Let’s Get Ready to Rumble! Sunday, Apr 6 2008

I’ve worked in all kinds of call centers, some good, some not so good.  One of the worst was a telemarketing company selling satellite television service.  The call center was in a decrepit building in the middle of a “bad neighborhood” in a medium sized Midwestern city.  I had just lost my previous job thanks to the “Do Not Call List” and it’s effect on the industry and this one wasn’t intended to be permanent, just something to get me through the near future.   The police station was right across the street, which turned out to be a very good thing for the police since they didn’t have far to go to make a “pickup”. They basically were running a one way chauffeur service from the office over to the “county hotel”.

Fights in the workplace aren’t the norm, but they do happen.  The tiny, cramped office was always very noisy since the building was not designed for a call center and we were practically crammed in with a shoehorn.  Customers frequently asked me if we were having a party due to the noise in the background.  It was in this environment that the battle erupted.  The night started out like any other, I made 30-40 calls and got maybe 1 sale, but I don’t remember for sure.  What I do remember is that between calls I heard several shouts and everybody in the place jumped up and ran over to the the back of the office.  Two young girls were beating each other up and the team leads were trying to break it up without any success.  It turns out that an innocent bystander, an unlucky man who was between them and in the middle of a call when they attacked each other, got the worst of it.  The sheriff made yet another visit to our little corner of paradise and removed the Mike Tyson wannabes.   The  poor guy in the middle of the fight was unharmed and later in the evening somebody jokingly raised a fist to him, to which he responded: “I’ve already been rumbled on once tonight”.

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Dropped Laptops Saturday, Apr 5 2008

Here’s one for the CITCC Record Book: A customer called in awhile back to tell me he dropped his laptop, but the good news, according to the customer, was that it only fell two feet before it hit the floor. Now if he could just get all of the buttons back on the keyboard in the right places. No matter, the hard drive was destroyed. “But I only dropped it two feet”.

I was barely able to refrain from asking how high it came up on the second bounce.

Another classic moment was the caller who informed me that he fell down the stairs with his laptop. After thumping down the steps it came to rest on the landing. Needless to say this happens and just as needless to say is the fact that it’s a total loss when it does.

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Training Derailed Saturday, Apr 5 2008

Training in a call center is never what it needs to be, but always seems to be “on the agenda for the near future”. Call centers make their money by having as many agents on the phones as much of the time as possible. Providing agents with adequate training means taking agents off the phones and putting them in a training room, which nobody in management wants. Much of the chaos in a call center stems from this lack of training or training done in a haphazard manner.

I once took a tech support job with a major IT firm assuming it would be operated as a well oiled machine, but found that it was more of the upheaval that I quit my previous job to escape. The employees were trained by different people in waves, so each training class got slightly different training. A few months later the project changed, requiring another round of “training” to use the term loosely, and my new trainer said that my previous trainer had definitely been wrong on many points. This creates a phenomenon I like to call the “ask three people, get four answers“ phenomenon. It’s hard to tell a coworker he is doing something wrong when he insists that’s what the trainer said to do.

An IT trainer once told a training class that I was in that he was going to teach us 1% of what we needed to know in order to do the job, and that the rest would come from doing it. Trial-and-error learning is always fun when your doing helpdesk work.

The moral to the story is when you call tech support and the agent sounds unsure,  don’t take it out on the agent, he’s just trying to figure out which non functioning cubicle he will work at today and what his schedule is for the week since it has changed twice already and his manager resigned without notice ten minutes earlier

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Modem Operandi Saturday, Apr 5 2008

I’ve gotten more than one call from DSL customers who tell me “I don’t have a modem, I have DSL”, or in response to me asking what kind of modem they have , “The DSL kind, you know, the one with all the lights on it.”

Wikipedia defines a modem as:

Modem (from modulator-demodulator) is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data. Modems can be used over any means of transmitting analog signals, from driven diodes to radio.

In other words, it’s the DSL box and without it a DSL subscriber isn’t going anywhere online.  Customer’s  have discovered that the modem works better when plugged in. When I was fairly new to tech support I got a call from a man who had spent all day trying to set up his DSL.  We went through some troubleshooting steps when finally I asked:

“Are we sure the yellow cord is connected to the computer?”

“Yes.”

“And of course the black electric power cord is plugged in?”

At this point he got very quiet and suddenly let loose a series of words and phrases I will not post here as he discovered the unplugged power cord.  He thanked me and hung up.

When configuring a modem we had the customers log in to the modem using the word “admin”.  It is truly amazing how many ways a person can misspell the word “admin”.  They try to spell it amen, adam, adman, amman, ammen, admen and so on.  When the customer is “not as am as I think he/she drunk” it only adds to the fun.

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Bill Collecting and A Christmas Card Friday, Apr 4 2008

My first forays into the madness of call center life were in the field of bill collecting (Please spare me the hate mail, I wasn’t very good at it, which is why I’ve had all the other jobs in call centers.) I did truly hate being a bill collector and certain consumers that I had to call only enhanced my displeasure with the job.

They used to tell you when you went to work at a collection agency that debtors were to be called consumers. One consumer whose account was assigned to me was on a weekly payment plan. I had to call him/her each week for payment arrangements and each time I got an earful. Consumers would sometimes mail a check or money order and often included “love letters” with their payment. One day when the mail came I was handed a Christmas card from the consumer and in it was a note thanking me for helping him/her get out of debt. I was stunned, of course. This was a rare occurrence, but that it happened at all is amazing.

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Customer Tirade Friday, Apr 4 2008

In the mid-1990’s I was doing a fund raising job raising money for a museum in Chicago. This was outbound calling to previous donors to the museum to ask for more money. The project was, ahem, interesting, because the database was outdated by about 50 years. Many calls went like this:

“Can I speak to ‘John Doe’ please?”

“Nope, he’s gone”

“Will he be home this evening?”

“Nope.”

“Tomorrow maybe?”

“Naw, he died in 1959. Who’s callin’”

After a month of that I was completely off guard when I called a certain person who cut me off in mid-sentence and flew into the most ridiculous tirade I’ve ever heard. He said that he was a database marketer himself and had offered to do this project for the museum and so on and he regaled me with stories of how he is the best in the country at fundraising and how he should have gotten the contract etc. For those of you who have never worked in the field, you aren;t allowed to just hang up on people, so I just sat there for about half the night listening to this guy rant. When he finally stopped to breathe I cut in and thanked him for his time.

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What’s XP? Friday, Apr 4 2008

Every now and then I get a call that is one for the record books. I don’t expect everybody to be experts on the use of their computer, that’s why I have a job after all. I do however expect you to be able to answer

“Ok, ma’am what operating system do you have ?”

“I don’t know”

“Is it XP?”

“What’s XP”

“That’s an operating system”

“You mean on the computer?”

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