A letter to the Sullivan borg:
Call center reps are among the lowest paid workers in the service sector, and have one of the hardest jobs. We spend most of our days solving problems and fielding complaints, soothing angry customers and explaining incomprehensible company policies. We are tethered to desks by telephone headsets, staring at computers for 8-10 hours at a stretch, in airless and windowless cubicles. Not only must we have encyclopedic knowledge of our services and products, we must also be able to articulate clearly and empathetically with our customers. We must never lose our temper, sound uninterested or uncaring, and be willing to listen to tirades and invective without responding in kind.
The most offensive customers are the ones who assume that CS reps are uneducated, have landed in their jobs because they have no other choice, and simply cannot provide help without an aggressive approach by the customer. The great majority of my co-workers in both of my jobs are college-educated, experienced in a lot of different life situations (including world travel, and a great variety of past jobs and professions) and are CS reps because they respect the companies they work for and believe in the product and services they sell and represent. Most of them have chosen to work as reps, often because of the flexibility (as I do, for seasonal work that allows me a lot of time off to travel). We relish our ability to solve problems and help people.
No one hates call center workers because we think they are dumb. People get angry with call center workers because they have generally been driven to madness by the corporate practices that are causing the problem. Then, when the call center worker just repeats scripts rather than attempting to solve the problem, people get madder.
Trust me. I didn’t call paypal with any negative opinions of the call center worker. I was livid with the company.
And I still haven’t resolved my issue with them because my phone is dead and I’m waiting for a replacement cell and have gone without service for two days. It’s actually been kind of nice not having a phone.
jwb
It’s also because you know very well that you’re not likely to get anyone who can actually help you with your problem until you’ve gotten to at least the supervisor’s supervisor, and everything in the system has been put in place to keep you from doing so.
Amanda in the South Bay
Ditto what everyone else said-I think a case can be made that people who work in menial jobs (in general) are often unfairly put down as uneducated, but there’s nothing specific about call center workers.
Actually, what pisses me off when i talk to a call center worker is the fact that I just can’t call a help number and talk to someone-you have to navigate a fucking automated menu before you can speak to a human being.
Hugin & Munin
What a maroon!
JGabriel
John Cole:
Please tell us your phone is dead because Experian told the phone company that you don’t live at your address.
Because that would be the bee’s knees.
.
dmsilev
I’ve spent the better part of the last two weeks delving through various AT&T call centers. No, they still haven’t managed to turn on my DSL line. Life got a little bit better, with some progress towards the goal, once I managed to get a direct number for U-Verse’s Tier 2 support center. That at least bypasses the automated system, most of the hold times, and the need for the first-line people to read through their script.
Everyone I’ve talked to has been very polite. Not always able to do anything helpful, but always very polite.
dms
ChrisS
The script thing pisses me off, especially the minute and a half long monologues.
I just called to adjust something on my account, please don’t pitch me other services, otherwise I’ll just hang up.
brendancalling
what JWB said, and also this: from the minute you dial customer service for ANY company, the first thing you get is a voice mail system that is designed to keep you from reaching customer service. “Please listen to the following options, because our menu has changed” is a LIE. The menu hasn’t changed. “Dial one for A, dial 2 for B, dial 3 for C…” is the just another finger in the eye.
what makes things worse is that companies have realized most people press 0 to get an operator, and have started making it so 0 doesn’t work: in many cases pressing 0 ends the call. So you call back, and now you’re angry. You started pushing any button you can to reach someone, and by the time you do, you’re ready to strangle them.
I had this same experience on Monday with bank of America, until i finally went for executive customer service (ssuch a thing exists). it ended on Tuesday when they put a VP for customer satisfaction on the line,who told me Bank of America was not going to do what i wanted even though they acknowledged they’d messed up. So i told her to “kiss my ass.”
John Cole
@jwb: Dealing with “help” centers is a lot like trying to establish the running game against a tough defense. You keep pounding, and pounding, and pounding, try after try after try, and then after a couple dozen attempts, the linebackers break down and you get a shot at the secondary.
Tyro
[They] are CS reps because they respect the companies they work for and believe in the product and services they sell and represent.
Wait a sec: that’s even worse! The reason you shouldn’t take your anger out on CS reps is because they’re generally low level people with no power who are just doing their jobs because they need the pay. If they’re completely useless and serving a company that’s harming their customers because they believe in the product, then they’re not innocent bystanders in this situation.
gelfling545
When you work in a call center you’ve sort of volunteered to be a target for the customers’ anger. I usually begin (if I think it’s going to be a difficult conversation) by saying “I know that you have no control over the policy but…” and conclude after explaining my issue with “please connect me with someone who does”. This is not a pleasant job, usually so there is some empathy there for the operator. Certainly I make no assumption of stupidity unless real proof of such is apparent but powerlessness is a given.
mts99
I quit a job at a call center for Verizon Wireless, because of “the screamers”. They don’t think you’re human. You wouldn’t start screaming at the top of your lungs in the middle of a McDonalds because your hamburger didn’t have ketchup on it. Yet, people think that it’s ok to do if it is over the phone.
I had one woman start screaming at me because she wanted an icon removed from the screen of her flip phone. That is impossible on lower end phones — you can only do that once you start getting into smart phones.
The worst days are when the stock market goes down. Every call from the northeast is someone screaming into the phone for five minutes straight. It’s not even about a problem with their phone — they just want a whipping boy to scream at.
