This is a collection of stories about my experiences in 13 years of call center work.
Feed- Let’s Get Ready to Rumble! April 7, 2008I’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 [...]
- Dropped Laptops April 6, 2008Here’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 [...]
- Training Derailed April 6, 2008Training 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 [...]
- Modem Operandi April 6, 2008I’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 [...]
- Bill Collecting and A Christmas Card April 5, 2008My 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 [...]
- Customer Tirade April 5, 2008In 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 The project was, ahem, interesting, because the database was outdated by about 50 years.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 [...]
- What’s XP? April 5, 2008Every 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 [...]
- Let’s Get Ready to Rumble! April 7, 2008
