When we answer the phone, and the person on the other end of the line needs to speak with someone else, we usually say, “Okay, hold on a moment” and transfer the phone. After a while, we were told that was rude, and what we must do is say, “May I put you on hold?” and wait for the answer. Never mind that other phones are ringing. Never mind that if I don’t put you on hold, you can’t be helped any further. It’s got to be the client’s choice!
Also, we had to smile before answering the phone because the client can hear it in our voices. We were all given smiley-face stickers to put on our telephones as reminders.
Where I work, we use ride-on pallet trucks that look like this. They are steered by a tiller, and you stand on a little platform to ride about.
Now then… they have introduced some safety rules at my workplace.
You are only allowed to drive forwards (with the load in front of you) to pick up or set down a load. All travel must be in reverse.
You must always have both hands on the tiller, or you will be disciplined.
Now these two rules were obviously made up by different safety committees. Individually, they are fine, but together they represent a huge safety hazard. To go backwards, the tiller is behind you, and you are able to face the direction of travel with one hand controlling the tiller by reaching behind you. To have BOTH hands on the tiller, at best you have to stand sideways, and you have lost 180 degrees of vision (imagine driving a car from a sideways seat and trying to look out for traffic merging from streets behind your back). Even if you don’t collide with anyone or anything, you go home at the end of each shift with an extremely stiff neck.
My office use to have some dumb rule that only your relatives could come into the actual office. Anyone else had to wait in the reception area.
Absolutely nobody knew why this rule was in effect and it never came up until I let my lesbian sister’s two legal children (her partner gave birth and she adopted them) into my office. Somone who hated me let the shit hit the fan about my breaking the rule. “They are not really your nieces.” I think he was just crazy about the whole lesbian thing.
The person was put on warning and the rule was cancelled.
Ya know, all the posts about phone etiquette are cracking me up. At our call center, the only thing one is required to say is “Hi, how may I help you?” or some such. (To be honest, I don’t think they even have sample script for it – they just assume you know how to answer a phone professionally) but from all the years of working in primarily customer service/management, I am accustomed to answering with “Good morning/afternoon, this is Litoris, how may I assist you?” Sometimes, especially when I see it is a “New Customer” call, I will answer “Thank you for calling Gift Wrap Center**, this is Litoris, how may I help you?” I don’t find it to be cumbersome in the least, and have a 5:30 call time average (and also average about 20% above goal – goal being defined as 20% above our web sales).
What I do find funny is that we do live online chat for our website. We are supposed to make sure that we alwasy ask if there anything else they need (easy enough, as we have hot keys set up), and then we are supposed to hit the hot key that says “We appreciate your business.” How gay is that? I refuse to do it – I just simply say “Thank you and have a great day!” I figure if I get a slap on the wrist, at least I don’t come across as an idiot in chat!
You want a stupid rule? How about this – I cannot walk around the cubicle to speak to my coworkers, but we are allowed to carry on conversations through the cubicles. Did I mention our cubicles are the all-encompassing 6’ tall ones? Yeh, so they’d rather we speak loudly enough to be heard through/over the dividers than to walk around them for a second to say “yeh, I bought that book, thanks for the recommendation.” I, of course, always use email/Im, because I find the disembodied cubicle wall voice to be a bit…disturbing.
**not the real name of the company
And also creepy when I find myself saying it when I answer my phone at home!
(In some defense of where I work, ours is not overly obnoxious, but I’ve worked there forever. If you called me in my grave, that’s how I would answer the phone.)
When I worked at TGI Friday’s, we had a whole paragraph to say when we answered the phone (something about margaritas). It was posted on the wall. Once I answered a call, went through the whole spiel, and the caller said, “Wow!” I laughed and said, “I know, it’s quite a mouthful, isn’t it?” Turned out that the caller was some kind of company bigshot, and he was happy that I’d answered the phone correctly. A good thing I hadn’t given my actual opinion of having to read that damned essay every time the phone rang!
I used to hate having to start with “thank you for calling” but it serves a good purpose…it gives a few seconds for people to understand your voice before you get to the important part. I can’t count the number of times I’ve called somwhere and gotten some unintelligible slur of words, and had to ask what or who they were. I always answer the work phone “Thank you for calling Store name location, This is Kittenblue, how may I help you?” because it gives people all the vital information they need. Countless times the caller says, “Oh, I was trying to call your Other Mall location, or The Home Office” and that saves us time. as well as let’s them know who i am…face it, we all aren’t good at identifying voices on the phone with just a few words to go by. If I’m calling another store to talk to Mary, and Mary answers the phone (and doesn’t say her name) and I ask “Is Mary there?” we both feel stupid.
That being said, I absolutely refuse to do waht our regional training director wants us to do, which is add an ad to the greeting: Thank you for calling Storename Location, where all men’s accessories are on sale this week for 20% off, this is name. Or what my daughter’s former employer required: “We’re having a great day here at SteinMart, how can I direct your call?”