Talking to a supervisor is silly — the supervisor is just the person who does the timesheets in a group.
toujoursdan
I had a few of those jobs right after university and they are the worst jobs ever. Not only do you have to read from those stupid scripts, but every aspect of your call is tracked and impacts your job performance: # of calls, amount of time spent on a call, number of secondary services sold, number of problems solved, etc. Some even sound out rating emails where people take out their anger at the company on the customer support person.
It’s the most soul-destroying, depressing job you can have. I feel alot of sympathy for the support people and tend to treat them well.
Villago Delenda Est
People get angry with call center workers because they have generally been driven to madness by the corporate practices that are causing the problem.
This is definitely the root of the issue, and the call center people are there, basically, as cannon fodder, as human shields, if you will, between customers who want action and executives who don’t want to provide it, because it interferes with them counting their bonus money.
Bob In Pacifica
The other day I had to activate a new credit card. For some reason the bank had once again decided it was time for a new credit card. And I called the 800 number and punched the requisite buttons and a guy came on and I told him the zip code and the name of the first pet I ever had, yada yada.
And then the guy said that I had accumulated a lot of bonus points. I didn’t know squat from bonus points. So it turns out that they’re sending me a check for over a thousand bucks! Now I know that a thousand bucks these days isn’t like a thousand bucks in the old days, but I’ll take it.
So today I feel pretty good about call center people.
schrodinger's cat
Sullivan borgs are boring and dull. The blog has become yawn inducing, especially this particular series of posts about people explaining what they do for a living.
Emma
Gelfling45: That’s the approach I take too. Get through the automated system as fast as you can and get through the lower echelons as soon as you can. However, contra everything that’s been said, I had to deal with customer service from two different companies (t-Mobile and UPS) yesterday and the interactions were fast, pleasant, and productive.
On the other hand, the sales spiels they are now required to go through… the poor T-Mobile girl had to go through something like a large paragraph in about a minute. She sounded like an auctioneer at a cattle sale.
arguingwithsignposts
@John Cole:
Re: the lack of a phone, gmail has a “Call any telephone” feature now. And there’s Skype.
ruemara
By the time I call a CS rep for a tech issue, I just cut them off after the greeting and let them know we can skip the first 2 pages of their CS manual and get to the real tech support. Saves me the frustration of being told to do what I’ve already done.
WereBear
What I do is try with the CS rep, then ask for the supervisor. You gotta have documentation; tell them you want “notes done.”
With the supervisor, you ask them to “read the notes” and wait calmly while they do so. They can’t do anything either; that is the way the system works. But now you are showing you tried.
Then, when the supervisor tells you the completely reasonable process you suggest is against company policy (because it always is, that’s just company policy) you google the coporate headquarters and ask for the VP of Customer Service.
You aren’t going to get them; what you will get is Corporate Soothing, for lack of a better term; you will tell them to “read the notes” and get back to you. Because that’s what will happen.
But this has a better than 50/50 chance of something getting done. Usually the incredibly simple and reasonable thing you first proposed that no one is allowed to do.
Culture of Truth
are CS reps because they respect the companies they work for and believe in the product and services they sell and represent.
Um, really?
suzanne
My mom used to supervise a call center. She got laid off a year ago. Funnily enough, she hasn’t taken her antidepressants in a year, either. She’s doing fine without them. Surprise.
@Dogsdoingthings
Dogs calmly and rationally accounting for their fury.
Odie Hugh Manatee
@Bob In Pacifica:
I just activated my credit/debit card since the current one expires this month. When we were WAMU, they had us call an 800 number and enter our PIN to activate the card. Chase only requires that you call the 800 number, that’s it. If the card had been intercepted anyone could have easily activated it.
Masters of the Universe indeed.
Chad N Freude
I always make it a point to tell the rep that I know they hear a lot of complaints about things that are not their fault and I know they’re not personally responsible for my problem. I do make exceptions when the rep does nothing but robotically read from an irrelevant script — then I just thank them and hang up.
Chad N Freude
@ruemara: This doesn’t always (or often, for that matter) work.
— The Voice of Experience
J.W. Hamner
Right, people get frustrated when CS can’t help them… which is more often than not a result of company policy, not the Rep themself.
When I was graduating college a local software company was snapping up the engineers to staff its call center.
Remember November
Best call center I worked for as a temp was 1-800-flowers. The even had a pretty interesting tele-university training and I was lucky to shake hands with the founder, Jim McCann.
Nobody hates flowers-yeah there were plenty of mis-routes and wrong orders, but having that network of florists at your disposal made correcting the issue easy- plus they gave out vouchers to soothe ruffled feathers.
roshan
Only when the call center employees start jumping off the roofs of their offices like the ones making Apple idevices at Foxconn, will I say that their jobs are hard and stressful. Until then, fu and your “hold please, we are encountering high call volumes” BS.
MattF
Maybe I have low expectations, but I’ve generally gotten OK service from call centers. Was lied to by GE service reps, though.
El Cid
It’s not always possible, but many times when I’ve gone way, way overboard (in a believable style, not silly) to be polite and appreciative, they’ve appreciated it so much that they’ve gone out of their way to help, often giving discounts, credits, etc.
arguingwithsignposts
While I’m sure that suffering the abuse of customers over the phone for hours at a time as part of a corporate defense mechanism against doing the right thing, it’s really not The Worst Job in The World.
