If someone tells us stuff like that, we’re supposed to alert a manager, so they can begin recording the call, write down as much information as possible, and then after the call, call the police and give them the information. Basically they say to do this when someone is in danger or making threats, and I would sure as hell classify sexual abuse of a child as “someone in danger” and “threats”.
On of the few cases where client confidentiality goes out the window. “They live at this address, they were calling from this number, they said X, Y and Z”
And goddamned straight, if someone told me they were making their child do something like that, I’d spend half a day calling every law enforcement and child protection agency in their state and reporting it.
Chiming in as another former inbound call center worker. Like rachelellogram–who is possibly either my evil or my good twin–I worked inbound at an insurance company. I was there seven years before leaving under pleasant circumstances.
The clientele is quite different at an insurance company, I think–especially one where you’re working with retirement plans that are for the most part not employer sponsored. I think, in my entire time working there, I had maybe one person get mildly personally abusive. There were plenty of people who were condescending, and some who were often upset, but, usually, nothing like what the OP described. One time, I did have a caller say, “I know where you work.” That was a little frightening. Then again, that was an agent, so, honestly, I wasn’t that worried. Agents say a lot of things; it’s usually because the customers are yelling at them and not us.
The problem with something like cell phones is that people don’t really have a stake in their service. Don’t like the place? Cancel and leave! And they’ll be jerks because, let’s face it, people are often jerks, and usually, when you call customer service for something like a cell phone, it’s because something has gone wrong (or you think something’s gone wrong), and so callers are more likely to be hot from the get-go. So, basically, you get the full gamut of the general public, including those people whose poor impulse control and lack of societal understanding generally precludes their being with-it enough to buy, say, an annuity or an IRA. Which means that cell phone reps probably get it about a million times worse than I ever did. I probably dealt with more condescending assholes than the OP; she’s probably dealt with more nutbars spewing sexual insults.
I was lucky; the place I worked was pretty awesome. We had the authority to hang up if customers were abusive, but I never had to do that. I find that being exceptionally chirpy and bright does actually make it go easier when a call’s nosediving. Customers are like hyenas; they can smell fear and annoyance a mile away.
Call center metrics are frequently designed and analyzed by retarded monkeys, apparently.
My buddy used to work in an internal IT call center at Nortel for unix system problems, and routinely performed very well by most of the metrics- call volume, problem resolution, etc…
He finally got tired of resolving the same symptoms over and over again, so he spent some of his own time and devised a solution for this particular unix issue so that he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.
Like clockwork, the next month, he got chewed out because his call resolution volume had gone WAY down… precisely because his solution to the problem worked so well that no more calls came in about it after they implemented it, and most of his time was spent doing much harder problems.
My advice would be to start seriously looking for something else; call center type work is frequently grueling, annoying and frustrating. They treat you like children as well.
Document as best as you can on the past incidents. Write it down, paper does not forget. Approx dates are fine, and approx dates of meetings with your manager and his responses.
Then when it happens again, you will then have a pattern of ongoing abuse in a hostile work environment. The more incidents the better.
I came up with a term for the difference between what you could have gotten if you were nice and what you did get because you were a dick. I called it the “dick tax”.
When I was in a call centre, I gave back a ton of money to people who had no legal right to demand it but had a perfectly understandable explanation for how they inadvertently wound up on the hook for it. I noted my accounts as to why I was breaking policy for the nice people, and never even had to explain any of it to the higher ups.
I also denied a ton of credits to people who had no legal right to demand them but felt that their anger, or importance as the assistant to the regional manager of the third largest manufacturer of mobile homes in the tri-state area, or their ability with profanity, would somehow carry the day. These people paid the dick tax.
Eventually, I wised up and moved out of the call centre game.
I work retail now, and in a year I don’t meet as many dicks as I did in a week on the phones.
Think about that for a bit, and next time you are on the phone take a deep breath, count to ten, and remember you’re talking to a human being. You might get a dick tax credit.
Many years ago, I worked in a call center – CSR for a car rental company, which was gobbled up by another and no longer exists. The parent company was a Japanese car company, and conveniently most of the rental fleet was comprised of this make of car. This was back in the early 90s when there was still such a thing as a 100% American-made car and a 100% Japanese-made car. Many of our customers called to complain that they wanted to rent an American car but we only had one Ford at that location and it was rented out, so they got stuck with this Japanese model (which was virtually the same car) and they would like to speak to the CEO about it. All of the senior-level executives were Japanese businessmen who would transfer in, work there a couple years and then go back to Japan.
“I’d be happy to transfer you, sir, but our CEO does not take customer service calls. Even if he did, you’ll both need a translator because he does not speak English. Do you speak Japanese?”