And we’re not allowed to use the phrase …no, the word “help” in our dialogue with customers in the store. I understand they want us to be more helpful than just “how can I help you?” but sometimes the prohibition makes me look like an idiot! We’re supposed to ask probing questions, such as “Who are you shopping for today?” and “what occasion do you need a gift for?” and since you don’t want to sound like a robot and ask three customers in close proximity the same questions, sometimes the variation that comes up is “So who can I (oh, my god, I can’t say help, what can I say?) hel…you find a gift for?” The word is that huge elephant in the room.
We’re also required to keep asking for add-ons until the customer says no three times. But I try to take my cues from the customer, and if they have given me a withering look, and said, No, this is all I need today, if I need anything else I’ll let you know, now just ring me out so I can get out of here in the next 16 seconds" I generally don’t ask them anything more…and then my boss gets on me …Did you ask if they needed a gift bag, did you ask about a second ocassion, did you ask…Arghhh! No I didn’t! The customer was about to bite my head off! I thought antagonizing them further would be a bad thing!
We also have the “nothing between the toes” thing with shoes, but my boss flouts that one all the time. She’s so grateful we’re now allowed to wear open-toed shoes and skirts without hosiery (which she was already doing)…but it seems like since the rule change ALL she has worn are sandals with something between the toes! She’s a rebel!
The main goofyassed rule we have (well, we have MANY - it IS a government job after all) is if there is a conflict in sending cases to another worker.
Cases move all the time. There is a checklist we are required to complete prior to tranfserring to another worker. If I get a jacked up case from someone else, can I take it back to him/her and request they fix the problem?
No. I must e-mail a 3rd Party with specific examples of wrong or incomplete work. It’s a convoluted useform wherein not everything can be explained. THEY then contact the worker who sent the crap case. The other worker cannot come talk to me - oh no! They must reply back to the 3rd Party either noting what they will fix (EVERYTHING DUH!) or if they feel it wasn’t their problem the whole kit n’ kaboodle goes to a review board.
JUST TO TRANSFER A CASE. Suffice it to say I usually just end up fixing the damned thing.
I can’t tell you how many times I answered my home phone, “Good morning thank you for calling Blockbu-----oh. I’m home, aren’t I?” :smack:
Blockbuster had some awful mouthfuls for answering the phones. We were not only supposed to say “Good morning” or “Good evening”, but also the name “Blockbuster”, the town our store was in, the newest promotion AND our name, and end it all with not “may I help you”, but “how may I help you today?”
“Good Evening, thank you for calling Blockbuster Video in Palos Park where you can pre-order the hit movie Titanic for only $5 dollars down thisisNataliehowmayIhelpyoutoday?” Gasp. Wheeze.
Sorry but I totally agree with this policy and have a similar one implemented myself. It isn’t an employees job to determine if someone else is doing theirs. I don’t want to hear a complaint from one employee about the work of another. Do you job and mind your own business. Your job is to make sure things get done. That is what you are paid for. Management’s job is to make sure you are doing your job. If your coworker isn’t doing their job correctly, he/she needs to deal with it, not you. If you feel you are covering another person’s job you need to address the issue that your work load is too much. At that point, the manager will be made aware that the other employee isn’t pulling his weight if they weren’t aware already.
No doubt there are terrible managers that don’t notice that one employee is picking up the slack from another. However, if you want to make a really bad impression, go whining to your boss about it and tell him/her how to do their job. I wonder which employee will come out looking worse?
I work in sales, and we are supposed to send out a certain number of thank you cards to clients each month regardless of the number of actual clients we have. No one ever seems to ask why sales person A has sent out 40 thank-yous while he only had 22 clients that month. Gods help you if you don’t have the correct number though. This has led to creative thank-you noting on the part of the sales staff. So far I have sent out about 150 cards to people out of the online yellow pages.
Yeah except when your job entails dealing with everyone else’s clients as well as your own. If I spend all day farting around on the phone with your clients at the detriment of my work the boss WILL hear about it. Time is money; your lazy butt is spending my paycheck while I wipe up your mess in the effort of good customer service.
This pisses me off not even because of the whole lesbian thing, but because they are children. What did he think it was going to accomplish, by penalizing the children? Ugh!
I work for a telecom company and make a lot of calls to other telecom companies. It’s very disconcerting when they answer the phone with just “Hello”.
I stumble a bit and then say, “Is this Yo Mamma communications?” “Yes”
I think, ‘why couldn’t you say that when you answered the freakin’ phone, ya unprofessional mook”
We don’t have too many stupid rules at my company. In fact we have the opposite problem. Whatever standards we have for tickets and troubleshooting are completely ignored as people do whatever the hell they want. And usually in the stupidest way possible.
I guess it depends on the job. If the shift I’m relieving hasn’t done their job properly, it causes me much extra work fixing what they did wrong, and doing the things they should have already done.
Then there’s customers mad at me because their service is still down when it should have been fixed hours ago.
Then there’s the field techs who are mad at me because I have to call them out at 1 A.M. for a problem that could have been handled at 8 P.M.
You bet my boss is going to hear about this stuff.
It occurs to me, Borborygmi, that if you can rephrase that as a single sentence, you might be able to dethrone Boyo Jim in next year’s Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. (We all know that workplace manuals are pretty much fiction anyway.)