Until they’ve been in a coal mine or chicken-processing plant (or other, similar jobs), I’ll just agree with @roshan.
Alwhite
I worked field service for a major network device company & part of the job was to spend 2 weeks a year taking calls at the call center. My first word of advice to always always always start out nice and calm. You are not going to get better or more help if you are screaming and insulting. Even if the CR is an idiot. If they start reading the script of step-by-step and you have been through all that, understand that most people have not or have botched it, remain patient, explain what you have done & what results you got. If the CR is smart they will ask you some questions but if they plow ahead with the script your choice is to remain calm or hang up and try again.
Its a shitty job so if your call makes it worse don’t expect better results. Understand its a shitty job and the CR may being doing all he or she is allowed to do, a little understanding will go a long way.
Rosalita
@brendancalling:
This. You get totally degraded by having to ‘talk’ to computer, get looped around twice and then, maybe, finally get a person. By then your head is about to explode. I have learned that on some systems saying “representative” will get you person. Dialing ‘O’ doesn’t work any more.
Oh and yeah, having your internet connection down and sitting on hold being repeatedly told that you can solve your problem on their web site.
mikefromArlington
I can attest. I worked supporting Hewlett Packard’s Pavillion series PC’s back in the mid 90’s when everyone started buying PC’s.
It was a pretty smart group of people, computer smart that is. Mostly computer geeks that lived in the computer world when computing wasn’t cool.
Things were different then though for sure. We didn’t have scripts. We didn’t really have trouble shooting flow charts. There were some shared notes on a shared drive that people could glance at to see if someone had run into the problem before.
Now, there is no doubt flow charts that are used so you have to go through usually about 50 steps you’ve already done on your own prior to getting to what the real problem is it seems like at times and there is no straying from that flow chart.
That’s what is frustrating now a days. I don’t believe there is much free thinking going on in the PC support world today. Anyone still in this business that can attest or has it all gone overseas now?
daveNYC
I suspect being a CS at a company that has policies designed to improve the customer experience is not that miserable a job.
Will
My racist comment for the week – If i call a call center and get what sounds like a young white male, I immediately hang up and try again. Over and over again, I have found that you’ll not found more attitude, disdain and helpfulness than from those from my demographic.
The exception is Apple. They must pay their people well, because they are all cheerful and helpful. It helps that they seem to be able to bend and break the rules if you can convince them the customer is not at fault.
Persia
@brendancalling: The ‘menu has changed’ trick is just a way to get people to actually listen to the menu. I don’t blame them for that one.
I blame them for not paying a human being to direct the damn calls, though.
Punchy
Airless? What, are anareobic bacteria answering phones? I call shenanigans.
Culture of Truth
What, are anareobic bacteria answering phones?
Don’t give corporate America any ideas.
Violet
@dmsilev:
AT&T is hands down the very worst customer service phone tree I’ve ever experienced. I follow the directions, press the number for U-verse, press the number for Billing, and then end up talking to someone who does tech support for their phone side. Or I press 2 for Internet, then 3 for Tech Support and end up talking to someone who does billing in the Phillippines.
I’ve had multiple dealings with them over the last several months and they have always, always, always been bad. For a company that does phones as a major part of their business, their phone tree is the absolute worst I’ve ever encountered. The people are nice, but generally useless, and it takes forever to get to the right person.
MattR
@Odie Hugh Manatee: It is not quite that insecure. You have to be calling from the phone number that they have on file (it used to be a home phone but I am guessing that has changed). If you call from a different number (ex. your office), you have to jump through more hoops to prove your identity.
PS. When I was unemployed in 2001, as part of collecting benefits I had to go down to the unemployment center for orientation. One of the things they told us was the trick you needed to do if you actually wanted to speak to someone at the unemployment hotline. I can’t remember exactly what it was (it might have been to enter a SS# of all zeros), but without it you would just get bounced around the automated system indefinitely.
catclub
I am always amazed at two things:
1. When the phone company does not know my phone number,
and keep asking for it. I keep wondering if they have ever heard of caller ID. This is similar to car salesmen who have no idea what the cars they are selling cost.
2. It is better now, but for a long time, when I already had email, the bank or electric company never seemed to have heard of that.
Of course, it may simply be time to revert to the past. Send a snail mail letter and engage in a long term correspondence.
This does not work if you want something fixed NOW, however.
Walker
@Will:
Dealt with them for years, and they are mostly good. Had a bad run in back in 2000, though. Had to send in a laptop for a replacement DVD drive. They sent it back and the keyboard would not lie flat. Most annoying thing to type on ever. They refused to do anything about it.
Culture of Truth
my rule of thumb
if they already have your money, they will blow you off
If they need your money, they will talk to you
angler
We are all black panthers now. JC’s experience with PayPal was chronicled in different form by Tom Wolfe forty years ago in Mau Mauing the Flak Catchers. Where Wolfe took the perspective of the bemused middle-class everyman puzzling over the rage of poverty advocates at municipal officials sent to keep them at arms length, now think of the the corporate execs as bemused “average” Americans and their customers as important inner-city youth screaming at their CS flaks for no good end.
