I once managed in a call center, and a no denim policy had been recently enacted after a long and ridiculous discussion period of what denim meant. One day, one of my employees came in wearing a denim shirt. The VP of the center walked by, saw him, and charged up to me and told me to send him home to change. I told the employee who then charged off to HR to protest. He was given a pass. (Way to undercut me, HR! And the VP!). Later, I saw the HR director on the floor.
Wearing a denim shirt.
I agree - great thread. Lots of good information here and worth the long read.
I’m glad to hear (sorry, misery loves company) that others have to deal with “supervisors” who are less intelligent than some of the people they superivise. Curses on a system that allows that to happen.
If you don’t know what something means, you just need to say “I’m sorry what does ‘desktop’ mean?” This way the CSR can explain it a different way so you can understand and move on to solving your problem (oh, ‘desktop’ is just a term for the screen you see, that has the icons sitting on it) Do you think some terrible thing will happen if you tell the CSR you’re confused or do not understand a term?
I assume it must be pride that causes people to argue for 20 minutes about the nonexistance of the apple logo, when all they need to say is, “I don’t know what the apple logo looks like.”
Exactly. At which point I would say “Just click on a blank area of the screen”, explaining further if I need to.
I did get XBox help in the Game Room, thanks. And I haven’t been playing Rock Band…I picked up Lost Odyssey while I was buying my mike, and I’m such a JRPG slut that I’ve been playing that instead.
Usually this is what I do say. Sometimes I get useful results. Other times I get the canned response of “I understand that this is frustrating”, without telling me what a “desktop” is, which is apparently the new way of dealing with customers when you don’t understand them or their problem. A good CSR is wonderful. A bad CSR is incredibly frustrating. Most Americans assume that they know what an apple logo looks like, and so won’t ask for help in finding it. I always assumed that a desktop was the surface on top of my office desk, and wouldn’t have imagined that word/phrase being used as a name for a computer background screen.
Please note, I actually do a teensy little bit of tech teaching myself. For instance, I taught my mother to defrag her computer regularly. She doesn’t need to know, really, what fragmented files are. She just needs to know how to do it, and that it needs to be done regularly. I also taught my podiatrist’s office manager how to find information using Google. She was having problems, as the website she usually used was down. She didn’t believe that I could find the information if I didn’t know what it was, but I told her to move over, and I found her information in under a minute. She was amazed. Then I showed her how to Google for owl images (she’s a birder, and particularly likes owls). So it’s not that I can’t learn new things, it’s that I just don’t know, sometimes, what the jargon is. Since I don’t know the jargon, it’s easy for me to teach other n00bs how to do certain simple tasks.
A big part of that is that Apple, in their call review process, now requires two things on every call;
1> An “Empathy” Statement (as per your example), and
2> Acknowledgement of the customer’s overall situation (which may be another empathy statement if they’re frustrated or lost data).
I could get reviewed on a call, do everything right, have gold pouring from the customer’s optical drive and have them offering to adopt me into their family…and still get knocked for not making an empathy statement. Annoying as all fuck. This is why you get agents giving you some goddamned annoying bullshit rather than simply moving to resolve your confusion. It’s not necessarily stupid agents (although they should be giving you a real answer rather than taking the opportunity to ensure they cover their butts on the checklist), but obsessive call flow requirements that have people thinking first about covering their own asses rather than resolving your issues.
I can only surmise they’re worried the CSR will either get angry at them for being “stupid” and “wasting their time” (which any quarter-decent CSR isn’t going to do), or the CSR will laugh at them after work in the pub with their friends (and they’re still not going to be identifiable personally- just “I had some old guy on the phone today who didn’t know what the Apple logo was!”).
I agree with you… but the problem, as a CSR, is that if you ask (politely) “Do you know what the Apple logo looks like?” you’ll likely get “Of course I do, do you think I’m stupid or something? I want to talk to your manager/supervisor!” as a response.
Heh. Actually, I was getting these empathy statements (thanks, now I know what to call them) from XBox support, not from any Apple service. While I guess that I would maybe feel better if I had followed 20 minutes of instructions and still had no resolution, I’d rather have my problem FIXED first, and then be empathized with, if empathy was still needed. If my problem is fixed, in fact, I probably am deliriously happy and don’t need such a statement.
