In China they don’t bitch about their jobs, because they’ll send the death van. Those organs have to come from somebody.
I was put on hold for a long time the last time I called a “call center”.
But the recording told me every 48 seconds that my call was important to them.
So, 23 min later I was in a good mood and ready for pleasant conversation.
The problem is that yes, by that time you’re pissed. But the person responsible for you being on hold is not the person who picks up the phone.
When the servers go down where I work and there are 40 calls in waiting constantly*, we’re not having a good time, either. We have to document tickets as quickly as we can and pick up the ringing line 5 seconds after it rings. When you’re on hold, we’re still hard at work, not sitting around surfing the net.
When you get on the line, you’re not talking to the person who caused the problem or who decided to not have enough people staffing the phones. You’re talking to the front line person whose job is to help you. I understand being really irritated at the wait (since I still do have to call other places, such as medical billing, etc. where I wait, too), but it’s not the CSR/Help Desk Tech/whatever’s fault.
- Even though there’s a recorded message that tells them there’s a problem with (whatever the problem is) and they don’t hang up at that.
I am sure that your snarky attitude came through in your conversation. How do you think the customer service rep feels, when call after call, people like you bitch and moan about being on hold? Maybe you could cut these guys some slack? What the fuck do you think they are doing while you are on hold? They are helping other people. Have you ever waited 23 minutes for a table at a busy restaurant? Or in line at the post office in December? Or in line for a roller coaster at a theme park?
Maybe those call centers need to bring in more customer service reps and those theme parks need to build more roller coasters.
Nine pit threads about work in the last year? Yeah, that seems like a lot, but if I pitted everything that pissed me off at work, it’d be about one a day, so I’m going to go with that isn’t all that much. And I don’t even work in customer service - a customer called me last week to bitch me out about something that had nothing to do with me, so I took my phone number off the returned cheque letters I have to send out (see, people send in cheques that aren’t cashable because some people are too freaking stupid to breathe, and you have to send the cheques back to them).
Um, what was my point again? Oh yeah, customers suck, and I sympathize with anyone whose livelihood depends on putting up with them on the front lines. Especially when management is obviously not on the ball.
Actually I was sweet as can be. Just because I wasn’t in the mood to be nice, doesn’t mean that I was ugly.
If they were like me the rep would probably be amazed.
Actually, that’s just a guess. They could be sleeping, out to lunch (waiting in line for 23 minutes) or at a theme park. As a customer, the only feedback got was “your call is important to us” If I had heard “15 representatives are currently busy with customers, your estimated wait time is 23 min”, I could decide to stay or hang up.
Yep In every one of those situations I was aware of the progress made towards serving me. Also, nobody ran up to me every 45 seconds to tell me that I was important. I consider that good.
Wow, CoG888, Ya think so? Maybe Otto should have thought of that in his rant. Oh wait, he did!
Just my luck, one of the slow kids decides to take a swipe at me.
In Soviet Russia, jobs bitch about you!
In China, jobs bitch about YOU!
Reminds me of my days working in an insurance claims call center. After a major event, like a hurricane, we would have 100+ calls in the queue for hours on end. Good times.
I ran a call center/helpdesk for three years. There was never enough cheese to go around with the amount of whine we would get from our callers. Then again, the more whiners that called, the more secure my job at the time.
Some companies already use this type of hold service. Last time I called my cell phone company, I was told that I was number 14 in line and had an expected wait time of 4 to 5 minutes. I know that my bank does it, too.
When I worked a call center, we briefly toyed with the idea of implementing this kind of system because our abandon rates were growing during busy periods. In the end, corporate came in and said no no, because if the customers heard that they were 119th in line with a hold time of 30 minutes, the negative imagery associated with it would be huge. They’d feel like “we screwed up” with at least 119 other people today.
Is the title of the OP referring to the people waiting on hold, or to the managers of your company who don’t staff the call center properly? I would hope the latter.
I’m sorry, but if I call a company and wait for an hour on hold, that means that the company is doing a very poor job of staffing the call center.
