Well, I’ve worked in a call center for awhile now, and I never give out my last name. I encourage my employees not to, either. It’s not hard to find out where a call center is located, so combined with a phone book, it’s usually easy to find you. We have had people who happened to live in the area (or not, in some cases) threaten to come down and thrash people.
In my case, as far as I know (and I’ve looked), I am the only person with my name in the world. My last name is very rare and there are perhaps only a dozen or two dozen people with my last name in this country. My first name is also very uncommon and memorable.
Some people just can’t give the distinction between the person and the company. The last thing I need is for some nutjob to show up at my house, or use my name for fraudulent purposes, or what have you.
I have always given out my operator number or extension when asked for a last name, though. I agree that accountability is important.
Emphasis mine. The OP has taken a lot of guff for this statement, but I guess the only reason I can defend it is because most call center employees ARE women in most industries.
A couple of decades ago, people weren’t able to find all about you on the Internet in half a second. Someone couldn’t log on to XXXXsucks.com’s forum and post your first and last name for every idiot in the world to see. (I have actually seen people do this to call center employees on MANY occasions), leaving them to be harassed by people who have a problem with that employee. People didn’t worry about things like identity theft.
Are you convinced there is no danger to such things? If so, why not post your own real first and last name right here?
As mentioned above, some surnames are extremely identifiable. For example, Nocturne and I are the only people with our surname in the US. That makes for fairly easy identification.
Havng said that (and not being originally from the US myself) it occurs to me that their is a fairly large number of people I know (and kow fairly well), without having the slightest clue as to their surnames. Doesn’t bother me at all. I only ever introduce people by their first names anyway
I thought that was like, say, in Japanese introducing yourself as “Name-san”? You don’t give yourself an honorific. It feels funny to refer to myself in that weird third person way, and it would definately get me funny looks if I responded that way to an inquiry about my name.
Also it’s very awkward since some of the people who ask your name are people trying to be friendly, some are people who are mad at you, and some are skeezy guys hitting on you.
I am curious as to why you wanted to know her name at all? From the little you posted it didn’t sound like she did anything particularly egregious. Was it just as some sort of backup?
Yes, actually. Granted, many call centers have their employees pick “Americanized” names. However, if you are a Christian in Bangalore, for example, it is quite possible that your name is Jennifer. A couple of trainers from India came to visit a few weeks ago, and their real names were – I kid you not – Chris and John.
Just chiming in as another person who’s worked at a call center and wouldn’t give out her last name. I would tell them that I was the only burundi who worked there. In my case, it was very clear where we were located.
This was certainly the case in my call center. About 75% of the employees were and, oddly enough, a slight majority of the male employees were gay.
An ex-girlfriend worked in a local department store’s credit card center. They gave made up full names with initials that matched their IRL names, but this was their consistent phone ID.
For example, if her name IRL was Susan Witherspoon, she would use the pseudonym “Samantha White.” I never asked what happened if a woman named Sharon Walton worked there. I would guess they would go to middle initials, “Stephanie J. Winston”, for example.
The operation was large enough that the staff felt protected like this, but not so large that they had to use the same first names or anything.