I am a supervisor, not a wish granting genie.

The BBQ Pit
21

In defense of cranky customers (only briefly), I’d be a lot less cranky when I call my credit card company if there was some way for me to get through to a human being without being forced to listen to my account balance and available credit and last payment and next payment and blah blah blah when that’s not what I’m calling about–not to mention getting MARKETED TO while on hold trying to solve a problem. I understand that a huge percentage of the calls they get must be balance inquiries but for those few of us who are calling for something else, how about a short-cut?

As for the rest, AMEN, SISTER! I work in an inbound call center at a local phone company, and if you think people get pissed about not being able to buy that spoiler imagine how enraged they get when we have the temerity to let them know that running up a $700 phone bill in two months and not paying but $30 of it is not going to keep them in dial tone.

22

Dude, just call your credit card company, they can let you go over your limit for emergencies like this.

23

Sorry Fenris but the “supervisors of the world” line still stands. I’m the first person to ring the customer service line and praise an employee who has given me good service (even though I usually have to wait in a phone queue to say “I’m really impressed with the service I received from Fenris”). "Thank you, we’ll pass it on to the SUPERVISOR "(not to the employee who actually delivered the good service). And I’m the first person to ring the customer service line and blast the shit out of the supervisor if their underlings are treating me as anything less than an adult human being.

I know that it’s a shit of a job - how many times a day can you say “hello, my name is Fenris, how can I help you?” without decending into mind-numbing apathy (would you like fries with that?). Apathetic, I can handle, but “I’m too busy to deliver customer service right now because I’m talking to the girl in the next cubicle about what I did last night” (the mute button is there for a reason kids) will get you an “I want to speak to your supervisor, NOW” every time.

24 
I tired to get you this job, but a Jeff Somebody objected, saying he thought the towels would disappear every time while he was in the shower. Sorry.

[sub] I don’t even WATCH wrestling. I don’t think I’ve ever SEEN this guy. But I know who she means. I read this board too much [/sub]

25

I think we’re talking at cross-purposes. I agree: if a service rep treats you like that, I want to hear about it and I’ll thank you for the info (and if, after listening to some of that agent’s calls I hear what you described, that person is gonna hear about it. In no uncertain terms.) I’m happy to take a sup. call like that because it helps me to uptrain or weed out the people not suited to the job.

HOWEVER:

is what I’m objecting to. Most aren’t incompetent*. Ignoring the fact that I take pride in my work and try to instill it in the people who work with me, and aside from the “How would I want to be treated” question, there’s the purely selfish reason: if my reps are jerks to customers, there are that many more supervisor calls I have to take. Hence the stress on competence and professionalism.

Fenris

*not all. Most. Oh for the power to simply fire “Because he/she’s a moron, that’s why.”

26

Amen.

My all time favorite escalated call? September 12, 2001. Notice the date. Customer calls and has fraud charges on his account. We have to close the account and issue a new card. He demands a replacement ASAP. I explain to him that normally, we could have one to him next day, but with all air traffic down, I would have to call Federal Express and see what they said.

His response? “That is UNACCEPTABLE! I need the card tomorrow!”

I kept trying to explain there was no way with no planes flying I could get the card next day delivered. I offered repeatedly to call Fed Ex for an ETA. He kept ranting.

I finally snapped and said “look, after yesterday, all planes are grounded until further notice. If that upsets you, I suggest you call your congressman. Here are the options available : regular mail, seven to ten days. Federal Express, three to five days. Or I can rubberband the card to a pigeon and whip it out the window. Pick one.”

27

Cheesesteak

But a supervisor has to authorize it, and they only let them if you shoe them whose boss first–don’t let them forget who the customer is, here!

28

What is truly unfortunate about my call center is that if you ask to speak to a supervisor, I will put you on hold. I will call my supervisor and tell them your problem. 9 times out of 10, their response is “Tell them the policy.” Which I’ve already done, and you didn’t like. So I don’t want to transfer you to my supervisor, because she’s going to tell you the exact same thing I just did. And she’s allowed to be ruder than I am. (Not RUDE. Just rudER.)

29

I rang my bank yesterday to report that I had lost my credit card.

I didn’t get placed in a priority queue though.

The recorded message said they were busier than expected and then hung up on me.

I was a tad bemused.

30

A lot of people ask right off the bat to talk to a supervisor even in my center (inbound). I think perhaps sometimes it’s because they figure that supervisors will be better service or something, and some people honestly believe that their very common matter (like changing their billing information) is beyond my scope.