Violet
@Rosalita:
This. It’s especially frustrating when the computer voice tells you to say what your problem is, “For example, say ‘Billing’ or ‘Technical Support.'” So you say “Technical Support” and the computer voice says, “I thought I heard you say ‘New Service.’ Is that correct?” And it happens over and over and over again until you want to throw the phone against the wall. But of course you can’t because you need help with whatever the issue is. That’s why you called.
At that point I just start randomly pressing numbers, hoping I’ll get someone who can help. But then they say, “I’m sorry, you have reached Billing. Let me transfer you to Technical Support.” And they transfer you to New Service. Or they hang up on you completely.
It’s absolutely maddening.
Face
I have never, ever had a bad experience with help desks. In contrast, I’ve learned that if you treat them well, acknowlege frustration (rather than rage), they will help you tremendously.
For example, the spouse gets Comcast on the phone and proceeds to blast them for their insanely stupid billing issues. Nothing takes. I then call a week later, friendly and breezy, and badda-boom!, shit’s fixed.
low-tech cyclist
@brendancalling:
Bingo. I’m pretty good about reading the manual, getting whatever help I can from the company website, and so forth. So when I get to the point of actually calling the customer assistance number, I generally have a pretty nonstandard problem that doesn’t fit neatly into any of their menus. But even then, it can be a real ordeal to try to break through to a real human being.
And since it’s a nonstandard problem, the first human being runs me through a bunch of steps that I’ve already tried five times over (yes, I turned off the modem for 20 seconds, then let it reboot, several times; I’ve unplugged the cables between the wall jack and the modem, and between the modem and the computer, and plugged them back in; yes, I’ve rebooted the damned computer, three times now), before having to talk with his boss or with his tech support.
And through that series of conversations, the fact that he’s in a call center in India, and speaks a very heavily-accented English with different idioms and word choices, can also severely impede understanding. In those rare instances when the call center I fight my way through menu hell to get to is staffed by people who talk standard American English, that all by itself is enough to reduce me to tears of joy and relief.
Kicked in the Ding Ding
@Odie Hugh Manatee: It’s been my experience that the activation only works if you call from the phone number linked to the account. Otherwise you get kicked into the whole mother’s maiden name, street address from five years ago, etc. type of activation.
Walker
By the way, you all know nothing. Have you any of you upstate NYers on this board had to deal with Suburban Propane?
This is without a doubt, the most incompetent company that I have ever had to deal with. I have to mail them my bills and cannot pay over the phone (online, what’s that?). If you call them up, they cannot determine that I am a customer from their records. Even if I read them off my account number. They claim I do not exist and refuse to deal with me.
Last winter my boiler shut off because I have automatic refill (stupid me), and they waited until the last day. Air got in the fuel line and I had no heat on night in the teens. Even though I had a service agreement with them, and read off the number, they claimed they could not find it, and were going to charge me to fix the problem — even though it was their fault! Luckily the guy who actually came out saw the service sticker on the boiler and was able to help me. But the call center people are worse than useless.
schrodinger's cat
@brendancalling: Bank of America is pretty bad. I finally canceled my credit card with them because I just got tired of dealing with them. They suck.
numbskull
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I think the call has to be made from the phone number that was previously associated with the account.
Svensker
@ruemara:
That doesn’t always work. I got a woman one day who burst into tears when I insisted that she skip her script and connect me to someone else — she told me she could get fired for not reading the whole thing and that her calls were recorded and reviewed.
We have a seriously screwed up work environment, with an enormous gulf between people at the bottom of the corporate structure and those at the top. But we’re so happy because we’re Americans and We’re Number One!
jacy
I often deal with BellSouth customer service when I can’t get on the Intertrons ( and it’s always an emergency for me, because I work on the web). I don’t know if they pay well and hire only really competent people, but I’ve always had excellent, speedy service. So whatever they’re doing, they’re doing it right.
Interesting to note that I heard a report the other day on NPR that a lot of American companies are bringing back call center jobs from overseas at a really high rate. (They called it on-shoring or something cutesy like that.) They listed a variety of reasons, among them that they were losing too many customers due to poor customer service; that wage rates overseas were rising enough that the cost differential was markedly narrowing; and that there is a huge uptick in having qualified service reps work from home, thus saving them from having to have an actual brick and mortar call center, which they said erased the cost savings gained from overseas call centers.
Svensker
@Odie Hugh Manatee:
You usually have to be calling from the telephone number they have on file for you, otherwise they route you to a security center.
jibeaux
Worst customer service ever has got to be Time Warner Cable. I understand Comcast could probably give them a run for their money, but we don’t have Comcast here. Once spent, honest to God, nearly two hours being transferred here there and everywhere, Bangalore was definitely involved twice, when my internet service went out. And you know how it is when you call for technology support — everyone makes you unplug everything and wait 12 seconds or whatever and then plug it back in, and then everyone they transfer you to has exactly the same protocol. What, in the end, was the problem? I had made a typo entering in my debit card number for payment, so it rejected the payment. Instead of notifying me that there had been a problem with the payment, they cut the service. Oh, but only the internet and not the cable, for that extra confusion factor. And then, apparently, notified no one within their organization of this fact, but did somehow obscurely code it somewhere so that after playing the unplug the modem game a half dozen times and then the they ping you or whatever the hell it is game, someone gets some sort of inkling that it could be a billing. Another transfer, another long-ass wait.
The internet and cable bill is on auto-pay now.
