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It'll also depend on how they're targeted - if they're working on an autodialler then a "wrong party connect" will not count against their stats but they'll be expected to get through them really quickly. It takes longer to remove the offending number and annotate the account than it does to mash the wrong party connect button and move on to the next call. It's poo poo but it's the sort of thing that can get driven by lazy people who struggle to hit targets and/or stupidly high targets.
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Sep 19, 2015 18:32
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DariusLikewise posted:I'm going to hazard a guess that you work in the Call Centre I used to and unless things have changed Business Support was pretty much a dead end due to the fact that it's still an emerging part of that company and nothing you do there will get noticed. Everyone I've known that has made it to Network Ops has gone to the RAC first(if I'm right you'll know what this is).. I ended up going to Business TSR from my administration position. I'm expected to know about the Hybrid-Fibre Coax system, managed voice systems, PBXs, GPON/EPON, routers, domains, firewalls, etc. 90% of the people I speak to are professionals who know what they're talking about, are respectful, and know how to troubleshoot. I was afraid I'd hate taking calls again, but honestly it's been great so far. Everyone I work with has IT degrees/diplomas and know what they're talking about.
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Nov 6, 2015 20:54
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I work at a call centre where representatives are treated really well. We're inbound website technical support, and so we are not marked on how many people we speak to, or how long our calls are. We also do not have to sell anything and are in fact encouraged to provide refunds when a customer has made an honest mistake. A lot of our calls are website cancellations and people who are having trouble navigating to their document for whatever reason. Our website provides templates for legal documents that customers can fill out and print on their own. The customer has to sign up with the website in order print their document, and can sign up for a paid membership or a 7 day free trial that auto-renews monthly after the 7 days if they don't cancel within the trial period. Pretty self-explanatory, right? Well if someone calls to cancel and their billing date is today or even yesterday, heck yes we'll refund it for you, no problem. When you call in two weeks after you've been billed, sorry, you're probably out of luck. It specifies that it is a 7 day free trial twice before you enter your billing info, then after you do that you get sent an email with the exact date that your account will auto-renew. There's some background on the job. I came in here and typed the stuff below before the background info, because I needed to get that rant off my chest... People LIE so much. "I tried to call you all week to cancel my account and I've been billed, can I have a refund?" Nope, you didn't try to call once. Guess how I know? I WORK HERE. If you called during business hours, you would have been directed to one of the customer support agents and if wait times were long, you would also have been given the option to leave a voicemail. If you had called outside of business hours, straight to voicemail! And yet, here you are, trying to lie to me about my own full-time job. "I signed up for your 30 day free trial" Even something so simple as "do you see your email address on the top right hand side of the screen?" (so we can navigate them to their document if they need help printing) is often responded to with "yes" then when you give them further info, they say "I don't see any of that. Do I click sign in?" 
uptown fucked around with this message at 23:15 on Nov 6, 2015 |
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Nov 6, 2015 23:09
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Hmm--I have interview at a call center place  Anything I should know? I've never done it before but the listing said good availability for jobs. Right now, it looks better than 100% of p/t work which varies a lot. Yes, it comes with paid training too.
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Nov 21, 2015 17:29
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Alder posted:Hmm--I have interview at a call center place Accept, and then immediately start looking for something else. Leave before training ends if you can.
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Nov 21, 2015 19:42
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The metrics are designed to fire you because call centers are all run by lunatics who think a 100% turnover rate is too low. There will be a tiny handful of lifers and the other 90% of people you meet will have a tenure measured in weeks or months.
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Nov 21, 2015 19:57
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Chicken Doodle posted:Accept, and then immediately start looking for something else. Leave before training ends if you can. eh, training is only 2 months though. not sure if I can find a job within that time  Pope Guilty posted:The metrics are designed to fire you because call centers are all run by lunatics who think a 100% turnover rate is too low. There will be a tiny handful of lifers and the other 90% of people you meet will have a tenure measured in weeks or months. Alright, sounds good. I figured there had to some reason everyone is hiring so often.
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Nov 22, 2015 01:36
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Pope Guilty posted:The metrics are designed to fire you because call centers are all run by lunatics who think a 100% turnover rate is too low. There will be a tiny handful of lifers and the other 90% of people you meet will have a tenure measured in weeks or months. I don't know; I think it's more to prevent you from earning the bonuses/give them something to criticize you for than to outright fire you. Or at least that was my experience.
