell and already spoke with a supervisor and don't want to hold. Okay, what the gently caress do you want some peon rep to do? Why do these idiots think you can just get up and walk over to the person and get them to attend to their needs? Everyone's glued to the phone taking constant calls and everyone is interchangeable. I guess business has kind of distilled the lovely part of work (talking to customers) down to call centers and the customers still imagine some person working a 9-5 in a smaller office and actually handling more than bullshit grunt work.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2013 19:41
|
|
|
Shadowhand00 posted:This guy sounds like he's about the cry at any moment: Is it weird that I'm sitting here wondering if I could have de-escalated that call? On a different note, my job is sending me out of state to provide floor assistance for a new center for a week. Paid travel time, from what I hear very nice hotel rooms, plus a week off the phones to do the only thing I even kind of like at work? Sign me up.
|
|
#
?
Sep 12, 2013 23:55
|
|
|
That call is fantastic! Wow! That rep really sucks, but yeah, customers are nuts.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 00:33
|
|
|
you ate my cat posted:Is it weird that I'm sitting here wondering if I could have de-escalated that call? Screams or a single curse word on their own get a first warning from me. If he didn't calm down, it would be an instant hang-up. I've never worked anywhere that didn't let you hang up on abusive callers, as long as you warn them first.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 00:39
|
|
|
you ate my cat posted:Is it weird that I'm sitting here wondering if I could have de-escalated that call? I don't try to de-escalate calls. Who gives a gently caress if some man-child can't calm himself down. Then again I don't get any poo poo for not doing it so I suppose that helps. I'd have done the same thing. Call and freak out screaming at me? See if I lift a loving finger.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 01:57
|
|
|
martyrdumb posted:Screams or a single curse word on their own get a first warning from me. If he didn't calm down, it would be an instant hang-up. I've never worked anywhere that didn't let you hang up on abusive callers, as long as you warn them first. Pretty sure we're not allowed to hang up on anyone for any reason. There is, however, an art to making people think they've lost you without hanging up. Not that I've done it, but I've seen it done. The system can tell if you hung up, and it can tell if you just hit mute and are pretending. Try stressing the connector on your headset where it meets the amp cord, just enough to break the connection intermittently, while still talking normally. Still might get fired for it, but it's harder to trace. But honestly screams and cursing don't bother me, I just wait till they get tired, then we can actually get something done. I'm an escalations agent, though, so it's a bit of a different perspective. You want to get angry and screamy with me? I don't give a poo poo, I'm so over people being angry that it's just a waste of time. Finish your tantrum and then chill out a little.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 02:03
|
|
|
martyrdumb posted:Screams or a single curse word on their own get a first warning from me. If he didn't calm down, it would be an instant hang-up. I've never worked anywhere that didn't let you hang up on abusive callers, as long as you warn them first. My call center has a policy that hanging up on a customer for any reason, even verbal abuse, is grounds for termination.  However, they are cool with you taking off your headset, standing up and getting a supervisor to take over the call if someone is really getting to you.  This is the only kinda-lovely policy we have, we're pretty great about everything else.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 02:12
|
|
Blue Steel posted:Joke's on you if you actually want to help the customer and not just min/max your metrics so you don't get inevitably shitcanned after some stats sheet is printed up and an idiot director highlights your name on the list. Of course it is a risk if some QA creampuff listens to that call and hears you giving a fake extension or transferring the idiot off your line. "I need to speak to Jack please." *eyes 58 people in his immediate area, multiplying by 3 floors times 7 other call centers*
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 04:16
|
|
|
I've been doing offline work for like a week and it's been so great. Went back to taking calls today as regular and it felt even worse than when I started
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 13:39
|
|
|
you ate my cat posted:Is it weird that I'm sitting here wondering if I could have de-escalated that call? Prepare a warm transfer, tell the customer that you're going to try to put them through to Michelle but you're going to stay on the line so that if there's *any* issue with getting through you'll still stay with them rather than them being transferred to another CSO. That's my go-to for people frustrated with getting bounced back and forth, and it's not failed yet. It suggests that rather that just trying to get them off the phone and make them someone else's problem, you're actually trying to accomplish what they need. Listening to the beginning of the call before where the youtube link started it; whoever thought that "how are you doing today" was a good greeting for a tech support line has their head way up their rear end. It's like waving a red flag at a loving bull, and practically an invitation for a mildly frustrated customer to start exploding.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 15:08
