📞Thank you for calling customer support! I'm just another John whose name is not John. By all means, tell me how your world stinks! 💩
Everyone who has survived a call center for a year should get a medal or at least get a little sticker for their résumé to show they have no problem working under pressure.
I started working at one of these centers when I was 15 years old. Before getting on the phones I had never held a conversation with a native English speaker who didn't also speak Spanish to an extent. I was able to cash in on the information age which allowed me to pick up a second language by exposure early on. I am one of those who learned the basics from watching TV shows and listening to music, but it was hillbillies trying to watch the football game on Satellite TV that taught me how to curse eloquently.
To be completely honest I don't know how I survived that first call, but I do know I didn't think I was going to make it.
If I could understand 30% of what this guy was saying it was a lot, when you speak to someone on the phone you can't see how their face moves, you can't see their expressions, you can't feel the vibrations when sound comes out much because they manifest differently. I had imagined that it would be difficult to understand customers while I was on training, but on my first day in production I realized it was difficult to the point of literally leaving me with without words.
A panic attack on my first day! At that moment I thought I was going to get fired, on my very first day they would know I had bullshitted my way into the job and didn't really speak English. Years later I would remember that moment nostalgically and find it funny, thinking to myself that at least I didn't cry like the dude next to me was doing on his first call.
By then I had been in the workforce for a few seasons seeing people get hired and fired within three months. I had become desensitized to people getting "decapitated," as we would jokingly refer to contracts getting terminated. I had been on the phones during the 2008 financial crisis listening to every other sob story about people getting laid off and losing everything. At some point I begun wishing that the callers would stop telling me about all the things they were losing, because we both knew what they wanted was more time to pay the bill and going around the bushes wasn't going to get us there faster. There's always that one horror story that gets to you, regardless of how much experience you have being a corporate robot.
We had a lot of fun, despite all, and that's why I decided to start writing this series about my experiences in the call center industry.
There was some dude who'd answer the phone as Obama when people would request a supervisor, we were encouraged to take names people didn't have a hard time relating to. This is something we could all understand, one of the most uncomfortable questions we would get was where we were located. Not only was this question usually prelude to the caller requesting to speak to someone with less of an accent, located in America, but generally the caller would lose trust in us if they didn't think we could understand the gravity of their situation, which was a single channel missing out of five hundred. Changing your name would also had the added benefit that insults would sound less personal, I remember burning through a few names but some people would get a new one every call... just so that whatever they did on that call would have a harder time being tracked back to them.
Then there were the specials, those who'd ask while on the phone whether you could watch them live as they were waving to the sky because since the signal for the TV comes from space you must surely be able to point the satellite there just to get a glance at how special they are.
I was an underpaid shrink for a couple of years but I learned a few things
I was the Indian you'd vent all your frustrations on when you'd come home after a hard day of work to find the cable off having just paid the bill the day before. I was also the guy who activated the adult channels for you, taught you how to get the parental control on and promised not to tell your wife.
✏️Images sources:
pixabay.com
tshirtbandit.com
wikimedia.org✏️
✒️ 100% Followback ✒️
Interesting to hear your perspective on this job. Can't even imagine the stress/pressure you faced on a regular basis. I feel like this post ended so abruptly though... Part 2 coming soon? 😋
At least I wasn't doing emergency calls!
Here's part 2: https://steemit.com/story/@tommycordero/thank-you-for-calling-customer-support-segunda-parte-my-name-is-john-but-i-swear-i-am-not-the-john-who-hung-up-before
Interesting. I can see how frustrating it can be to talk to idiots who don't know what they are doing and can't describe their problem appropriately. I wouldn't want to do it because I'd probably explode from the frustration.
On the other hand, it can be just as frustrating on the other side. When I can tell that the person on the other end knows nothing about the program or equipment he or she is trying to support, and that they are clearly reading from a script, it is difficult to deal with the requests to repeat all of the things I've already tried.
I will look forward to more stories.
That first caller was actually very nice to me, I thought he was going to hang up and get rude but he never did.
Perhaps one of the worst things of having worked there is how I know every time I'm placed on hold for 5 minutes the rep probably went for a cigarette and coffee. Now I know how frustrating can be for the other end too :)
Sometimes we are also forced to read from scripts. Even if we know exactly how to fix your problem in less than 10 seconds, we still have to go through the 10 minutes of reading the script in case the call goes through quality control we can keep the job. I have worked for companies so strict they would give you a 0/100 on a call because you forgot to ask for the customer's email address.