Now, if only I could somehow convey this sentiment to the people who dream up these little ideas. “A customer who has his problem resolved in a timely manner is a much more satisfied customer than one who has not had his problem resolved, but who has been fed an empathy statement.” Nope, it would never work. I’m sure that empathy statements are cheaper than hiring enough CSRs to handle the problems.
They put them in there from customer feedback about how they didn’t think the CSR cared about their issues. That and I believe that the Industry Consultants are really pushing it. Heck, I’m even hearing Empathy Statements from AT&T these days. You know, the “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company” people.
Sometimes when you’re intently focused on researching the issue and some “boo hoo me” statement is thrown at you, you can’t switch gears fast enough to acknowledge their issues and still retain your focus on resolving the issue. So when someone says something and we just say “ok” and move on, it sometimes tends to make us look insensitive.
Other times, it’s a litany of Oh My Life Sucks and I Have All These Other Problems and it honestly gets annoying. Sure, I can understand if, like one customer I recently dealt with, your father died and you have larger issues to deal with in straightening out his estate and the issue you’re calling about is an inconvenience for you. I went way beyond my Scope of Support to help that guy. But if you’re just whining about how horrible life is and not cooperating on resolving the issue, I’d really prefer that you just fuck off and call back when you’re ready to work on this particular issue.
Along those lines, I once got a call from a “Stroke victim” who pulled all sorts of Woe Is Me stuff on me to get my help in clearing something up. In doing so, I had to put her on hold to consult with other areas and found that some of the stuff she was whining about was a persistent pattern of potential fraud on her account. I cleared up what I could and informed her of the potential issues regarding the rest.
About five hours later, I somehow (by shear random call assignment) got her again. Her voice was completely different and her apparent mental capacities much much different. She’d clearly been playing me for sympathy on the first call.
This thread really reminds me of my miserable job. My #1 pet peeve is the stupid fucking ‘ownership’ statement. No matter what you say, I need to tell you, “I can help you with that.” I also need to make sure I say it within the first 30 seconds. So, you, the client, will get interrupted because I need to tell you I can help you with that before I know why you’re calling!
“Hi. I hate your company and want to burn it to the ground with all of you fuckers locked inside”
“I can help you with that!”
The decisions management can make astounds me. They have no connection to reality. Requiring that phrase isn’t itself that unusual, but what the hell is wrong with saying it after the client has explained their issue?
These stupid empathy requirements get added because the little raisin brain that is management somehow realized that what customers most want is sincerity, but didn’t understand how to genuinely elicit it from the call center. I know of no better way to scream fake sincerity at the customer than that dumbass decision.
A new low:
2 memos today:
Memo #2 today
“Remember that our new Sick Time policy says sick time can’t be accrued from year to year–so any sick time not used by Dec 31 will evaporate.”
I’m getting a mixed message here.
Better yet;
We get two weeks of vacation a year. On paper, this looks great because most companies at this pay level don’t do such a thing.
But try to take it. I dare you.
They constantly turn down PTO requests over “staffing” issues. One guy I worked with asked for a couple of days in October, back in March. It was turned down. More than six months in advance for a non-prime month and they said no.
We have to use it by the end of the year, or we lose it. I can’t get a straight answer on whether or not it is paid out or simply evaporates.
We’re not allowed to use any of it after Thanksgiving. So if you haven’t used it by then, tough shit. Oh, and that means anything ‘accumulated’ in December is an illusion.
Of course, since nothing rolls over, forget the idea of ever taking a vacation in the first few months of the year. You have to accumulate some.
Allegedly, you can use some before you accumulate it. In practice, they’ll only allow you to use at most, two days, and only if they think you stand a good chance of being around to earn it back.
And on the H1N1 thing, they sent the Supes around with bleach wipes so that we could wipe our desks down. Once. Yeah, that will help. Because if I’m going to pick up Swine Flu, I’m absolutely certain to pick it up from my own keyboard and NOT from the various doorknobs and push bars that everyone in the place uses. But it wouldn’t make sense to wipe those things down, that would be menial work.
At our center, we used software called Blue Pumpkin to schedule time off. The idea was that we didn’t want more than one person off at a time, so if someone had pre-scheduled an hour of time off on a Thursday six months from now, if you asked for that whole week, you’d get declined. Of course they didn’t say that exactly, but I found out that this is what our “workforce management” team was doing.