|
|
|
Shadowhand00 posted:This guy sounds like he's about the cry at any moment: That asshat would have been disconnected by me by second 30. Even if he were to give me a bad survey, causing my manager to listen to the call, the WORST I'd get is a minor talking to. If it were a trend, we'd escalate to a special group that can actually close the person's account and blacklist them from doing business with us again.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 15:51
|
|
|
blackmet posted:That asshat would have been disconnected by me by second 30. Yea we have a similar policy where any personal threats or excessive swearing is grounds to disconnect the call on the spot. And repeated offenses can result in losing your account. Which I've actually had a call that made it to the team that decides that. Guy called in Wanting some auto loan but had no income, I can't say no to him asking to run an application so we do. Of course he was declined and then he blew up about how rich he is that he takes his Bently (Do you even know what that is son?) to the end of the driveway to get into his lambo while he checks his time on his Rolex (the diamonds make it really easy to read the time) And what a loving retard I am for not giving him 50k to buy a car with.  I don't know how professional business is conducted and must be some idiot in India. After about 2 or 3 minutes of it I just told him I was done with the call, the loan was declined, if he had any questions he could ask someone else, and hung up. He called back and cussed out some new girl and made her cry too. They ended up not closing the account but they did limit it. He can no longer get loans through our company. So I guess its a good outcome.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 16:44
|
|
|
I worked for an insurance company that insures active duty/military vets/families. We had one customer call in and was very racist/sexist/terrible with a coworker who has an 'arabic' name, saying that she was what was wrong with ARE COUNTRY and couldn't believe she was employed with us (which is ridiculous, she was a retired staff sergeant). I believe his membership was revoked for being abusive and management blacklisted him.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 16:54
|
|
|
Was it USAA? They're a rad company, I do pretty much every piece of business I have with them.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 19:11
|
|
|
Loving Life Partner posted:Was it USAA? They're a rad company, I do pretty much every piece of business I have with them. Yea actually. Good guess. I was attempting to be fairly vague about it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 20:43
|
|
|
Sorry, I didn't mean to out you lol, but that's an awesome story.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 13, 2013 20:47
|
|
|
Just put in my two weeks notice... Now to see if I can survive these two weeks with a borderline abusive lead who is soon going to be told of my temporary status...
|
|
#
?
Sep 14, 2013 23:56
|
|
|
Man, there's a couple of changes going to be happening around my place. My department takes calls from our stores from across the UK, all internal stuff (speaking to store staff). I don't know how it compares to standard customer service call centres, but I like to think we had it pretty good. 9 hour work day, two ten minute breaks and one half an hour lunch break, pretty much trusted to take care of ourselves (then again we are a team of like 25 people). Half of our jobs doesn't even involve going on the phones (and some of us have other tasks to be doing). I've not worked in any other call centre jobs, so I don't have any point of reference. Our bosses are bringing in some new rules that don't seem to do much such as having team leads hovering over us, or having to ask them for bathroom breaks. They're probably going to implement some kind of clapping system that'll never be used, so that we can get team leads' attentions??? Is that kind of poo poo normal for a call centre job? We have pretty tight targets, and things have gone in the red over the past couple of months due to huge increase in call volume without additional staff. I think our management are just trying whatever poo poo they can in some desperate attempt at avoiding the real solution (hire more people). The whole thing has a general feeling that we're slowly being demoted, and the trust they had in us seems to have gone. It's just one dodgy decision after another, and I have no clue what's going on. My guess is that they're taking rules from our customer services team of 150 people and trying to squeeze it down to an experienced team of <25 people. Job security isn't an issue at the moment. Am I just being pessimistic about everything?
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2013 00:43
|
|
|
I feel like that's the way it always goes. Why hire more staff when you can edge your existing staff closer to 100% utilization? Out of curiosity, how many levels of management are between you and the people probably making the decisions about these changes?
