Today was a day where I left work feeling crumby and thinking about now is probably a time I should start to apply for other jobs. That kind of change represents instability though.
I just want to write it out. I work in a call center. The call center is one big room on a floor of a building in one of those business parks that is like steel colored buildings and parking lot and then freeway noise and a strip mall near by.
All I do is answer the phone (a 1-800) and make notes all day long and make phone calls to our suppliers. The company just sells "Stuff" pretty much the company attempts to bait customers on the internet. There is a company website with tons of stuff lots of it seems to be out of stock or discontinued and even advertised wrong.
Today I picked up the phone, a woman was talking. I found her order and account stuff in our database. There is a list of notes on every person's order. When I first started working at this job I was shocked at how many employees made notes on a single order for simple issues.
So anyways. I often feel like I don't have time to understand the situation before I get to respond to the customer, they launch into their "issues" within 30 seconds they are already full force with their onslaught of grievances. Main thing is probably that the customers have had enough dumb interactions with the company that it aggravates them to the point of having an emotional break down at which point they then get on the phone and scream at me about something that I have just that very second glanced at for the first time.
Our phones have timer's on them. I can see the seconds ticking. Our computers are also very slow.
So the woman was complaining that the tracking number she had was a bad tracking number. I was kind of saying "um hum" and "okay" etc. While listening to her complain I was trying to also read the copious list of notes on her order. There was a new tracking number that I was going to give her but while I was looking at it her voice started to literally go up and up and up into a shrill freak out rant. I just couldn't handle it. I told her I was going to disconnect the call if she didn't stop yelling. It was stressing me out. Inside I just feel like I am being tortured and anxious and I feel like I can't breathe. I ended up putting her on hold. Thing is wherever she was going with her shrill voice it didn't sound like someone asking me for help. All I feel like is I am being used as a whipping boy.
She ruined my day. I am sure that is what customers want to do. They want to make sure somebody gets punished for whatever went wrong.
So a senior rep was standing by who hopped onto the phone and talked to the customer. When she got off the phone to the customer the senior rep then belittled me because I told the customer I would disconnect the call if she doesn't stop yelling. The senior rep then said to me "you know how this job is"...
so now I am quietly trying to figure out how to vent without getting fired, really how to get some kind of revenge but really I can let it go.
I want customers to ask me for help. If they say I have a problem and I really need someone to help me with it... well that is okay. I am really not equipped with nerves of steel and am not good at taking customers that are completely flipping out. I am not the person for it.
After it was all over I made a very hasty note on the order stating that the customer called in escalated and that she had been given a bad tracking number earlier today prior to speaking with me and then I put in caps "THE CUSTOMER STARTED YELLING AND SCREAMING" right on the order notes because that is exactly how that interaction went. so I got my note in before my stupid senior rep could put her dumb notes in.
I went back and actually read the notes, her product was lost in transit by the shipping company and this I guess is what she was pissed off about. It sucks but it wasn't a shipment of organs for a heart transplant. It was a first time I had even seen her order. The rest of the day I was exhausted and one of the customers asked me how I was and I said "okay" and she could tell that I wasn't really okay. So not only do I have to allow customers to yell at me for something I have nothing to do with I also have to pretend that I am okay after all of that. I am not. I hate it. I feel like I am too old for this. Whoever runs the company only ever looks at their pie charts and stocks graphs. I am not sure that I have even seen the president of the company even walk through the call center and she is just on the other side of the building.
It is very hard for us to get a response from our own transportation department when something has gone wrong. We are not allowed to call them, we have to send them emails. The rate at which emails are replied to is about the the same as if we were sending usps snail mail messages inter-departmentally. Sigh.
When something arrives damaged to a customer it is hoped that the customer will figure out what to do with it on their own. But of course there are elderly people and so forth who can not deal with it. There are also just super snooty people who wont do anything. So we in customer service have to try and get our transportation dept to arrange for removal of broken items something which they seem to hate doing. We are supposed to ask customers to have the stuff donated, try to have services for the blind to come pick up the stuff. Even if something is totally trashed we are supposed to suggest this and push the customers in that direction even when it obviously is a hand off or shirking of responsibility. Giving people the run around basically.
My co-worker who sits right next to me heard everything the senior rep said to me, being talked to like a 5 year old. She said the reason why she had been crying the previous week is because she was reprimanded for an issue that happened with a customer. I don't cry, I get angry or more vocal
Humiliating employees isn't going to stop customers from being pissed off. It's sort of sick.
I would say the reasons why customers are pissed of is because of the process.
The customer picks something, their credit card is charged promptly. The order is then given to "the manufacturer" which can mean all sorts of things. Sometimes a manufacturer is mostly a warehouse in the USA that receives those rectangular train car looking things coming over on a huge boat from china. For the most part the business is designed to take people's money without doing much of the actual work. FedEx and UPS and the freight carriers do most of the real work. Ha, the guys who move something that weighs 600 pounds, I would say they are doing the real work.
There is a sheet of paper that are like scripted responses, they are not like how real people speak so for that reason I have never said them. Maybe I will try to read the script to the customers word for word lol and then if it just pisses off customers even more I can write that on the order notes. LOL
eh but for a dose of reality I went on the internet and read customer reviews about the company and there are many bad reviews so it is somehow validating to read those.... isn't that twisted ?
I looked up the head people of the corporation, they are in Forbes magazine articles I guess. From the looks of them they are some sort of zombies. Okay maybe not zombies. I don't know what they are.
I want to write an anonymous letter to the company telling them that at no point have I ever had training at this company for how they want us to deal with screaming customers. Nor at any point ever has there been any training for service recovery etc. But you know what is the point. I should just try to move on.
