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The OP covers a very important burden of call center life, the customers, very nicely. It mentions the perils of management's fiat as well. However, it doesn't cover the ever present killer in the shadows, your fellow employees. Never in a job before this have I seen an employee so ready to throw a co-worker under the bus to save their own skin. More importantly, I have also never seen people lie so much to customers about what we can do to fix their problems, with the intent of shoving it off on the next poor bastard that gets a call from this person. My company is a cable provider. We partner with a large, nationwide phone company to offer a hybrid VoIP service. Because of this, there are constant delays in communication for phone related issues. Normal turnaround time for anything we send to them is two business days, no matter how small. And there are glitches in our automated communications systems that talk to theirs which can cause catastrophic problems for our customers. A week ago, one of my customers was mistakenly disconnected from her phone service. Her bill had gone past due, she paid it, the account was taken out of a non-payment status, and everything looked fine. 10 days later, on the date she was scheduled for a disconnect which had been canceled when she paid that bill, her phone mysteriously goes dead. The automated system had never informed the phone partner that the disconnect was to be canceled. The customer calls up, confused. The rep who gets the call claims there's an outage in the area (their services were all up and running, but the VoIP wasn't being passed a dial tone, even though it was connecting to us just fine and perfectly readable in the internal tools), tells the customer to call back the next day if it's still not working. She calls back the next day. This rep realizes that the number has been disconnected. She tells the customer that we'll have her reconnected within 24 hours. Did I mention that this second call was placed on a Saturday, and that our partner only counts standard M-F as business days? Nope, I didn't. And my co-worker didn't either. Never mind that the timeframe quoted was completely wrong anyway. Sunday comes and goes, Monday rolls around. 7pm, my last call of the day comes in. She gave us the benefit of the doubt and waited patiently for an extra day. She's audibly agitated, but trying very hard to be pleasant with me. She does a great job of maintaining composure until I explain that she was outright lied to, and apologized. At which point she musters up about 10 seconds of complete rage before breaking into hysterical sobbing. She eventually explains that her husband is a soldier in Iraq and they talk daily so she knows he's alright over there, and that this is the first time they've been out of communication for more than a day since he was deployed. At this point, she's been 96 hours without a phone, and is terrified for him. 5 minutes of tears and apologies later, I've made it clear to her that I would love to put in an order to get her reactivation moved up, but it's impossible because changing the date will cause the order to fail and leave her without service longer. She eventually gets her composure mostly back, and between sniffles thanks me for being honest and hangs up. Frankly, I hope she disconnects our service, because nobody should have to be put through that kind of mess just because two assholes lied. Those of you who don't work in a call center environment, count your blessings. Sitting at a desk answering phones is a cushy job, in and of itself. But the reality of it is that you're in the trenches. 40% of customers treat you like you're an animal, not even worthy of basic human decency. Management constantly imposes tighter goals and restrictions on how you do your job, increasing stress levels drastically. Your backstabbing co-workers aren't in it to help the customer, they just want to make a buck by taking as little effort as possible, while the 5% of employees who are genuinely dedicated to actually being helpful bear the burden of honesty. People have nervous breakdowns because of this poo poo.
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May 27, 2010 02:32
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| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 01:14 |
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