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Nov 22, 2015 06:23
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Depending on the industry the centre is for half the metrics could be for regulatory compliance and half for pushing sales/reducing cosrs and the two are generally conpletely opposed to each other. READ THIS TWO MINUTE LONG SCRIPT ON EVERY CALL WHERE THE CUSTOMER SAYS THEY HAVE A MORTGAGE. KEEP CALLS BELOW THREE MINUTES. THE ID PROCESS TAKES 90 SECONDS. OFFER THESE SIX PRODUCTS ON EVERY CALL. gently caress YOU YOU FAILED
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Nov 22, 2015 07:32
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The last call centre I worked for it closed in Canada now but is currently being sued for not paying bonuses that they received from the client to the phone jockeys.
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Nov 23, 2015 16:58
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 They just did a huge shift in how we do a big part of our job and it's the most slapdash thrown together set of contradicting processes I've ever found myself thrust into. The system we had before wasn't bulletproof but it was fast when it worked, now I'm getting stopped every inch by dumb bullshit and idiotic questions and concerns.
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Nov 25, 2015 14:12
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Same here, management has partially replaced an already time consuming process with one that is several times worse, except the new process is used in 60% of cases, while the old one is still used about 40% of the time. Oh, and there are a bunch of staff in new positions due to a reorganization, they have to learn this process in a week, screwing it up will cause a major mess that can't be easily fixed, and the holiday shopping season is our busiest time. This is going to be a trainwreck.
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Nov 25, 2015 16:44
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Nov 25, 2015 16:44
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So some people in the XBox One thread over in games wanted me to share some stories about working for XBox tech support. They pointed me to this thread, so I'll post a few stories and thoughts and other fun call center-related things. To start, it was a work-at-home job. Probably the only good thing about the job, really. I was given a PC to use for work purposes and, of course, it was total rear end. I feel like I was lucky, however, because some of my (former) coworkers said that their machines failed spectacularly and the company I worked for fired them because of it. Training was paid and actually kind of fun. I think it was 3 months of training, actually. Unfortunately, however, it didn't really prepare me for what was to come. One of the problems we had was that a program that was absolutely essential to our daily job wasn't working correctly for our class for like, a week. Way to go.  We were contracted out to do our jobs and so this lead to a lot of annoying asskissing of Microsoft. It got on my nerves a lot. In training I brought up a few things that were clearly bad about the XBoner and of course the trainers put my rear end to the fire about it. It was like they were brainwashed. I guess the whole mentality was "if we suck up to Microsoft enough they'll love us!" I suspect that the company I was working with was on thin ice with Microsoft and there was reports of them losing a department (networking) in the past, so if true that tends to explain a lot of things. The only human contact I got that was decent out of the job were my coworkers. It was like we were brothers-in-arms, together being bombarded with lovely people and lovely policies. It was nice to have camaraderie and have support and to make fun of awful people in our chatrooms. Of course the higher ups didn't like it but lol to them. We got reminded a lot that "our client could pull chats whenever they want." I call bullshit on that, I have no idea what Microsoft would want with a bunch of chatroom logs of underpaid employees who great treated like poo poo. As far as actual stories go, a lot of the riff-raff is anything to do with the account management department. Holy gently caress is the account management department bad. Like I mentioned in the XBox One thread, a lot of the times it was, "Little Joey used my credit card and you're Hitler because of it! Fix it now!" Microsoft's security policies were also a huge frustration to work with. Unless we get an actual Microsoft account and are able to verify it, we could only remove credit cards and not refund anything. A majority of the time I said "gently caress it" and refunded them anyway because I was tired of dealing with these people. The times I did do things correctly, of course, these idiots always forgot their password, or their email is wrong, or something else. This job made me hate smartphones. 95% of the people, I swear to God, only had a smartphone. I got trained for the networking department which was a huge breath of fresh air. I loved the networking department, because the problems (to me at least) were fairly easy to solve. That's not to say there was bullshit involved. Resetting routers/modems was a no-no which sucked because a majority of the time that fixed the problem. However because these peoples' ISPs sucked it lead to a clusterfuck sometimes and them having to get their ISP to come out and them trying to bill Microsoft for it. In addition another fine masterpiece of poo poo was the Teredo IP address problem that could only be fixed by doing a system reset. I won't go into much detail about that, but Christ, fix your console, Microsoft. Later on the account management and hardware department got merged together which was the stupidest loving thing. It made my job harder and it lead to a lot of calls where I didn't know what the gently caress to do. Nearly everyone hated this decision. I also had to deal with a lot of bullshit with call escalations. Everything had to be spic-and-span in your call notes, you had to answer questions, and oh my God it was the most frustrating and loving awful thing. Add the fact that some of the supervisors were complete dicks and you have a recipe for putrid anus-garbage. More to come soon, but I think this would be a good starting point. I'll have more stories on the way, like the guy with "brown rings around his penis." 