When I put someone through to a supervisor, I have to ask them what they want – the supervisor is going to ask me what the issue is when I put through the transfer. When I ask, nine times out of ten it is something completely simple that I can easily handle in about five seconds. This is why we ask.

I only pursue the matter insofar as it saves everyone time and effort if I handle what I’m qualified to do. If someone wants to talk to a supervisor, they get a supervisor. It’s just one question. I don’t understand why people get so upset over one three second question before getting what they want, especially when it’s something for their benefit (like confirming that their address is correct when we mail order products to them, or asking if there was a reason why we’re transferring them).

I don’t think there’s anything in the legal code that requires a person not to ask why the person is calling if a supervisor is requested. It’s just illegal to deny the request, right?

31

[semi-hijack, but related to this topic]
This is the same situation I was in at my last job. I worked in a medical center, and people would ask to speak to their physician. I was required by the physicians to ask why, and to even probe with questions. That’s because if I didn’t, too often I’d have to take a message, put it in the doctor’s inbox, the doctor would get to it whenever they did - even a day later if it didn’t sound urgent), they’d call up the patient and hear “I need a letter to the phone/gas/electric company saying I need the service turned back on for medical reasons”, “I need an appointment”, “I need my medical records mailed out”, etc. So the doctor gets annoyed at spending his or her valuable time calling for something that I would do anyway, and thinks that I’m not doing my job when I take phone calls. So yeah, sometimes I would get very pressing with questions, and occasionally I would annoy people. I was doing that at the urging, and with the blessing, of the physicians I worked for, because for some reason patients thought doctors handle those tasks.
[/semi-hijack]

So please, don’t get snippy if you ask to talk to a supervisor and get asked why. The person is almost certainly following instructions from that same supervisor, and might get bitched out if they incorrectly transfer the call because you refuse to answer.

32

It’s company policy to request (insist upon) a reason for a supervisor call for us.

A) My job is to (in addition to call routing, payroll, staffing, queue management, uptraining, etc) take truly escalated calls, not calls from every nutcase who decides to demand to talk to me.

B) If I have some idea of why you’re calling, I can try to get resources to help or get you to the correct department.

C) I may be able to cut to the chase if I can read the notes about your call (or previous calls). Sometimes my CSRs do screw up. Sometimes there’s an obvious misunderstanding. If I can get 30 seconds to review what happened.

I can also tell you that basic civility will ALWAYS help you. I understand that you might be frustrated. But calling me a “Motherfucking nigger” (I have no idea why “nigger”) will NOT make me go that extra mile for you. Trust me on this. If you need to vent, fine, up to a point. But remember, that in addition to not being a wish granting genie, I am also not your anger management therapist.

(Guess who spent 9 minutes on the phone today with someone having a psychotic breakdown about having to go through two!!! phone-menus before reaching a human.

Trust me. If we didn’t have those recordings that filter out about 60% of calls that have nothing to do with us (“If you’re still in manufacturer’s warranty, please call 55501212”. “If you hear voices in your head urging you to kill a head of state, please press 3”), he’d be bitching about his 40 minute hold times.

Fenris

33

Fenris

What, Asgard isn’t an “employment-at-will” state?

What I really need is the power to disconnect telephone lines “because s/he’s a moron.” Lucky for me, most of the people I talk to are going to get disconnected in a day or two anyway. If only there were some way to attach the disconnect to the person instead of the line, so that any phone they touch would go out of service so they could never call me again…

34

OK. I understand the comments from those who work in call centres about people asking to speak to call supervisors without good reason. I ask to speak to a supervisor if my previous contacts with that call centre have demonstrated to me that the lower level staff are simply not empowered to make any decisions in respect of the issue we are discussing. In most call centres here, the initial point of contact staff have very little authority to make decisions on behalf of the company or government department they represent. Very many times, they are outside contracters who aren’t directly employed by the organisation on behalf of which they are calling.

Every single time I get what I consider “good service” from a call centre, I go out of my way to contact the supervisor of the person who gave me that service and congratulate them. I’m well aware that working in a call centre is a pretty thankless task. But just as you - as the superviser - are going to here from me if your staff have given me good service, you’re certainly going to here from me when they give me bad service.

Incidentally, the very first ever Australian award relating to call centres was signed a few weeks ago - and it was way overdue. Up until the signing of that award, call centre staff had very few legal protections and often worked under totally hideous conditions. It’s a very good thing that they now fall under a legal award, and perhaps as a result of that we will now have call centres where the majority of staff have some idea of what they are doing rather than simply reading a script and being thrown into panic if the consumer actualy asks a question or disagrees with the statements they are making.

