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Verranicus posted:Any tips/tricks for people just getting out of training on how to survive the hellish grind? smoke weed every day
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Mar 20, 2017 14:17
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Grillfiend posted:smoke weed every day Pretty much covers it.
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Mar 20, 2017 15:04
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I work 12 hour shifts in a factory now and I'll tell you working my shift at my current job does not feel nearly as stressful as working 8 hours in my last job at a call center. I would occasionally work 11 hour shifts to pick up some overtime at that job and every time it would make me want to kill someone. I would not, under any circumstances work 12 hour shifts at a call center just as a regular schedule. That shift set up is for people who aren't dealing with the general public, or people with a really good reason to not want to change shifts as often (like doctors/nurses).
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Mar 20, 2017 15:34
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I was forced onto a 4×10 once at a call center. It wasn't horrible, due to the way the days were split -- Monday/Tuesday/Friday/Saturday. 9AM-7:30PM. 10 hour days were tolerable. I did a few 8AM-8:30PM's for OT. At the end of those shifts I had just enough energy to hit the drive thru, silently eat in front of my computer for 15 minutes, then fall asleep for 10-12 hours. That extra two hours were what broke me. Did that maybe twice. If I NEEDED the OT, I'd do a 9:30AM-1:30PM on Wednesday or Sunday instead. For some reason they always wanted help in those slots most. blackmet fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Mar 20, 2017 |
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Mar 20, 2017 17:54
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Verranicus posted:Any tips/tricks for people just getting out of training on how to survive the hellish grind? Forget that you're a human being with the right to be treated with dignity and respect, because nobody you interact with except coworkers doing specifically your job will be doing so while you're in the office. Or just be super mad all the time.
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Mar 21, 2017 01:27
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Verranicus posted:Any tips/tricks for people just getting out of training on how to survive the hellish grind? I was very strict about not talking about work while on a break or lunch. I just took a bunch of lovely calls, I don't want to hear about someone else's lovely calls while I'm not taking them.
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Mar 21, 2017 04:04
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Verranicus posted:Any tips/tricks for people just getting out of training on how to survive the hellish grind? Find a new job as soon as you can.
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Mar 21, 2017 12:09
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- if you're allowed to bring library books, sketchbooks, knitting, etc to your desk, do so. For a few months there was someone who bought a remote wi-fi spot that they shared with everyone else so we could watch movies on our phone and play on our laptops on weekends between calls. Try to have one small thing you did for yourself every day, even something like "I read a page in my book" or "I read a wikipedia article." I became really obsessed with travel during this time and I think it's because I needed a goal or checklist to go through since my career wasn't going anywhere. - if you can work remotely, do so - if your company has any kind of anonymous ethics reporting system, take advantage of it (I reported federal labor law violations when I worked for an inbound call center owned by a Fortune 500 company. Our local HR person lied constantly and ignored complaints, but corporate HR enforced actual improvements based on my anonymous complaints. But I was very, very careful to hide my identity, and I don't think this would have worked in a smaller company). or maybe just keep yourself busy screenshoting e-mails, recording dates and details of incidents, etc to report to your state labor board after you get out. - when I worked there, I kept my head down and barely interacted with anyone. I napped in my car over lunch breaks and sometimes just found a quiet place to text on my phone. Most of my co-workers just seemed so depressed and I didn't want to get dragged into that. Looking back, I probably might have been happier if I had found one or two people to get sort of close to.
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Mar 21, 2017 16:29
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for the past 3 weeks, i've been unable to leave on time. they think that 6 people are enough to close, but that's not the case. every new person they bring on is promptly placed at the opening shift, meaning that after 3:30, it's always busy as hell as half our drat work force just leaves for the day, so everyone that works till closing has been stuck with leaving like half an hour afterward due to the queue not being finished.
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Mar 30, 2017 00:45
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There's usPenguinKnight posted:for the past 3 weeks, i've been unable to leave on time. they think that 6 people are enough to close, but that's not the case. every new person they bring on is promptly placed at the opening shift, meaning that after 3:30, it's always busy as hell as half our drat work force just leaves for the day, so everyone that works till closing has been stuck with leaving like half an hour afterward due to the queue not being finished. Are they paying you for this extra half hour?