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Nov 29, 2015 00:50
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SGR posted:This job made me hate smartphones. 95% of the people, I swear to God, only had a smartphone. I'm noticing this more and more and good lord does it make it hard to help people. Smartphones have made a lot of progress, but you're still basically using the internet with your hand behind your back.
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Nov 29, 2015 01:06
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TheScott2K posted:I'm noticing this more and more and good lord does it make it hard to help people. Smartphones have made a lot of progress, but you're still basically using the internet with your hand behind your back. Get used to it. Smartphone adoption continues to rise, and these people aren't necessarily getting desktops or laptops too. We're going to have a generation which grew up with smartphones but never used computers, which is going to be very interesting.
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Nov 29, 2015 02:51
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It's especially great when you work for a place that has websites and uses software which straight up do not work with mobile browsers/exist on mobile OSes and people get upset that their toys aren't as capable as actual computers. Also if there's a constant when it comes to passwords it's that there is a segment of the population which simply cannot be bothered to type their password correctly and trying to do this on a mobile device makes it even worse. Of course the worst part is being unable to simply tell them that they need to pay attention to something for ten seconds...
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Nov 29, 2015 14:02
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SGR posted:working for XBox tech support. Several years ago (before the xbone), I worked at a company that starts with the letter S and did Xbox billing support and later networking support. This was in person in Oregon, any relation to your stories?
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Nov 29, 2015 15:35
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RIP Paul Walker posted:Several years ago (before the xbone), I worked at a company that starts with the letter S and did Xbox billing support and later networking support. This was in person in Oregon, any relation to your stories? Sounds like it. They're based in Colorado iirc?
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Nov 29, 2015 16:19
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Volmarias posted:Get used to it. Smartphone adoption continues to rise, and these people aren't necessarily getting desktops or laptops too. We're going to have a generation which grew up with smartphones but never used computers, which is going to be very interesting. It's funny because right now we actually have two age groups that fit this category: the young ones who grew up with smartphones and the older ones who grew up well before any personal computers. My dad doesn't have a computer or an Internet connection at home, but because it had slowly become the norm, he's acquired a smartphone in the last couple of years. He's finally realizing that it would be helpful to have a real computer in order to fill in paperwork and stuff online, but he'd prefer keeping things as simple as possible with his one device.
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Nov 29, 2015 17:18
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Pope Guilty posted:It's especially great when you work for a place that has websites and uses software which straight up do not work with mobile browsers/exist on mobile OSes and people get upset that their toys aren't as capable as actual computers. That's the kind of attitude that's going to drive companies out of business, as you scoff a changing market straight into irrelevance. Unless your website has a really good reason to require a full desktop (hint: it doesn't), you really need to be able to at least limp along on mobile even if its not a great experience. Being unusable only means that you're going to fail to capture a new customer segment that's going to go somewhere that they can actually look at with their "toy" (read: only computer they can realistically afford or want). Anyway, for content, it finally happened to me: I called into a call center to try to figure out a billing problem, and the person who took my call placed me on hold to "look something up." Five minutes later, I get a recorded message that the center was now closed, and that I could call back tomorrow. Goodbye! *click* 
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Nov 29, 2015 17:48
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SGR posted:Sounds like it. They're based in Colorado iirc? I worked for them. For a different program, with AT&T
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Nov 29, 2015 19:35
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Volmarias posted:That's the kind of attitude that's going to drive companies out of business, as you scoff a changing market straight into irrelevance. Unless your website has a really good reason to require a full desktop (hint: it doesn't), you really need to be able to at least limp along on mobile even if its not a great experience. Being unusable only means that you're going to fail to capture a new customer segment that's going to go somewhere that they can actually look at with their "toy" (read: only computer they can realistically afford or want). Good news: I work for a university and the people who make all that stuff don't sell to consumers.
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Nov 29, 2015 19:43
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Exactly, companies that are accountable to consumers get it, but there are a lot of websites that have a captive audience. Some examples are utilities, mortgage servicers, health insurance companies, and government services. They don't feel much pressure to do more than the bare minimum with their websites, since people can't exactly switch to a competitor.
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Nov 30, 2015 01:41
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Volmarias posted:That's the kind of attitude that's going to drive companies out of business, as you scoff a changing market straight into irrelevance. Unless your website has a really good reason to require a full desktop (hint: it doesn't), you really need to be able to at least limp along on mobile even if its not a great experience. Being unusable only means that you're going to fail to capture a new customer segment that's going to go somewhere that they can actually look at with their "toy" (read: only computer they can realistically afford or want). Someone has clearly never worked in a corporate environment. Unless Microsoft really makes Continuum work there will always exist a business world and a personal world. I could never do my business stuff on a phone, SAP would crush one.