After waiting for an hour, those customers will be irritated. When people are irritated they often become rude. You should let your managers now that the situation is unacceptable. I don’t fault the customers. What are they supposed to do, congratulate the call center person for finally picking up the telephone? Or ask to speak to a manager to complain, and then get put on hold for another hour while waiting for the manager? When I call the company and get bad service, I don’t know who’s at fault, either you, the call center employee (maybe you’re goofing off), or the management that doesn’t hire enough people. And most people won’t care who is at fault. They want to make their displeasure felt.
I hope that this level of rudeness inspires management to do somethign to keep call waiting times to a less offensive level.
staffing levels
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Okay, I did what you people told me to do and it didn’t work. I want to speak to a manager now!
Having worked in a call center for a few years, I feel your pain. However, not to side with the customer, but what the heck does this mean?
People have other cell numbers?
It’s shit like this that drove me out of the call center industry as soon as I can manage. We worry about our “abandon rate” (people who hang up before reaching somebody). So, to fix this, we won’t actually add the staff to properly handle the calls, because that would be too expensive. Instead, we’ll propose simply letting people know exactly how awful our service is so they can plan accordingly… and we’ll be told no, because informing our customers is a bad idea. Clearly, customers are too dumb to realize that we have problems when we have a consistent half hour hold time.
Seriously, Otto, you need to get out.
I’m sorry you are having trouble. Please stay in this thread and someone will be with you shortly to assist you with your problem.
I read it to mean that the rebate card is tied to a multi-line phone plan (a family plan or other sort of arrangement). If one of the numbers doesn’t work, try the other one on the plan.
I ran into some similarly infuriating counterlogic when I worked for a private help desk and had to plead on my knees to be allowed to change the introductory recording message to announce when we were experiencing server issues. They didn’t want the client to know when the server was down, so they preferred to let us waste time (both ours and the callers’) answering hundreds of calls just to tell them the reason they couldn’t connect was because the server was down.
The whole call center paradigm was just fucked. It was all about volume: how many calls you took per hour and how short you could get your call time, with no real focus on whether problems were actually solved on those dozens of impressively brief calls. If a customer had a complex problem that defied one of the boilerplate fixes, it ended up taking them multiple calls until they got someone like me (who tried to actually research the problem and come up with a logical solution, and who would end up suffering for his efforts) or got so furious that they demanded to speak to a manager, who would then try to defuse the situation by doing what should’ve been done in the first place. Meanwhile, my co-worker Jimmy Dipshit who told every customer to “reboot your computer and if that doesn’t fix it, just call back!” would get managerial accolades for his record-setting call stats.
I thought so too, several rants ago. Now I think our friend (and anyone else who chooses to stay miserable and whine about it) is exactly where he deserves to be.
I had to call MetLife today to ask about an insurance policy that my recently deceased father had taken out on me. I did not have the policy number (I didn’t even know it existed until I got an e-mail about it from my brother over the weekend). Their recorded “help” line insisted on knowing the policy number before it would route me to a CSR. After I heard several repeats of “I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that, could you repeat your policy number” I finally muttered, “I don’t know the number, that’s why I’m calling.” Apparently, in addition to understanding spoken numbers it was also programmed to recognize something in that phrase because suddenly the message changed to “Did you say that you don’t know your policy number? If that is the case, please say Yes.” :rolleyes:
Why the fuck can’t you list “I don’t know the policy number” as one of the options instead of repeatedly asking for it and refusing to even transfer me to a real person until I gave you one? And then, of course, when I finally got a real person the first thing she asked me for was the policy number. I decided to let her live, and before anybody jumps on me, I was very polite to her as she got the information she needed to send me the paperwork I needed.
They will do something to lower hold times. They’ll push even harder for the reps to shorten their calls (resulting in even worse service like Vinyl Turnip describes because the reps who care have longer call times) or they’ll program even more shit to be handled via the Automatic Voice Response Unit (IOW - press 1 to change your address, press 2 to let us know you’ve become dead, press 3 to provide us with proof you are dead, press 4 to blah blah blah… )