RobertB
My brother’s take on dealing with CS (works at a big telcom for sales/support) is that you’ll definitely do better being polite than being abusive. Your CS person has a lot of leeway beyond the script, but when you start screaming they can just script you to death to the point where you demand to be bumped up to the supervisor. His personal breaking point is, “You people…” The minute he hears that, he starts working to rule rather than creatively trying to solve your problem.
This matches my experience with weird 3G broadband problems – stay polite no matter how much you want to start screaming, and don’t be afraid to start over until you get a rep that knows what the hell they’re doing. Hang on to that guy or gal as long as you can.
Another thing – IIRC, he was trained as sales/support, not just support. So when his company’s pure support folks get swamped, they start shuffling support calls over to his group. And since that is a sales team, he can get fired for not trying to sell you extra services.
Jayackroyd
@John Cole:
You can also deal with smaller service providers whenever possible. Covad was way better than Verizon, and my first internet provider, NYNET, was a guy named Bob who always answered the phone. (Of course, he got bought out eventually.) I am on RCN now for internet because Covad simply cost too much. (And that is ultimately the problem, isn’t it? If you pay more, you can get better more responsive service.)
CREDO is better than the larger phone companies, and the selection bias in favor of totebaggers (as DougJ would say) leads to a generally more pleasant vibe.
Yes, it is irksome that when I call I have already rebooted everything I could reboot, checked to see that everything is unplugged and my issue can’t be resolved by the website or the VRS. But if that were generally the case for their calling population, they wouldn’t waste (precious) time confirming all this.
None of this has anything to do with your paypal problem of course.
Mnemosyne
@Violet:
Protip: 9 times out of 10, those choices correspond to the numbers on your phone. So if they say “Billing” first, chances are that you can press 1 to get the billing department, and so on.
I hate hate hate having to actually speak to a computer, so I use the phone buttons whenever possible.
RobertB
And while we’re swapping CS stories, I had to call DirecTV to address an antenna issue. The conversation went something like this:
Me: blah blah blah no signal blah blah blah
Her: Please reset the DirecTV box and see if the signal is restored.
Me: This was working Thursday, dead Friday, and is dead on all the boxes in the house. I doubt very seriously that it’s the box.
Her: Resetting the box isn’t covered under your service agreement, and if the box isn’t reset we’ll charge you $50 for the tech to reset it.
Me: I guess I’m resetting the box then.
This little bit of madness aside, DirecTV CS has always been good for me. They had a guy out to move the dish (my poplar tree that was a sapling 10 years ago had grown in the way) on the 4th of July, the very next day.
Eric U.
I had a new experience trying to get help with my MIL’s new HP printer. They made some horrible mistake in their setup program, and it was deciding that it wasn’t working even though the printer was working. A few of the ancillary programs didn’t get installed. All the scripts led to a point where you could only click “done” and then the program would reset the computer. This of course disconnects the CS person and you are no longer their problem.
Dell used to have a troubleshooting tree, and you could short-circuit the reading of the scripts if you followed it and told them the code of the point where you got to in the tree. I liked that, because I do get tired of having worked fairly hard to do everything I can and then get an idiot reciting a script that they don’t understand.
Freemark
@ruemara: Hate to tell you you but if you had reached me when I worked in the Comcast call center I would have asked you to repeat the steps you had already done with me over the phone.
Literally 9 out of 10 times it would fix the problem. When people would tell me “they had tried that” I assumed they were lying or hadn’t done it correctly and was proven right on that assumption most of the time.
And people with computer based jobs were the worst at doing basic troubleshooting. They would tell me how they had done this and had done that for hours and couldn’t get online. I would make them unplug the power from their modem and router, plug them back in in the correct order and the problem was fixed. Of course at that point they would accuse me of doing something on my side to fix it and I was trying to make them look stupid.
gex
Hear hear. I am an IT professional. Used to be a systems admin, now I’m a programmer. So when I have problems with my broadband Internet, I call Comcast’s customer service, who will helpfully tell me to reboot everything in my house four or five times, despite the fact that I know it is not on my end. Eventually they will do something on their end to “reset” my cable modem and it will be back online.
There’s no point telling them that they are wasting my time with the multiple reboots of every electronic device in the house – because they have to follow the scripts. They have to treat every single caller like they have no clue how networks work. And they don’t give their CSRs the flexibility to solve our problems without first wasting our time: either in endless IVR systems with transfers and hangups, then with a CSR who makes you play Simon says until they decide to actually help.
andrea
@mikefromArlington:
I worked for Apple in the mid to late 90s and my experience was similar. We had a pretty good sized database of articles for reference and a large department, so lots of resources and collaboration. In ’98, I and a lot of senior tech supporters got laid off. They still have some support in the Bay Area, front line folks near Sacramento and elsewhere. I’m still doing support, but email/online, for smaller companies and we have a fair amount of leeway.
Rosalita
@Face:
I’ve also adopted the strategy that when the CSR answers and gives you their name, acknowledge them by name and treat them like a human. They will be as helpful as they can. And, if that backfires and they are jerks you can report their ass. But usually I get a good response.
mantis
We are tethered to desks by telephone headsets, staring at computers for 8-10 hours at a stretch, in airless and windowless cubicles.
So that’s why they’re so unhelpful!
I don’t know what call center that person works at, but I’ve known a bunch of call center workers, and they have all been either college undergrads working part time or fuckups who couldn’t get hired in a better job. None of them ever knew much more about what they helping people with beyond their scripts, and not a single one of them liked or gave a shit about their job.
