My old person trait is that I think ‘ghosting’ is completely unacceptable and you owe the other person a face-to-face conversation.
My old person trait is that I think ‘ghosting’ is completely unacceptable and you owe the other person a face-to-face conversation.
As someone who works in a call center, screw that last person on here. So sorry you hate the automated system. Sorry you had to wait on hold. They can’t keep enough of us employed because y’all are fucking mean and no one wants to be abused for $15/hr.
Er, I mean, Thank you for calling, sorry about your wait!
Don’t you think you could both be victims? Waiting for ages listening to a 13 second loop of music interspersed with “your call is important to us” might make people a bit more angry?
You should be mad at the people who gain financially from it, and could make it better for you and the customers, but might have to skip that third yacht for little Timmy.
I understand that people get angry when they have to wait in line for ages and usually due to something having gone wrong in the first place, but dumping that anger onto a hapless call center employee who’s in many ways — like you said – also a victim of the same company is Not Cool™.
If I find myself feeling elevated by a company screwing me, I always start my call by telling the customer service agent that any frustration on my part isn’t directed at them, but at the company and their policies, things I understand they have zero control over. If they’re obviously foreign, I try to make clear that I think it’s an injustice that they’re paid less than their US counterparts and that I think they should be paid the US equivalent, because them being from another country does not make them any less of a human being deserving of basic respect and dignity.
Usually, having gotten that spiel out of the way at the beginning of the call, they are pretty understanding and by the time I’m done explaining I’m less elevated. If you’re frustrated, it helps to keep in mind the power structures at play and direct your frustration and anger at the correct parties: the corporate suits who use customer service lines to screw with customers and avoid ever having to hear a customer complaint themselves.
What I really want is the corporate phone numbers so I can call the fucking jackass CEO at home and direct my fuming fucking self-righteous anger right under his stupid worthless ass. Because I’m well aware that they record calls and don’t give one flying fuck about our complaints. They don’t listen, they don’t care. They’ll care when I’m blowing up their personal phone at 3am demanding them to fix the fucking issue.
Yeah same here.
Also, turns out that when you treat customer service employees as humans, and communicate your frustrations and what caused them instead of jumping down the throat of an innocent service rep, you’re way more likely to get good outcomes. Who woulda thunk?
I have very little faith that a lot of these people would be any more pleasant. My time spent over the last year in the chat department at my company is a major reason why. Chat, unlike phone, has little to no wait time usually. But maybe something about written word makes people even more vitriolic.
Of course I am upset at our staffing policies as well, and the company who is at the whim of the shitty investors.
I had two friends quit call centers within a month of joining because it immediately sent them into a depression.
I’m sorry for everything you have to deal with at work.
Worked in a call center for a long time and I somewhat agree with the last person.
It’s often easier to deal with something with a real person. That is not the issue.
The issue is people being polite and respectful. If everyone was a decent human being, call centers would be a good place to work and they wouldn’t be understaffed.
So what you are saying is that you should be allowed to categorise them into nice and “wait until smb. Will find the energy tot talk to them”?
Lmao. That could be a way to get around it, but those calls would be permanently in queue if that was the case hahaha
Well don’t be a dick then.
I wish call center software had better features on dealing with overburdened staff. Callbacks are a great thing to avoid having to be on the phone constantly. A dash of statistics might be nice to recommend an alternative time to call to get a better wait time.
I don’t use callbacks, and I don’t leave messages, because no company has ever actually called me back. It’s a great idea, but IME they never execute it.
My HMO’s advice line uses them. They very handy for when you’re trying to get non-urgent advice.
I was disappointed to learn that some companies set fucked up quotas for their customer service people. If you call to cancel, they can’t just process the request: they need to try to keep you, because they have to keep a certain number of cancellers each day. And in those situations and others like it, being polite seems to come off as susceptibility. It’s a system designed–it seems to me–to cause confrontation.
I think we can safely blame the corporate overlords for this situation: set impossible goals for one side of the phonecall while pissing off the customer at the other. Whatever moves that needle, no matter how it dehumanizes people, no matter how big the CEO’s yacht already is.