The policy loosened once supervisors started to fight it (myself included). I pointed out:
With a department of over 100 people, sometimes multiple people will need to be out at the same time. 100 people x 2 weeks (or more) a year = Years will need to be 200+ weeks
They only wanted one person scheduled off at a time to make room for about 5 to 6 unscheduled absence or unfilled position slots
If people try to schedule a week off at five different times and get declined every time despite giving multiple months’ notice, one of two things will happen: they will quit, or they will just start being “sick” and we’ll not get any notice at all
Therefore, we’re not going to have only 5 or 6 absences or unfilled positions per day if we follow this stupid plan
Someone has to man up and deal with the practicalities and fight for the right thing. A lot of times, the right thing for the business is the same as the right thing for the employee, but not what we’re actually doing! Since we carry over PTO, there’s no reason not to just schedule it. Unfortunately, in call centers, most people are too ineffective or too apathetic to bother with dealing with the organizational issues.
Before I was a supervisor, I was subject to this plan. What I did was go in and say, “I was turned down for a week of vacation six months from now. I don’t really care when I take my week as long as it’s around October or November. When is there a free period?” Watch them flip out trying to figure it out. They won’t want to admit “yeah, there’s no such thing”, and I got what I wanted – the original week I asked for. 
If that hadn’t worked, I would have just taken it anyway. Our absence occurrence system was stupid, in that anything 2 hours or more would count as an occurrence, but it was only one occurrence until you actually came back, so it counted against you just as much to take a week as it did to be late 2 hours. So, I would have just taken my occurrence and sucked it up.
Chimera, what state do you live in?
I worked in tech support for a couple of years, and ended up getting fired for violating the rules about (1) not meeting H.R. to complain about my boss, and (2) trying to be a good technician. I was also in Tier 2.
The problem was, although I had been in IT a very long time, I had never ever worked on any distributed applications, or most of its related technology, with the exception of some OOP language classes here and there. And they wouldn’t train me, other than by giving me a high level system chart. They expected you to hit the ground running, because they just assumed that everybody knew this stuff. Moreover, it was far more important to call the right person than to know how anything actually worked. My trouble was that I wanted to know how things worked.
The operation was distributed too. Our servers were leased from and run by an outside company, which itself had Tier III teams scattered all around the globe. When we had struggled with the overseas staffers long enough, only then were we allowed to call the real experts in Denver and get the problem fixed in twenty minutes. Meanwhile, in California, we had to provide 6am to 6pm coverage and there were only two of us. I had the 9 to 6. As for the people in the same building with whom we had to interact, on nearly daily conference calls, their schedules could run anywhere between 4am to 7am. Often, the employees who had young children and lived way out in the Inland Empire like to have as early a shift as possible, say 5am to 2pm. Combine that with my schedule and the upshot was that most conference calls had to be scheduled during–you guessed it–lunch. Gone forever was my restorative half-hour in the sun with a book.
Of course as I mentioned I violated the HR rule, not so much to complain about my boss but my job. It just wasn’t a good fit, and I can’t entirely blame my boss for terminating me. Sometimes you have to recognize that the operation deserves a better employee for your job, and you deserve a better job for you. Still, he could be an ass. On an office move day (just for me), a critical tech issue arose that had to be dealt with, and took most of the day. So I didn’t get my packing done by the stated time–and he emailed me in the evening to harangue me about how extremely disappointed he was that I had disregarded his express instructions. I carried a blackberry, of course, so I saw it right away.
See, the reason I ask is because in an earlier post you give the impresion that you work for Apple, which IIRC, is in Cupertino, CA.
So if you’re in California, here is the scoop on the legality of “use it or lose it” for vacation time.
I feel you, bro, but now coming your way is a letter about your credit rating from TRW, who has no interest in your side of the story. You of course are welcome to take the matter to court.
You’re screwed. You’re the little guy. As usual.
I got billed by a library for what must have been double or triple the cost of some books, but what am I going to do about it? Some library commissioner would have to clear a rule change with a board to change the policy, and screaming at the poor woman who just wanted kids to get books won’t change anything. Oh, it’s unfair, and it makes me hope for karma, but I’m not sure you “gottem”. All you can do is quit and make it known why.
I hope to god no one in your office was keeping kosher at that time. Jesus!!!