Not that I blame them, really. I worked the graveyard shift at Kinko’s for a couple of years when I was an undergrad (terrible job, btw), and we got calls every night from morons who couldn’t figure out their computer/printer/whatever, and of course product support was closed in the middle of the night, so they called us. They would frequently get pissed off when we told them we didn’t know why their printer wasn’t working, despite the fact that we didn’t make printers, sell printers, or use the type of printer they were having trouble with. I would hate my job too if I had to deal with that all day.
sukabi
@Culture of Truth: yep… well at least that’s what the PR person who wrote that spiel wants you to believe…. that whole bit smacks of a well managed PR campaign for Customer Service Reps…
Nutella
The letter John quoted actually doesn’t make any sense at all.
Paragraph 1: Customer service is a really miserable job and we are treated badly by our employers.
Paragraph 2: How dare you assume that we are in these jobs because we couldn’t find anything better? We love and respect our employers.
Huh?
KXB
AT&T is particularly awful. The reps I deal with are perfectly decent people, but the company does not empower them to solve problems. They are there to collect data and information. I tried to update our address information through their website. We were combining the bills for our office landlines and wireless accounts, and I did not want there to be any discrepancy.
I got an email the next morning saying they had issues with the change, and asked me to call them and refer to a ticket number. I did just that, and it still took 40 minutes and 4 reps to find someone who could simply add the suite number for our billing address.
gex
@numbskull: As though spoofing phone numbers is hard. That’s been possible forever. They don’t actually care about financial fraud because all the costs of resolving issues surrounding this are paid by the customer. The bank may eventually write of a bit of money, but not until they’ve wrecked your credit, charged you tons of other fees, etc. And the write offs just help them not pay taxes.
sukabi
John, file a complaint with the States Attorney General, and call your local “people helper” news station to get some assistance with your PayPal issue…. The other thing you might do to get some attention (resolution), is to post a video to YouTube detailing your problems with PayPal… worked for the BoA lady that was fired for trying to help folks..
gex
@Freemark: Funny that I commented right after you.
I actually don’t have this problem anymore because Comcast will let me reset the modem from the phone menu now. Which is a bonus because I don’t have to reboot everything for 20 minutes like it’s some kind of rain dance.
I’m not dismissing your take, I’m sure lots of tech people have those problems. In part because tech work encompasses a lot of areas, and tons of them don’t know shit about networking.
Murc
Ah, customer service. I’ve been doing tech support over the phone for going on eight years. Please, allow me to share my secrets!
First thing to know; every company I’ve ever worked for, our managers and supervisors have always been real, real clear about one thing; nobody will EVER be fired for following procedure, but we MIGHT be fired for NOT doing so. Literally. I’ve often been in the position of responding to new hires who ask ‘But what if we do all this and it doesn’t fix the problem?’ ‘Doesn’t matter. You did your job, they CANNOT ding you for it. Send it to Tier 2 (or, if we are Tier 2, to the appropriate team). You are covered.’
We don’t care how mad you get about being told to do what you’ve already done, especially if our calls are being recorded; we’re going to run through the entire checklist anyway and make you TELL us you’ve already done it. Having you not raise your voice isn’t worth our job.
Second, technical support is regarded as a money sink. Everyone SAYS they want top-notch technical and customer support. Tons of people will say they’re willing to pay for it. Those people? Are liars. They can and WILL switch to a competitors product that’s five dollars cheaper the very instant they can. Studies have shown that people will RETURN TO COMPANIES they’ve had horrible, terrible customer service and support from as long as the price point is low enough.
Third, because of the first and second points, the primary focus of an incoming call queue is triage. Depending on what you’re supporting or servicing, something like 80-90% of your call volume is going to be focused on a small set of issues that have really simple fixes. That’s what the point of those flow charts are. We tell you to reset your modem because a lot of the time it will actually WORK. It’s the same reason we’ll often ask if stuff is plugged in. The guys making the scripts and flowcharts aren’t necessarily idiots; they’re just operating under the assumption that YOU are ignorant. The result of this is that, perversely, the people who end up receiving the worst service are intelligent, responsible types. You’ve already self-filtered yourself out of needing triage and have a genuine issue that, most likely, needs a dedicated tech with specialized training and knowledge.
In a halfway-decent call center, there’s an escalation procedure in place that’ll get you to those techs or service reps… however, because dedicated, experienced techs with specialized training and knowledge will not stand for sitting around in a call queue all day, getting to them involves us taking your information, making notes, and kicking it up the chain. And that has its own set of problems and issues.
Finally, to those who say that people don’t get mad at the techs, they get mad at the company… that’s not true. It’s simply not. It might be true in the aggregate, but I’ve personally dealt with people who can and will launch a vendetta against specific techs who did nothing wrong (from our point of view) simply because they weren’t helped. We’re talking ‘trying to get this guy fired from halfway across the country’ vendettas. And that frightens us, because the company WILL boot us to the curb if we did one little thing outside of procedure, and even if we didn’t, now we’re a ‘problem employee.’
/rant
Violet
@Mnemosyne:
I always try the button route too and have tried that with AT&T with limited luck. If I try pressing buttons during the initial menu, I just get a “I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” response from Mr. Computer Voice. So effing frustrating. Later on in the menu it seems to work better.
