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Man, I wish I knew about this thread before I quit my call center job 5 months ago. Let me tell you my two weeks notice period felt like the afterglow of the best sneeze I ever had stretched for the entire period. I worked at a small internet hosting company, starting in the website design team. The point of the team was a retention measure: customers would buy our crappy do-it-yourself website creator program, think "This looks nothing like my business!" and cancel it immediately. We were tasked with getting into a site after the sale was placed, but before the customer saw it, to make it look prettier and more customized. It was $10 an hour temp work, but we were expressly forbidden from touching the phones on our desks, so it was great! I was learning a lot, and producing highly customer rated websites at a faster rate than my coworkers to the point where I became the go-to guy for any trouble cases and got a $1 per hour raise for it. Of course, that didn't last, and it gradually became more and more phone-focused, leading to panic attacks and deepening depression, before finally, on the first day of my supervisor's yearly vacation, before I even got in for my 10am-6pm shift, the manager brought the team into his office, told them the design work was being shifted to the Philippines, and we were strictly phone-based from here on out. From there, I switched to the technical support team for that same website creator. If I was going to be on the phones, I might as well be full time, get a $0.20 raise, and healthcare. Besides, they offered to put me on the custom code team, which meant a little off-phone work...which lasted until three months later, before the GM killed the custom code team. I spent that year walking customers through basic website creator editing, domain issues, billing, and getting yelled at because I didn't support the product the customer was calling about and had to send them to the Filipino technical support team. By the end of this year, I could get a customer's account details verified, explain the difference between a DNS point and transfer of registrar, and walk the customer through performing a DNS point in 4 minutes flat. By Friday night (because, at the end, by some miracle, I was able to work a dream shift of 10am-6pm Monday through Friday), my mouth would be sore and loose from giving the company spiel at the beginning of each call. One day, I was walking into the office thinking, "This is it. This is the day I loving quit. I can't loving take this anymore." That same day, I was offered a 2nd level position on the newly reformed design team. Well, "2nd level," officially we can't have a 2nd level agent, so on paper you're going to be a 1st level agent in charge of website reviews, but it'll be fine, you'll have people under you (but not officially) and you'll be next in line for a supervisor position! At first, it was great. I'd QA the living poo poo out of the Filipino team's website designs, give them detailed notes, and wound up getting decent material out of them. Meanwhile, I had two agents directly under me doing website review work and another 6 unofficially under me due to being the senior agent and our little cadre being separated from the rest of the team due to a seating issue. The only time I'd take a call is the occasional supervisor call. My panic attacks stopped. I'm sure you see where this is going. New manager, two new supervisor positions handed to specific other people without them being officially offered to the rest of the company (one was a friend of the first supervisor, the other was a diversity hire from a temp position thanks to the company getting hit with a lawsuit), and a whole lot of other departmental changes meant more and more of my 2nd level duties were stripped from me, piece by piece. First, I was back on the phones when our lines got busy. Then, I was tasked with writing training documentation for another product entirely, and, well, isn't that funny, OutOfPrint's the only person who really knows the product, let's put him on 1st level calls for it. Then they took away supervisor privileges from me for our call monitoring platform, despite being the only person in my department to take the time to figure out how to get decent information out of it and gave those rights to a buddy of mine without telling me they were doing it. Finally, I was back on 1st level website creator calls, and my panic attacks came roaring back so badly that I couldn't function and had to get my therapist to fill out paperwork for my HR department stating that I can't perform the actions asked of me with the changes in my job description. Incidentally, they changed my job description without notifying me. Not just my unofficial 2nd level stuff; they added a line stating that I would take 1st level calls for my, and any other, department as needed. Neat stuff! In short, I held three jobs there, all three were phone bank, and only one of which I knew was going to be phone bank when I signed up for it. I worked there for five years, four of which were on the phones, one of which I actually signed up to be on the phones. I was passed up for promotion twice due to office politics and a diversity lawsuit, unofficially demoted, and passed up for two other jobs in my company (one for a trainer position for which I apparently gave one of the best presentations their manager had ever seen, but the job went to the guy whose Facebook page was flooded with vacation pictures that just happened to feature two other trainers, and another in our Fraud department because they genuinely just liked the other guy more. I can't argue with that one.). There were some good parts to it, but holy Hell am I glad to be out of it. As a thanks for sticking around until the end of this rant, here's the best call I ever had: CUSTOMER: Hi, I can't edit my website. It's not doing things. ME: Okay, which internet browser are you using? CUSTOMER: Ask Jeeves. I mentally shut down for a solid 10 seconds after hearing that. Turns out he was using AOL, which is still a mindfuck considering it was 20-goddamn-13.
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Feb 23, 2017 21:11
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Takuan posted:Reading this gave me flashbacks to working for a crooked webhosting company that lied to and exploited their customers almost as much as they lied to and exploited their employees. Though what they would do was advertise a 'free website development program' (Microsoft Front Page), then when the customer called in because it was an ancient program that barely worked, we had to try to sell them on a website development contract. Hah! Yeah, sounds like something my old company would do. My old company did some super shady poo poo, including stuff that skirted outright fraud, telling 1st level agents who had customers calling in to (justifiably) complain about stuff we knew didn't work as advertised to say, "Oh, that's new. Let us look into it and we'll let you know in the next few days." They made that even more fun when they introduced sales quotas for all support agents. It was "sell this load of poo poo product you know full well is a load of poo poo or get written up." The company really, really pushed a terrible 1st party implementation of a genuinely good 3rd party product that was broken for most of our customers who purchased it. It could only accept X submissions per month for all people who purchased it through our company, instead of per specific customer, due to our parent company loving up the wording in the contract. Any submissions over X wouldn't process, and the customer would receive no confirmation that their submission was not processed. This was a known issue for a full year until it was finally fixed. Looking back on it, I'm pretty sure this pigheaded culture made us do some downright illegal poo poo. Part of the problem is that it's the US branch of a foreign company, and when the parent company said "jump," we were all, from 1st level temps to the general manager, expected to skip past asking "how high?" and just loving jump, no matter what issues may be dangling right above our heads. I'm glad to see people in this thread escaping call center work for healthier alternatives. There are people who genuinely like this kind of work, but for people like us, the best thing we can do is get out. No job is worth your mental health.
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Mar 10, 2017 19:58
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That reminds me of a funny one. We had one agent whose extension was somehow linked to AT&T's call center system. He'd get calls that were transferred to him from AT&T, which confused the hell out of everyone involved. We had no way of fixing it, so he just had to deal with it until he got a new extension in a different department.
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Aug 2, 2017 20:01
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Coolspaz posted:One of the best parts of being a phone jockey is the crazy laws people make up. A few memorable ones include "I don't agree with this bill therefor i'm absolved from paying it", "You can't charge me for X because I didn't know I had X and by law I don't have to pay that" and the best one "I don't have to pay for X service because I didn't use it" loving THIS. "I haven't used my website, so why do I still need to pay this bill?" "Sir/ma'am, if you take a trip for a month, do you still need to pay your mortgage?" "Well, yes, but this is a website..."
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Jan 3, 2018 17:43
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One of the customer verification methods we used at my old job at a hosting company was the customer's password. Customers understandably hated that, so we created a PIN system which reminded customers to click a link in their control panel to make a verification PIN so we didn't need to ask their password. No one used it. The best were the customers who refused to give their passwords, asked if they could instead give me their social security number, then immediately start reading it out. At no point did my company ever ask a customer for their social security number prior to these people reciting theirs to me.
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Feb 15, 2019 21:35
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