One Of Those Days...

Today I went back to work for the first time since a month; the past four weeks I've been working from home, so today I got to meet my colleagues and manager again. Things have changed since the new year began...

_{Image by geralt - source: Pixabay}

Immediately it was impressed upon me that the corporation needs new customers. Fast. We are going to be assigned to mandatory training-sessions to "better anticipate the customers wishes" to be able to "make them a personalized offer." Now this would be business as usual, had I worked at some sales-department, but I don't. I work at a telephone helpdesk of an internet provider; I help people with technical problems, questions about their bills, listen to their complaints and try to help solve any problem relating to the services we provide, internet, television, telephone.

This is what I love doing; it gives me great satisfaction to be able to help another person and it's really gratifying to hear that the customer is happy with the solution. But now we are supposed to hook in on the customer's gratitude and ask them, after the problem is solved, follow-up questions in order to see if we can't help them by selling them additional services or products. This I can understand up to a point; there are occasions in which the customer would really be better off when taking another subscription or buy a wifi repeater or a powerline-adapter. A sale can be service in that way, and I'm glad to advice my customers to help them have a better experience.

This is how it was introduced, two or three years ago now. But since then it has been a slow and gradual push for ever more sales. We were a great success for the corporation and made them huge profits with this "soft-sell" method. But then came the incentives: agents now earn bonuses when they exceed sales-expectations. The new agents are trained in sales techniques and often lack the technical skills or know-how to solve basic problems. It's obvious that sales are quickly becoming a core task for helpdesk agents; even our mechanics now are being introduced to sales-targets and sometimes I get customers on the phone who are sold something they really don't need, like mobile phone subscriptions with a bunch of internet data sold to old people who never use the internet on their phones.

So, I write this to say that I don't really feel like writing today... I'm really thinking about whether this is still the right job for me anymore. Not the writing, but the helpdesk thing; I got the feeling today that it may be time to consider alternatives, but I really have no idea what direction to turn... yet. I really hope I didn't bore you too much today, dear reader, but this was one of those days that daily life zapped all inspiration out of me; I'm sure tomorrow everything will look brighter again and I hope you'll be here, sharing the light with me ;-)

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