35

I can also understand the “phone queue” hostility. More than once I’ve waited in a phone queue for an hour only to have the human being who answers tranfer me to another department where I wait another hour to get to talk to another human being who isn’t able to deal with my problem.

Some companies here have a recorded message which advises you of the approximate wait before your call will be answered. I can dea with that - if I don’t want to wait, I’ll call back later. But I’m sick of hearing the “your call is important to us and will be transferred to the next available operator” messages and then waiting an hour for it to happen - if you’re THAT busy that it takes an hour to get through to a human being, then you need more staff.

36

I kind of like the phone queues, where you get a message saying that you’re waaaaaaay down in the queue, but if you leave a message and your phone number, you won’t lose your place in the queue and they’ll call your back in the same order.
Used it once or twice and it seems to work.

37

Lot’s of places don’t give you that option, though C@W.

38

Reprise, in my case, he wasn’t ranting about the phone queue. I understand that long wait times make for psychotic customers (which is why I spend huge chunks of my week forcasting call volume and adjusting staffing). The bozo I was complaining about was ranting about the phone message!!! Once he listened to the four or five options on two menus (less than 45 seconds if he listened all the way through) he was on hold less than 5 minutes.

**

Not always: Next Monday will be horrible. It’s the single worst day of the year for my company. I’ve got every employee coming in, I’m offering (and in some cases where I can, mandating) overtime, I’m getting a few employees who’ve gone to other departments to come back and help, every supervisor, quality assurance person, lead, etc will be taking calls or fielding escalated calls. It still won’t be enough. If we only have 30 minute hold-times, I’ll be thrilled. I suspect we’re going to have triple that.

But I can’t justify hiring the number of people I’ll need for Monday (and a few other days a year that are notoriously bad) when I won’t need 'em most of the time. I’ll do my best to mitigate wait times, but I can’t always do so. And when we’re suprised by call-volume (a recall on a product, a new computer virus) I can’t even plan for it in advance, but at the same time, I can’t have 20 employees sitting around doing nothing for 340 days of the year just because I might (or will) need 'em for the remaing 25.

Otto: Actually I think this is an “at will” state, but the HR department has this silly insistance on documentation, curse 'em. (Luckily, it’s easy to document the really horrible call-takers behavior.)

Changing the subject entirely:

To all potential callers? EVERY call center I’ve ever worked in can A) monitor your talk time. B) monitor the time you waited in queue. Lying about it makes you look like an asshole.

I go through a varient of this at least once a week.

“I’VE BEEN ON HOLD FOR OVER AN HOUR!”

“Strange. We’ve had an average of four agents waiting for inbound calls for the last 3 hours and I’m considering offering them a chance to go home early. Were you waiting on hold with another company before you dialed us?”

“NO! IT WAS YOUR COMPANY! AND THEN I WAS ARGUING WITH THAT JERK FOR ANOTHER 45 MINUTES”

< looks at agent’s stats >
“Actually sir, you were on with him for less than 4 minutes. Are you calling about a broken watch?”

:rolleyes:

Trust me. My entire life is made up of call statistics. Lying about them won’t help your case.

Fenris

39

Word to that, Fenris. I seem to get a lot of people who are enraged about having to wait in queue… when we’re not even IN queue.

I guess they mean the couple seconds for the computer to transfer them to the correct operator.

I have a new respect for call centers. We get blasted sometimes and most people aren’t very patient about it. We’ll have everyone sitting around doing nothing, and then all of a sudden we have 30 minute queues and the natives are restless, and they scream “you need to hire more people!”.

Nothing’s better than the people who deliberately call the wrong line to see if it has a shorter wait, then get upset if I can’t help them. Dude, there’s a reason we have those options.

40

Hee. I actually had to institute a “hang up” rule (and you wouldn’t believe the strings it took to get permission to do that.)

We’ve got a line for technicians who are on-site at the customer’s home to call for authorization if the repair costs go above the amount we pre-approved. We can’t let them wait. If we do let them wait, that refridgerator of yours that isn’t cooling might not get repaired today.

So. Every now and then, the number will be given out to customers. And customers will call, despite the fact that the recording specifically states (parphrased) “If you are not a service technician, on site, at a customer’s location, you are calling the wrong number. Press “1” for a list of numbers where we can help you. If you stay on the line and you’re NOT a service technician on site at a customer’s location, you’ll be hung up on.”

And still we get customers calling in. And, after offering them the correct numbers, the call takers are allowed to hang up on the customers. It took forever to get permission to do so, but damn it was worth it.

Fenris