AT&T is really the worst phone tree and customer service I’ve had. Their reps are nice, but getting to the right one is a nightmare. And I’ve had countless things go wrong, even with reps who are nice and seem competent.
lol
My ex-girlfriend was a call center employee for AT&T Wireless a few years back. She was really good at helping people get what they needed. At the end of the calls, there was a little automated survey and she’d get top marks from customers.
After her first couple months, she received such consistantly high marks that the VP of Customer Care came down to the call center to give her an award for customer satisfaction. She wasn’t there to receive it.
They fired her the day before for having an average call length that was “too long”.
TrishB
@mikefromArlington: My previous employer, a major IT outsourcing company, sent the help desk jobs overseas quite a few years back, first to Mumbai, then to Manila.
Freemark
@gex: You shouldn’t even have to call. All that ‘reset’ procedure is doing is telling the modem to reboot, the same thing you get if you unplug the power and plug it back in. The exception are EMTAs which can be used for phone service. They have a battery back up. On an EMTA you need to hit the reset/reboot button on back of it. Hope that helps. Its good to do this instead of calling because if the modem is so locked up it isn’t communicating to the internet Comcast can’t even send the reset signal to it.
Violet
@lol:
That sucks. Big corporations are really stupid about some things.
As for those automated surveys, I get those calls a lot after dealing with AT&%. The problem is, I’ve usually gone through five people that are terrible and eventually end up with one who is pretty good. They help me. Then something goes wrong and I have to call back and deal with seven more people.
Three days later I’ll get a phone survey from AT&T asking about my experience with their customer service. But they never identify the service rep, so I have no idea who the survey is related to. Was it the four useless, terrible reps? Or the one good one? Or perhaps the three who transferred me to three more wrong people before I finally got the right one?
I used to answer those surveys, but I finally just started hanging up on them because I didn’t want to reward the idiots. Nor did I want to punish the good ones. I figured no survey response was better than getting it wrong.
Walker
@lol:
If ever there were an apt summary of modern corporate culture, that is it.
Catsy
@gelfling545:
This.
I started my call center career in 1995 doing ISP tech support for Sprynet, and did the same gig at several other places before ending up in IT operations–and the NOC was basically just a tech support call center for internal customers.
I’ve been there and done that, so I have a certain amount of sympathy for call center employees and always try to give them the benefit of the doubt and not piss in their Cheerios. But that also means that it is blisteringly obvious when someone is blowing sunshine up my ass or reading from a script rather than using their brain, and I have zero tolerance for people who waste my time or try to bullshit me. And automated phone trees designed as an obstacle rather than a resource make me near-homicidal–nine times out of ten they serve no purpose whatsoever other than to reduce costs by lowering the number of customers who can successfully reach a real person. The voice recognition systems are even worse.
The other thing that will vaporize my sympathy for the call center employee faster than you can blink is an inability to communicate effectively. This is usually due to poor English skills in an outsourced call center, but it also comes in the form of listening in order to wait for an opening to bleat the next line in their script, rather than for comprehension. This is a problem I have with drive through employees in fast food as well (another job I’ve done extensively and understand well). It’s this simple: your job is to communicate verbally. If you cannot do that effectively in the language in which you are providing customer service, you should not have that job. Period. It’s not about where you’re from or what your first language is, it’s about whether or not you have a fundamental skill required to do your job effectively.
Catsy
@Violet:
I had a problem with this general attitude many times in my tech support years. I was very, very good at what I did. Customers loved me. I fixed shit and left them more educated about their service than they called. It also meant that I had some of the worst average call times on the floor, something that I got dinged on quite a few times. It left me with no respect whatsoever for the credibility of the metrics by which management judges the job you’re doing, and it’s one of the reasons I don’t do that work anymore. When you make performance reviews revolve around how quickly you can get the customer off the phone, you’re going to have shitty customer service. This is dirt-simple cause and effect.
Edit: FYWP.
BruceFromOhio
@toujoursdan:
Same here. If the problem can be solved over the phone, this is the person who is going to help me solve it, and it makes NO sense at all to take my ire or anger out on the voice on the line.
As for “the customer service sucks,” well guess what? Take your business elsewhere. Unless its something super-specific, or you live in an area where the corporation has a monopoly (phone and cable, typically) you can vote with your pocket book. I dumped TimeWarner for AT&T UVerse because the TW support was so fantastically shitty it was like a game to see who could be the worst CSR. Same with Cingular for Verizon.
As for the automated menus, the caller may not be aware that this allows for specialization and more efficient service over the long haul. Yes, its annoying, “Press 1 for Jupiter, press 2 for Saturn, hang up for Uranus,” but what you get is a better shot at a human who can actually, you know, help you. I MUCH prefer wading through an automated system than getting transferred again and again in search of someone who can actually, you know, help me.
PayPal is definitely a case in point of stupid corporate policy getting in the way of a customer being able to use the service. Too bad the company is so entrenched in the innertoobz, sounds like a little competition would be good for them.
TooManyJens
True Tales from the Phone Tree:
I don’t remember what company it was, but a few years ago I had to try to return some computer part or other to a small company. While I was in the hold queue, I actually had to press a button every minute or so to stay on the line. Worse, and I am not making this up, every fifth time or so they switched it up so that you could stay on the line by doing nothing, or press a button to end the call. So of course, since you were trained to keep pressing buttons … This had no conceivable purpose except to keep people from staying on hold long enough to talk to someone.