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Mar 30, 2017 12:43
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They are, and it counts as overtime, but I'd rather be anywhere else but here once it's time to go. e: mother gently caress i keep getting chosen to help with training new people, so this entire past week I've been eating lunch right before i leave almost PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 17:02
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I feel incredibly lucky to have been at my acceptable call center for almost a year now. For an 8 hour shift I get 15 mins or personal time to use as needed, a 15 min break, and 30 mins unpaid lunch. Our break room is filled with healthy snacks (fresh fruit, berries, Greek yogurt, hummus, espresso machine, freestyle coke machine) and the company culture is very relaxed. This past month I was moved to outbound and I thought I would hate it. But since I'm processing applications I actually really enjoy it (to the extent I can enjoy it). I get to brace myself and prepare for the call ahead of time, and usually the shitheads get declined for refusing to provide the info I'm requesting. Our company has started outsourcing but I'm coping with that by documenting all of their mistakes and forwarding it to management who actually does something about it!
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Apr 10, 2017 00:49
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30 minutes of paid break is pretty standard for an 8 hour shift and basically absolute minimum. Only people who take less breaks than that are probably like fast food workers. Call center workers should get more because it's one of the few jobs that is constanly "on" for lack of a better term. I guess some call center workers sit and wait for calls to come in, but I think more usually if you're not on break your on a call with a customer. Most other jobs aren't like that, I spend half my shift watching a machine do its job while I do nothing. Which is also how your boss probably spends his/her shift, except you're the machine. I would have literally killed someone for a few minutes of extra break when I worked in a call center. It really helps the experience feel less like a meat grinder.
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Apr 10, 2017 02:16
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Modern Day Hercules posted:30 minutes of paid break is pretty standard for an 8 hour shift and basically absolute minimum. Only people who take less breaks than that are probably like fast food workers. Call center workers should get more because it's one of the few jobs that is constanly "on" for lack of a better term. I guess some call center workers sit and wait for calls to come in, but I think more usually if you're not on break your on a call with a customer. Most other jobs aren't like that, I spend half my shift watching a machine do its job while I do nothing. Which is also how your boss probably spends his/her shift, except you're the machine. I would have literally killed someone for a few minutes of extra break when I worked in a call center. It really helps the experience feel less like a meat grinder. I sit by both my team lead and my section manager. My TL is actually in charge of auditing and QA for the outsourced people overseas, as well as auditing our own apps before decisioning. My SM does one on one weekly meetings with everyone on our team to do off the record call listening and coaching to improve our actual stats the company looks at. That's in addition to taking escalations. They both are pretty constantly swamped, but still help people who aren't even in their section.
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Apr 10, 2017 14:22
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I am fighting back so hard to ask everyone that calls in pissed because their accountant needs their tax forms right now why they've decided to put off doing taxes until now. It's not like we've had that poo poo available since mid-January
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Apr 12, 2017 17:05
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PenguinKnight posted:I am fighting back so hard to ask everyone that calls in pissed because their accountant needs their tax forms right now why they've decided to put off doing taxes until now. It's not like we've had that poo poo available since mid-January There is still almost a week left. Have fun Monday.
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Apr 12, 2017 17:13
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i get the feeling it will be this way through all of April and maybe even May because people are stupid lazy shits  e: our website does not work in safari, due to the https certificate. we have no known IT people that we can report this to, and we just get told by supervisors "it's being worked on". It's been this way for about a month at this point PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Apr 12, 2017 |
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Apr 12, 2017 19:15
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Verranicus posted:Any tips/tricks for people just getting out of training on how to survive the hellish grind? I bring colouring books to work(mandala's and poo poo), fart around on the internet between calls. And due to the project I'm working on i no longer have an acw target so i can always just take a breather. But before that generally just something to zen out on(colouring, drawing and a small tub of LEGOs.) I work for the taxes and customs agency though and we generally have a lot of slow days. And handling complaints makes my work a bit more fun, just people complaining about the poo poo we do and or say and writing summaries of those calls and passing then on. Which takes about an hour per call of that kind, get about 4 on a 8 hour shift. Back when I did ISP work, all the weed all the time.