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Nov 30, 2015 17:17
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Woo, so I was e-mail, but I did a thing and company felt it was evil - so as punishment I'm on the phones again. Jokes on them, I never really listen to users anyway.
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Dec 1, 2015 16:01
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I got into an 8 minute argument with my supe about logging out 45 seconds early.
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Dec 10, 2015 01:51
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Loving Life Partner posted:I got into an 8 minute argument with my supe about logging out 45 seconds early. Make sure to adjust your time clock for those 8 minutes of work related discussion.
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Dec 10, 2015 02:18
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Loving Life Partner posted:I got into an 8 minute argument with my supe about logging out 45 seconds early. lol that sucks. We use a lot of internet on our job and we have chrome except it won't save your settings or bookmarks. But IE will. So every morning I have to transfer it over. We got some updated links that ended up messing up my bookmarks in chrome so I just logged out of the system and back in for a fresh start. My manager adjusted my time.
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Dec 10, 2015 08:47
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If it's 4:59:17 and you want me back in the queue to handle a potential 8-20+ minute call, you're a poo poo head. It's not even like I was dodging 'work', I was sending out an e-mail, going through my tabs and making sure all my notes were done, I was shutting the gently caress down for the day. Ugh. Now I just always make sure my last call runs to 5PM. LESSON LEARNED, BOSS MAN.
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Dec 11, 2015 01:11
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Loving Life Partner posted:If it's 4:59:17 and you want me back in the queue to handle a potential 8-20+ minute call, you're a poo poo head. It's not even like I was dodging 'work', I was sending out an e-mail, going through my tabs and making sure all my notes were done, I was shutting the gently caress down for the day. Ugh.
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Dec 11, 2015 06:15
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Mine had us logging out 10 minutes early for "off phone time" before our official off-the-clock time, but you got docked for compliance if your call accidentally ran over into the "off the phone time."
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Dec 11, 2015 20:31
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So even if they help you out in some way, they want to make sure it can still gently caress you. Gosh I love this industry.
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Dec 11, 2015 22:13
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It's like I say, call centers are designed to fire you. They want the best employees, even if they have to fire the entire county to find them.
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Dec 15, 2015 09:46
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Call Centres are a statsnerd literal wet dream. Almost the entire job can be quantified in numbers and stacked up against other numbers to see who has the best numbers. The only problem is most places use that as a crutch and don't actually pay attention to customer service.
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Dec 15, 2015 16:06
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DariusLikewise posted:Call Centres are a statsnerd literal wet dream. Almost the entire job can be quantified in numbers and stacked up against other numbers to see who has the best numbers. The only problem is most places use that as a crutch and don't actually pay attention to customer service. Or they only look at the customer service scores and run the most inefficient centre in the world.
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Dec 15, 2015 18:51
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DariusLikewise posted:Call Centres are a statsnerd literal wet dream. Almost the entire job can be quantified in numbers and stacked up against other numbers to see who has the best numbers. The only problem is most places use that as a crutch and don't actually pay attention to customer service. Working in a call centre is actually what sparked my love of numbers. Give me some cold hard statistics instead of gut feeling any day of the week.
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Dec 16, 2015 01:02
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Blue_monday posted:Working in a call centre is actually what sparked my love of numbers. Give me some cold hard statistics instead of gut feeling any day of the week. But surely you've noticed the problem of call center metrics driving unintended results over and over again.
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Dec 16, 2015 02:59
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RICHUNCLEPENNYBAGS posted:But surely you've noticed the problem of call center metrics driving unintended results over and over again. A-loving-men. It took me a long time to realize the truth. A call center isn't designed (in general) to provide good customer service. It is designed to provide good enough customer service. Basically, if it costs $100 / customer in service related expenses to make you happy, but we also mathed out that if we spend less than $30 / customer you'll cancel due to awful service, we will aim for $35-40 / customer in service expenses. This translates in to techs that are not great but good enough, queues that are long but not long enough you won't endure them, and so on. You'll always be unhappy more or less, but you won't be so upset your motivated to move on. It is the same reason why when you go to a Wal-Mart that has 20 cash registers and 4 are open, they know how long on average it takes you to get through a queue, and how long you will wait before you leave your cart and just walk out in disgust. So they have enough registers open so you wait just a little bit less than your threshold of leaving. You aren't happy and you complain about all the unmanned registers, but you still buy your cart full of items.
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Dec 16, 2015 03:12
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Meow Tse-tung fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Apr 24, 2020 |
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Dec 17, 2015 09:39
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