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Call Center Hijinks #1
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 Everyone sit down Indian-style and brace your eyes for more tales of call center hijinks!
Art vs. the Witch Doctor
Thanks to multiple interactions with the people of Miami via the call center, I have become certain there is not one pleasant personality to be found in that city's city limits. If you base your beliefs on these following two tales you may agree with me.
Yesterday morning a lady calls in because she thinks her bill is too high. Like many citizens of Miami she has an accent that makes her sound like a voodoo witch doctor from one of those oddball religions where they spread AIDS to each other through fucking chickens. It takes a couple of minutes to get her bill up on the screen and diagnose the situation, and I remove my headphones so I don't have to hear her rambling. (After your opening sentence I usually know exactly what's going on and what needs to be done to remedy your problem. The highly-detailed backstory and circular griping you do afterwards only serves as distraction. So please: shut up.)
"I see you bought a phone, a holster and a car charger last month, and also changed your rate plan mid-cycle. The phone was free. The accessories were $50 and your upgrade fee was $18. Due to the rate plan change you have two weeks' proration for service. This is why your bill is higher than normal," I advised.
"I already gave all dat a-back to you!," she exclaims, shaking a black cat bone in the full moon.
"You mailed it back? Do you have a tracking number? We can refund the accessories if you have your tracking number." A simple yes or no, followed by the tracking number, would have sufficed here. That was not forthcoming.
"I already gave all dat back to you! Why ees my beel so high?!" Okay...let's go over this again. Repeat paragraph four, as I did. She insists again she's already sent it back, but offers no tracking number. Finally after about 10 minutes she gets around to saying she returned it at a store. The store has made no notes about this on the account as they should have. I ask her where the store was, call them, they verify the return and I make the credit.
"Your bill is now only $86. Anything else I can help you with?"
"$86?! Why issa my beel so high?!"
God damn, you mean we're not through with this yet?! Re-read paragraph four to yourself again, followed by the amount of the credit, since this is what I said to her. I moved to the next bill to try to soothe her. "Your bill for the next month will be only $64.99 because you won't have the prorations, see?"
You guessed it. "$64.99?! Why eesa my beel so high?" Now am I wrong if my hands were across my face and I was on the verge of turning my desk over at this point? Keep in mind we have a required handle time of 15 minutes and I've been talking to Ladysmith Black Mambazo for 40 minutes now! I've repeated paragraph four no less than five times. If this were a Seinfeld episode the main plot and subplot would have already been introduced, supporting characters would appear and disappear, and we would have had climax and epilogue, including commercials. And I've been talking to her 10 minutes longer than that! By now I've sewn my own voo doo doll of her and began ripping it up! When the fuck was this idiot going to get it through her thick skull and hang up?
So...I turned to vile rule-breaking. We're not supposed to transfer calls to our fellow reps, but sue me! I'm doing it! I think 40 minutes is more than enough; you want me to take a Greyhound down to her house with a chalkboard and coloring books under my arm to make it clearer? If she can't get it in 40 minutes tough shit, I'm moving on! And of course...the guy refused to take the call and I gleefully hung up on his non-helpful ass.
Finally I got her over to the escalation desk where the rep said, "Is she elderly?," gently implying I was being mean-spirited to some old woman after now 40+ minutes. Yeah, her birthday was 1938 but I inform the rep my granddad was playing 18 holes of golf two or three times a week when he was older than this witch doctor, so no excuses! If she's that far gone she should be in a home with her kids handling her crap!
Now picture getting at least three or four dopes like that a day, in addition to the other 36 15-minute calls. You think you might air a gripe at some point? |
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Posted by Art | 12:29 PM EST |
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BTW, 'On The Lot' is Adrianna Costa's new vehicle~ a film makers version on 'American Idol'. She is not in Seacrest's league...
You should watch it once for giggles
So after getting her ass in the wringer for getting up to leave 10 minutes late for lunch due to a long-winded customer, this woman was on yet another neverending call the very next day when her lunch time hit and she told the customer, "Look, I'll call you back in an hour, but right now I have to go to lunch," and then disconnected the call!!
Hardy har har. So of course by following the rules as closely as she could, again she got in trouble, only this time for ending the call to take her lunch at her appointed time.
She was the type to not put up with a whole lot of shit so she asked the manager, "So do you want me to help the customer until we're finished regardless of the time it takes OR do you want me to go to lunch on time?" And the manager said "Both"!! What a stupid answer!
So the rep bit her tongue until the next departmental meeting in which a VP was making a presentation, and she brought up the situation and the idiotic response she got. The VP said that by all means she should finish the last call she gets before lunch and then take her full lunch break as close to her scheduled time as possible (well, DUH). The manager had a real pinched look on her face since she was being corrected in front of all of us.
Large call centers are generally run by idiots who couldn't function in the very job they're supervising. (This is why all four of my reps have an assigned territory, and as their leader I assigned myself one as well.)
Funnily enough, though, when I started we had a rule that if we arrived more than 2:59 late we got a "quarter point" on our records. At 5:58 one evening I thought, "Hmm...if I take another call it could go to 6:15 and they would have to pay me overtime. So using the 2:59 rule that I can arrive three minutes late, shouldn't I be able to sign out two minutes early and save them some money?" The next day I got an e-mail about my two-minute early sign out. I explained my logic to them and the reply I got was, "Technically you can, but don't." I figured if they were that tight on entrances and exits the same applied to breaks, but I guess not...until they change their mind without telling anyone and ding us for following the new rule.
Get me out of here!