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Apr 25, 2017 17:53
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Things that needs to get fixed don't get fixed. For the past 3 months, people haven't been receiving emails when they request password requests. For the past 5 months, our website won't work with a major browser. All this poo poo could get fixed and take a load off the people that work in the call center, so that our shifts don't turn into 100 call hells with half of them being password resets, but no. e: and then people ask us for general computer poo poo. i don't know crap about how your computer's set up and what programs you're using PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 23:01 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 17:01
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I'm in week two at my first call center job (ecommerce tech support) and I had my first true rear end in a top hat call today. Super combative, argumentative, accused me of not knowing anything (which, I mean, is true for now, but I don't need a reminder). Any question I asked for clarification was met with "Is that really relevant?" Refused to let me put him on hold while I looked up the info, so it was just awkward and horrible. I'm ok with not having an answer for somebody's question. I'm even ok with having to tell somebody, 'No'. But I hate not knowing enough about my job yet to be able to confidently say either one.
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May 3, 2017 01:37
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My call center has a really weird personal time system. For each hour we work, we can spend 6 minutes of it clocked to "away from station". Most shifts aren't longer than 6 hours, so that's a total of 36 minutes break. They say it's "more adult" and "allows flexibility" but I drink a ton of water because of health reasons and pissing away all my break time is no fun at all. TIs aren't allowed to read between calls, but since we do outbound research on behalf of a government agency it's easy to spend 45 minutes getting nothing but voice mails. And we're not supposed to talk to each other either. I had to get a loving accomodation letter from my psych to be allowed to read. I don't know how other people stay at this place long term without losing their minds. At least the pay is decent for a low cost of living state, the dress code is minimal, and the attendance requirement is 85% of scheduled hours/month. Oh, and since nearly everyone is considered part time I can get off virtually all the time I need for various doctor appointments.
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May 4, 2017 02:53
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Tuesday, I forgot to punch out at the end of my shift. I let a supervisor know about it first thing when I got there in the morning. Wasn't fixed at 3; let the supervisor know about it again, and got told that it would be taken care of by the time he leaves that evening. Still isn't loving fixed yet. I'm letting him know again today and if it still isn't taken care of by 3 today, maybe start of tomorrow, I'm going to HR and probably looking into the department of labor. e: heard back from sup: "did you need it to be fixed" yeah, dumbass, that's why i messaged you twice yesterday, scroll up idiot! PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 19:18 on May 4, 2017 |
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May 4, 2017 16:38
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My own personal hell is trying to verify employment for someone who works for an ISP call center. Part of my job is calling employers to verify our customer is actually a current employee where they say they are. Every so often I'll get someone who works for Comcast or Cox. Especially with Cox good luck getting a verifiable phone number straight to HR. We have specific requirements for what's a verifiable number, namely the number has to be found online as being officially associated with the company, so I can't just ask our customers, "hey what's the number for your HR" and dial away. Which leads me to 45 minutes of calling every number for Cox I can find only to be asked for an account number at every turn and spamming 0 of course hangs up instead of getting me a person. Get direct deposit, people. Save your potential lender's employees a headache. :| I'm not even calling as a customer and I still hate calling ISPs. I can reach the mayor of a town in Hawaii, and a US Senate committee member faster than I can reach Cox HR.
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Jun 19, 2017 14:54
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moonsour posted:My own personal hell is trying to verify employment for someone who works for an ISP call center. Typically a company that large will use something like Equifax's The Work Number. If you are working for a lender they should pay to access this resource. If they won't, find a better loan shop to work in.
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Jun 19, 2017 15:18
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therobit posted:Typically a company that large will use something like Equifax's The Work Number. If you are working for a lender they should pay to access this resource. If they won't, find a better loan shop to work in. We have Work Number built in to our back-end but we are not allowed to call the number if TWN blocks our app, which sometimes happens.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:01
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moonsour posted:We have Work Number built in to our back-end but we are not allowed to call the number if TWN blocks our app, which sometimes happens. Interesting. We just use thier web function.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:06
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moonsour posted:Which leads me to 45 minutes of calling every number for Cox I can find only to be asked for an account number at every turn and spamming 0 of course hangs up instead of getting me a person. Have you tried spamming # instead 
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Jun 20, 2017 06:40
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help i've found myself in some weird universe where mondays are weirdly calm and tuesdays are the busy days e:i swear to god people go out of their way to act as stupid as loving possible so that we do everything for them e2: I am so loving sick of fighting people about receipts needed for the FSA substantiation. PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 20, 2017 20:16
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Got snubbed for a promotion on Friday. This makes number six over the year-and-a-half I've been working here on top of the countless instances of being blackballed at every attempt to get a title change or anything resembling time off the phones. I don't get it. I've consistently been the top performer month after month (six times over the past 12 months and top three in five out of the other six). I have a loving master's degree. I got into this line of work after a month of unemployment after moving back to the US from overseas and have stuck around because it looked early on like I was going to be aggressively promoted when I got bumped up to a higher level within the first three months. Turns out that "higher level" basically is a punishment for trying too hard because it's a 7% raise and about double the work. Friday's snub was the last straw. I'm looking for work somewhere else.