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2013 01:08
|
|
|
Ball Cupper posted:Man, there's a couple of changes going to be happening around my place. My department takes calls from our stores from across the UK, all internal stuff (speaking to store staff). I don't know how it compares to standard customer service call centres, but I like to think we had it pretty good. 9 hour work day, two ten minute breaks and one half an hour lunch break, pretty much trusted to take care of ourselves (then again we are a team of like 25 people). Half of our jobs doesn't even involve going on the phones (and some of us have other tasks to be doing). Update your resume and get moving. The second a place starts instituting those kind of rules (clapping for a bathroom break? Are you loving serious?), it's going to become hell to work for in a very, very short time. From what I've seen, it takes acts of GOD to roll poo poo like that back.
|
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2013 06:02
|
|
|
Ball Cupper posted:Man, there's a couple of changes going to be happening around my place. Ball Cupper, I really feel your pain. I'm not working in a call centre yet, but I'm going to be very soon. I work for a national telecoms company in a small European country, and our department basically works on cases coming in from Tier 1 & 2. Normally, this is stuff they don't have rights to or that takes way too long to work on to handle on-call. We've nearly no contact with customers, usually sending out no-reply emails or text messages stating the problem's been fixed. Our sub-department does interact with Tier 1, because they often don't have rights to implement easy fixes. These are supposed to be two-minute calls with their customer on hold. We got bought out by an American company late last year. The vast majority of management quit, my department's been completely reorganized, and people with no skill overlaps were put together in teams. Some of us got pay increases, but our time is a lot more monitored - we still don't use aux statuses but have to account for basically every minute spent. The sub-department I'm in ended up understaffed to begin with, and that was with normal levels of inflow. Calls have been through the roof lately, including basic-knowledge and training calls. We haven't been involved in improvement or product meetings in a while. Furthermore, escalations from management have changed from 'things we actually do' to 'what?' One of my new co-workers, a fortysomething guy who's a wizard at STBs and DTV and used to handle the HD Copy Protection issues flagged me down as I was leaving. Management had assigned him an escalation to contact a customer to set up a mail client on an iPhone, using IMAP. He's never set up a mail client in his life. I settled in next to him and basically coached him for an hour and a half of unpaid overtime, made worse by the client being monolingual in a language we don't speak. At the end of that, on a hunch, I looked up the second tier guys, and found that while the position still exists, only one person in the entire company is still filling it. The rest are 'on loan', 'on extended leave', or quit. In fact, one of them got promoted to be on our team. On Friday before closing, we were told we were getting extra language training, and we would have to start engaging in customer contact by phone as a new performance metric, some time in the near future. My guess: we're about to be folded into the call center at Tier 2. Even though most of us have no call center experience whatsoever. Argyle Jelly fucked around with this message at 10:36 on Sep 15, 2013 |
|
#
?
Sep 15, 2013 10:26
|
|
|
This is why I Hate my job. Customer calls in because she was supposed to have an "easy connect" where we send her the crap and she hooks it up. That's all fine and well, this was done on the 11th. These are supposed to be handled 2 days at most. 5 days later, the phone part was not done correctly, they never scheduled a tech, 3 days of reps saying "someone will be out tomorrow" and nothing happening, and it gets to me and I can't tell her anything other than "someone will be out tomorrow" because "we're all booked up and can't get a tech out today". This is all so incredibly common, I can see why people hate the company I work for. Maybe I'm just exceptionally frustrated today because that was literally my first call (and I"m not even supposed to be in the office, because get this. The same company hosed up my install for work at home. Yep. Got delayed over the weekend and this after noon because some reason). However, I'm going to make this a full half day. I'll figure out a way how.
|
|
#
?