Catsy
@BruceFromOhio:
When designed for this purpose, and done right, yes–automated systems do just that. It makes sense when, for instance, choosing whether to speak to someone in billing or tech support: these are usually separate departments with different skill and toolsets, and they are not typically interchangeable.
Most are either designed as an obstacle or poorly designed to help, and when you’ve used enough of them and supported them from the back end, it’s pretty easy to tell the difference.
Also, the person above who noted that speaking to a supervisor is silly because he’s usually just the one who does the timesheets in a group has it half right. In many places a transfer to supervisor isn’t even that: the policy is simply that you transfer it to one of your coworkers and tell them a customer’s asking for a supervisor.
Even if you’re just being transferred to the team lead who does the timesheets and whatnot, you’re still moving up the chain–and you have reached someone who usually has a greater level of discretion and greater visibility into the management structure above them than the floor reps. And that’s really what you’re looking for: not necessarily a supervisor per se, but someone with greater discretionary power to resolve your issue who knows what the chain of escalation is and how to move through it. Whether or not they will help is a separate question, but they are far more likely to have the ability to do so.
asiangrrlMN
I am always friendly, courteous, and polite to CS reps. Most of the time, this ends up with good results for me. However, my latest runaround with Lenovo turned me into a bitch in two minutes flat. I have a graphic card/chip problem with my laptop. This is a well-known problem. NIVEA made a faulty batch. Other companies have replaced the chip with little quibbling, but Lenovo apparently decided that there is no faulty batch, so they are being dicks about it.
Anyway, long story short, they claimed I had liquid damage in my computer (didn’t) which fritzed out my (water-proof) keyboard, so I had to get the (working) keyboard replaced along with the (working) motherboard. I have a warranty, but this doesn’t fall under the warranty. I said, I only want the chip/card replaced, but they said they had to do eleven-billionty other things to get it up to warranty standard. Which, as I just pointed out, they are not honoring.
I try to inform several people that I use the Dvorak system of typing, so if they switch it back to QWERTY, they will see that the keyboard works fine. I could not get anyone to relay this info to the techs, and the CS people kept repeating that I had to get my (working) keyboard replaced.
I gave up. My laptop still isn’t fixed. I may have my brother fix it for half the price Lenovo was going to charge me (funny, they dropped the price two hundred dollars and went from a list of 9 things to be fixed to 3 in the space of a week), or I may just leave it as is and only use it for checking email.
To me, the worst part is that I just could not get the CS people to deviate from their scripts or let me talk to someone who actually could help me. That’s what set me off. Oh, and being called “Sir” didn’t help, either.
Tim in SF
Dude, get Skype. I make calls from my laptop. Easy as pie.
maus
I’ve been a call center rep in the past for various tech roles.
The problem is not the reps, usually. Sure, some are jerks, some are morons, but they’re not at fault.
The problem is the company who hires or contracts them. The reps are ill-hired, ill-paid, ill-trained, and the customer service department is designed to keep you from getting your problems solved, and to keep an air gap between you and the people who are capable of solving your problems.
drkrick
Who then asks you for the same identifying information you just gave the computer. Arrgh.
maus
@drkrick: Yeah, they use that for routing purposes but the systems are usually disparate and are rarely programmed to (or capable of) passing the account/serial numbers on. I appreciate that USAA actually uses the numbers, but they’re fairly self-contained without a million outsourced/insourced call centers that they bounce calls off.
TooManyJens
@drkrick: God, I hate that.
I also hate the phone menus you have to talk to. They make me feel like a fucking idiot.
Freemark
@Catsy: Know what you mean. At Comcast I had one of the lowest repeat call rates in the call center and my customer reviews were excellent, but my AHT(average handle time) was above average so I got dinged on my performance review every time. But the reason I left was mainly due to the stress. It is undoubtedly one of the more stressful jobs you can have. Not as bad as air traffic controller or trauma doctor, but it is definitely up there.
Mister Papercut
The solution to not wanting to have to sit through a phone rep’s upsell scripts is to just interrupt them with a “Not interested, thanks.” You may get a scripted rebuttal or two, but repeat that you’re not interested until the questioning stops.
Upsells were probably the worst thing about the call center job I held for a whopping month 13 years ago (I quit on the spot after two calls, in succession, where the callers 1) called me a whore and 2) when I wouldn’t supply my name, told me to stick my head in a bucket of shit). At least half the time, upsells led to irritated customers and raised voices, if not outright yelling.
For that job, and years later when I worked the phones for JCPenney (which wasn’t actually terrible, we didn’t have to adhere so strictly to a script), I was never more relieved as when customers just gave me a definitive “Do not want” so I could just move the hell on.
SeanH
Jesus, that letter’s a crock. In my experience people work the call center just because that’s where you either start out or end up with a generalized IT degree/background.
So at a 5-person call center you’ll have:
1. good-customer-rep
2. genius-only-in-his-own-mind
3. REALLY-doesn’t-give-a-damn
4. somehow-got-a-degree-without-learning-any-IT
5. demoted-to-the-NOC-so-they-wouldn’t-break-anything
Only the first person is likely to help you and he or she was probably just promoted to be an SA or developer so you’re stuck with the other 4. My strategy’s always been to keep calling back until I get number one on the phone.