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Jul 4, 2017 02:10
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Time_pants posted:Got snubbed for a promotion on Friday. This makes number six over the year-and-a-half I've been working here on top of the countless instances of being blackballed at every attempt to get a title change or anything resembling time off the phones. I don't get it. I've consistently been the top performer month after month (six times over the past 12 months and top three in five out of the other six). I have a loving master's degree. In some places if you make a lot of money directly on the phone then you're never getting a promotion off of them. Thanks capitalism!
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Jul 4, 2017 06:38
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i am so sick of these dumb motherfuckers and their dipshit passwords gently caress STATEMENT DAY e: we probably have the most lax password requirements out of all of the financial institutions, how do you fuckers struggle with this monthly 
PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 22:31 on Jul 5, 2017 |
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Jul 5, 2017 22:21
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Ok, I would love an opinion on what happened to a work colleague yesterday. Since about 6 years I work at the helpdesk of a small webhosting company, 95% of our hours go towards our most important client, a medium sized internet provider, and we do their phone support for various tech issues on their customer's side (reporting outages, helping with their routers, configuring subnets, that kind of stuff). Last year said client finally decided to do a Facebook page, they had no social media presence before, and hired some consultants to prep their marketing people. Customers can also ask questions there and post comments. Yesterday a work colleague of mine - I know him for years, he has plenty of experience and is never rude to our customers - answered a standard question for a customer. It was about a service interruption which would be fixed within a working day (usually less). The call took less than 5 minutes, the customer was ok with the answers - no debate, whining or anything else out of the ordinary. 10 minutes later the same customer posts on Facebook that the experience was the straw that broke the camel's back. That she was dealt with in an impolite and patronizing manner, that he made her look like an idiot and that we need to train our supporters better. And she posted his last name in that comment, for everyone to publicly see. The social media team let that post stand and apologized to her. I spent the last couple of hours talking to him, if anything had gone wrong during that call and I trust his answers, he's with the company almost as long as I am and we are always straight with each other. Personally I think it's really hosed up that a customer, who was treated properly, would suddenly have a change of mind and name and shame one of my co-workers and I'm currently thinking about the best way to escalate this problem with our client's social media team. This is a helpdesk job after all and most of us are just waiting for a decent job or are finishing their diplomas (yes, I'm the lazy one who is overdue), so a public comment like that, could in theory impact your ongoing job interviews. Especially because of the way the marketing people dealt with this. Have any of you had a similar experience of public naming and shaming on social media in your call centre/helpdesk jobs and how did your company deal with it ? Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Jul 15, 2017 |
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Jul 15, 2017 01:00
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Why the gently caress does the customer know your co-worker's last name?
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Jul 15, 2017 02:19
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Pope Guilty posted:Why the gently caress does the customer know your co-worker's last name? That's just going to give the police somewhere to start with after you deal with the customer "appropriately".