Sep 16, 2013 15:26
|
|
|
loving customer enlightenment blue balls. I spent 30 minutes with this guy disputing that he was "double billed" erroneously (he wasn't), and finally last ditch effort, I get him to draw a diagram and I plotted his payments out and I KNOW he loving saw it and he wouldn't acknowledge it, hahah.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2013 14:45
|
|
|
Gothmog1065 posted:This is why I Hate my job. Customer calls in because she was supposed to have an "easy connect" where we send her the crap and she hooks it up. That's all fine and well, this was done on the 11th. These are supposed to be handled 2 days at most. 5 days later, the phone part was not done correctly, they never scheduled a tech, 3 days of reps saying "someone will be out tomorrow" and nothing happening, and it gets to me and I can't tell her anything other than "someone will be out tomorrow" because "we're all booked up and can't get a tech out today". I do feel bad for our fuckups. I usually start throwing it at other people, dispatch, tech supervisor, tier 2 supervisor, we hosed up this is hosed up. Then in 30 minutes I call back and tell them (subtely) that I'm the only person who gives a gently caress. They usually accept it, because I tried.
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2013 17:44
|
|
|
One of the nice things about our company is that what we sell is so completely unnecessary that I don't feel too bad when we gently caress up (in part because we do a good job of resolving stuff).
|
|
#
?
Sep 17, 2013 18:30
|
|
|
Apparently my old company is having 'Spirit Week'...... .....when they're laying off 50+ people on Friday. What a bunch of bastards.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2013 00:53
|
|
|
This might be more e/n, but, uh... Rant thread? I guess it's a rant? I've been working at a call-center making outbound market survey calls for the last week. I pretty much hate it and have no intention of doing it long-term, and also it's only supposed to last two to three weeks, but it's the second job I've ever had (and the first was just a week of 9-5 filing), plus reading this thread cheers me up some, so I've been coping. I wasn't really expecting to get a call today telling me I've been fired for not reading the script verbatim? I'd been getting consistently good feedback about being polite and well-spoken and not mispronouncing words, which considering I graduated goddamn summa cum laude in English is something I kind of took for granted; I didn't hear a single thing about any gently caress-ups until two hours before clock-out yesterday. (My errors were telling respondents to rank a question on a 1-5 scale rather than reading out the five descriptions of "excellent, good, neutral", etc., and also telling them that they could say they "don't know" about a different series of questions rather than letting them hem and haw for five minutes over how to rank a product they've heard of once in passing.) And I thought I fixed it on the next go-round, but either that didn't matter or I was still screwing up, because hey! Sudden firing. I wasn't working as many hours as some of the other twentyish people on the project, but I had the third-highest completion rate, so I thought I was doing kind of well? They're only halfway to the project's total goal, too, so it's not like they're desperately shedding people on the homestretch. I didn't want the job and our supervisor let it slip that the client we're gathering information for is a notable figure that I utterly loathe, but I'm a goody-two-shoes straight-A student who has never hosed up like this before and now I'm worried my temp service is going to consider me untouchable even though I got excellent feedback from the filing job ugh ugh argh 
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2013 18:57
|
|
|
I did phone surveys for my first ever real job when I was 16, they are totally anal about being precisely verbatim, because they are terrified that the person reading the question could affect the respondent's answer in any way. You worked there for 2/3 weeks total? Don't stress about it, this will be viewed as a minor blip in your life and 3 years from now this whole thing will be a "Oh, hey, I did phone surveys once." story you tell.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2013 19:20
|
|
|
Tjadeth posted:This might be more e/n, but, uh... Rant thread? I guess it's a rant? If it's one thing I've learned from others on this thread it's that unless you're the god drat killing machine on sales, you're gonna get tossed over something as anal as not following the script. Don't worry, dude. Count this as a blessing. You no longer have to work for a sleazeball! Go do something else. Seriously.
|
|
#
?