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Jul 15, 2017 04:22
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Pope Guilty posted:Why the gently caress does the customer know your co-worker's last name? Cause we tend to use our real names when speaking on the phone, since something like this has never happened before, so we were kinda careless. In the past we didn't really worry about it, because our client had zero social media presence. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 11:14 on Jul 15, 2017 |
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Jul 15, 2017 09:02
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I really wish there was something like a union for call center employees. I tried to find one when I worked in a call center, but the closest I could find was the IWW or the CWA. Neither of these organizations have a foothold in SE Texas, lol. The only way I've been able to change conditions was by calling the corporate ethics hotline with reports about unpaid overtime, people being told to not use the bathroom except during scheduled breaks, inappropriate comments I had heard about women/minorities/employees' specific health conditions, etc. Many of the annoyances are legal in Texas, except for the federal violations such as the unpaid overtime and possibly the comments about minorities/healthcare conditions. Corporate HR actually flew in and interviewed employees in our call center. After this, we stopped having our mandatory-unpaid-lunch-break "employee morale" events, we all got overtime pay for one event that a manager was stupid enough to email over 100 people about with directions to "not change (our) lunch breaks" for the "required" event, one higher-up stopped sending emails with pictures of coffins, employees were suddenly given the option to telecommute, and six different employees were promoted into non-call-center-related departments within 12 months (the first time any employee had been promoted out of the call center in years, so six at once was really shocking). After I quit and changed jobs, I did decide to talk d one-on-one with some of the other call center employees about what I did so they can protect themselves in the future, but I think they're all (understandably) afraid to call the hotline. I don't know what to offer them besides directions on what I did to protect my anonymity. I know I'm really hung-up on a lovely job that I escaped four years ago, but I just feel so awful thinking about people who are stuck in call centers for their entire lives. Toward the end, I was just so numb. The only reason I even got a new job was because I was so terrified of disappointing an old friend who told me he was going to recommend me for an opening at his company. I had been told so many times that I was useless for things like taking an extra bathroom break or getting a "7 out of 10" instead of an "8 out of 10" rating by a customer, I didn't have the energy to want a better job anymore. I only went to the interview and followed up and did my best because I was so guilty about my friend spending time on me. Four years later, after experiencing an environment where my managers actually try to mentor and help me, I look back and I just feel so surprised by how worn down I'd become by so many little things. Pope Guilty posted:Why the gently caress does the customer know your co-worker's last name? Speaking as a former call center drone, we're required to answer any question the customer has. I would have gotten demerits for refusing to give my last name to a customer who was angry that I couldn't reduce their rate or that I couldn't connect them to their adjuster. I've also noticed that some financial institutions' customer service lines will have their CSRs provide their first and last name at the beginning of the call. The CSR may not always have a choice. I knew a young woman CSR who got asked lots of inappropriate/flirty questions by a customer, and she was stuck on the phone talking to him for twenty minutes, trying to sidestep his invasive questions about where she lived/her personal info. We were told that we had no reason to hang up on anyone unless the line went dead. I remember there was one customer who somehow was so over-the-top that he actually got a nation-wide notice saying that CSRs could hang up if he called in screaming, but that was the only exception I ever heard about. legsarerequired fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Jul 15, 2017 |
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Jul 15, 2017 14:50
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Luckily we still have a strong network of ex-employees, who made some ruckus on FB. The social media team handled this in the most amateurish way possible, randomly changing the status of the post several times in the middle of the night. This morning they probably got cold feet after another poster told them that there might be enough material for my colleague to file a defamation case against the complaining customer and they finally set it to invisible. Hammerstein fucked around with this message at 16:00 on Jul 17, 2017 |
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Jul 17, 2017 15:56
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legsarerequired posted:one higher-up stopped sending emails with pictures of coffins What the gently caress  I am getting real sick of processes just changing monthly and only getting about half the info I need to complete the new process. Got a blocked account? send a message to the operations team, not the blocked account team now. Except you get told that you didn't put it on a tracker of some kind that a supervisor neglected to mention in an email.
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Jul 18, 2017 17:21
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PenguinKnight posted:What the gently caress Yeah, the assistant director of our call center would send motivational emails to all the CSRs that weren't always in great taste. I think the one that an HR rep mentioned during a round table had the headline "RIP your career" and a coffin below it, along with a bulleted list on how to stay professional and positive in the work environment. Typing it out, I now realize the email was even more ridiculous than I initially realized.
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Jul 19, 2017 01:38
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I'm finally getting converted to an actual employee! It only 14 months when I was told 3 but hey, my pay stays the same, I get a daily stipend for lunch, and if my onboarding paperwork is right, over 200 hours of PTO which accrues at a ‰ per week.  My job is exactly the same but it feels more worth it now to be officially employed at a place that treats employees like people and doesn't vilify time off. I process loan applications and I will never tire of the people who talk themselves right into a decline because they mention they no longer work at their employer, or are technically self employed but don't file taxes, etc. BUT that doesn't top someone's employer doing it for them. Everything approved and good to go, then we call to verify employment and get told, "yeah he works here. Last day is next week though".
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Jul 19, 2017 02:45
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