Sep 18, 2013 20:23
|
|
|
So I won a $25 gift card for making the most customers happy in a set amount of time. So I made a joke to my boyfriend "just watch in a week or two they'll find a reason to give me poo poo for something." Fast forward to today (not even a week later) where I get an out of the blue verbal warning for a bunch of stuff that I either did with explicit permission (leaving early for being sick a couple times earlier in the year) or having called in over my allowed 10 days although 4 of those days were covered by a doctors note and my time management tool shows that I have 32 hours (4 days) of sick leave accrued. That's just what they do. They award you for something then a week or two later they cut you down with either warnings or bullying emails or highlighting you for some little thing. I cried myself to sleep last night for the first time in 4 years. The last time i had done so prior to last night was when I was in an abusive relationship. I feel like I'm going to burst out into tears all day at work and to make things worse I've been getting more lovely/abusive callers than usual this week and management is treating work like a witch hunt where any little thing that stands out (metrics, aux codes, etc.) gets you a warning or a bullying email. I keep applying to jobs and hear nothing back. I've been going to job fairs (one actually got so many people they started turning applicants away) and I'm just so frustrated and I feel trapped and I'm scared I'm either going to rage quit or get fired or be trapped there or I don't even know. I want to talk to my doctor about the bunch of issues I've been having including: Headaches Sleeplessness Listlessness Loss of appetite Panic attacks and generally just anxious behavior Crying myself to sleep Irritability But I'm worried he'll just say nothing is wrong or tell me to go to a therapist or something instead of prescribing stress leave but I'm not sure what else to do either. Just needed to rant that out I guess.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 04:49
|
|
|
No, that sounds about par for course in many call centers. They did that at the first one I worked at. Yay HEB grocery card! ... but you have too many points and will be working overtime without overtime pay. Oh, you were more than 3 minutes in the bathroom. And so on. It feels like an abusive relationship sometimes.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 05:09
|
|
|
What is this "doctor's note" thing? My work doesn't even loving accept those. Oh, unless you take a sick day before/after a holiday weekend. Then they're required or
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 16:31
|
|
|
Gothmog1065 posted:What is this "doctor's note" thing? My work doesn't even loving accept those. Oh, unless you take a sick day before/after a holiday weekend. Then they're required or Days when you call in are counted against us if we can't provide a doctors note. If we call in sick 3 days in a row it is mandatory if we provide one. I provided one and they still tried to give a verbal warning for it.
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 16:58
|
|
|
I'm going to bitch about one of my coworkers for no reason other than the fact the rest of my job is dream compared to most of you guys (especially you cuntvalet drat that sucks  ).To preface, I'm 22, he's 18, so this may be just a lack of maturity, but goddamn he has no idea about how to act in a work place. This is his first job too, but it's like he's treating it just like school. Most of it is little things, swearing loudly around the bosses, talking about things that are wayyyyy inappropriate, things like that, but over the last couple of days he's had two meetings (we've been here for a month and a half...) with our manager about some issues. The first was when he was swearing loudly in the canteen, then walked through the lobby to the smoking area with a cigarette in his mouth (thankfully it wasn't lit). His reaction to this was "I don't know what their problem is". The second was today. He had an early shift, same as me, which means he started at 8am. Now the way these shifts work, you take your first 15 minute break at 9 (when everyone else gets in), and your lunch between 12-1 (sometimes the full hour, sometimes half an hour). He decided this wasn't good enough for him, and decided to sit around on his aux codes until 9:30, when he felt his break "should" be. The major problem with this is that 9:30 is when we get really busy, so we need everyone available, which is why there's no breaks then. If that wasn't enough, he took an extra 15 minutes on his lunch, again when we were slammed, because he "forgot the time" (read: having a cigarette, in full view of the office). He's also just generally lazy, doesn't really know what he's doing, and his attitude just stinks. If we weren't already short staffed I'm fairly sure he'll be let go after his 6 months probation (hell, if he keeps this up he'll be shitcanned within the month), but he'll probably just have his probation extended like some other useless people. Anyway that's been pissing me off all day, and I'm sure I sound like a grumpy old man who takes his job way too seriously, but gently caress sort yourself out man. Aside from that though, everything's pretty good 
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 19:47
|
|
|
Seriously getting the impression call centres - or at least the one I work for - are built on lies. HR lied about the bonus pay, the schedule, the vacation time, weekend bonus, night bonus; everything. To everyone! 3 out of the 5 people I started with quit - and we started not 3 months ago. On the plus side, apparently lying just as much about my performance as HR lied about everything is the best way to get promoted; I was invited to the management fast track. 
|
|
#
?
Sep 19, 2013 22:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 8, 2024 18:11 |
|
|
The most telling thing about a call center job is how after a weekend or extended break you don't go back feeling "recharged" and ready to do your best, you go back feeling like you got submarined by life back into a lovely situation.
|
|
|
#
?
Sep 20, 2013 15:19
|
|