I have been dealing with some stuff in my personal life so I have been too busy to post, it's been way to hot out as well to sit at this computer all day long, but I have one I will put up for now and I will be back to my regularly scheduled posting in a few days.
One thing that happens is customers wonder why their service was interrupted when they haven't paid their bill in a month or two. I can understand if you have problems with money and I can understand having to balance bills and needed services such as electricity and food versus luxuries such as cable and internet and we are willing to work with you if you are calm and not demanding about it.
Let me give you an example of someone I would do everything I could for versus someone I would just do the minimum of what I could do for.
A customer calls up, is two months behind on her bill, is calm and nice about it and explains her situation and asks politely if there is anything I could do for her, this kind of customer I would find something I could do or find out the person who would be able to help her and make sure that she gets in contact with that person.
The next customer calls up, finds out that she is interrupted because she is two months behind, immediately becomes irate and demands that I help her, doesn't explain her situation and makes it a tough call and a major headache for me. Now I am normally a very understanding person but when someone like this calls, even if I can do something for them I am not very inclined to do so, this is the kind of person who I will give the number of the collections department and be done with it, I know it sounds mean but if you want to be rude and demanding towards me I will barely help you, if at all.
I guess what I am trying to get across here is that the person on the other end of the phone is a human being, treat us how you would like to be treated if our situations were reversed, if you don't feel like helping someone who is yelling, being rude and demanding you do something for a mistake that they made then imagine how we feel and that we deal with that about 70-80% of the time we get calls.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Friday, July 6, 2007
Updates will be a little less frequent
I am going to switch from posting every day to taking the weekends off, but never fear, I will probably end up posting anyway because I have too many stories I want to get out there.
Have you ever had a bad experience with people over the phone (mostly technical support but any customer service really) well here is a list of things that irritate a lot of us Call Center Workers and can lead to you having a bad experience because the person your on the phone with hates you beyond compare.
1.) When we say 'How can I help you today' we don't want to hear 'I have a problem' or 'I have a question' unless you EXPLAIN WHAT THE PROBLEM AND/OR QUESTION IS AFTERWARDS! This one irritates the hell out of me and many of my other co-workers because we do not read minds, we do not have E.S.P and we have no clue what the hell you want by that statement.
2.) If you want to know what is wrong with your equipment, call us when you are with the equipment, not when you are at work on your lunch break, we cannot troubleshoot things without you being there to give us feedback on if it is working or not, if you call me I will tell you if your modem is online or not, thats it because thats all I can do without you at home, obviously your experience might differ on this one.
3.) Speaking of, if you only have half an hour to talk, or 15 minutes to talk or whatever, don't call, rather give us a call when you have a little while to actually go through these procedures, yes we have to go through all of them to nail down the problem and yes, it irritates us when you tell us 'I don't have time for this'. You are the ones who called us, not the other way around, call when you have the time, it will save a headache for all involved.
4.) If you are not technologically inclined, we understand I promise, but if you tell us you aren't and then proceed to doubt our answers and diagnosis then we want to strangle you with the phone cord, honestly people we know what we are talking about, listen to us once in a while.
These are just the ones I can think of, I am sure there are more so if you work in the field then feel free to email me with anything I might have missed or if you had a bad experience with someone from a technical support standpoint let me know too, I always want to hear from you all.
Have you ever had a bad experience with people over the phone (mostly technical support but any customer service really) well here is a list of things that irritate a lot of us Call Center Workers and can lead to you having a bad experience because the person your on the phone with hates you beyond compare.
1.) When we say 'How can I help you today' we don't want to hear 'I have a problem' or 'I have a question' unless you EXPLAIN WHAT THE PROBLEM AND/OR QUESTION IS AFTERWARDS! This one irritates the hell out of me and many of my other co-workers because we do not read minds, we do not have E.S.P and we have no clue what the hell you want by that statement.
2.) If you want to know what is wrong with your equipment, call us when you are with the equipment, not when you are at work on your lunch break, we cannot troubleshoot things without you being there to give us feedback on if it is working or not, if you call me I will tell you if your modem is online or not, thats it because thats all I can do without you at home, obviously your experience might differ on this one.
3.) Speaking of, if you only have half an hour to talk, or 15 minutes to talk or whatever, don't call, rather give us a call when you have a little while to actually go through these procedures, yes we have to go through all of them to nail down the problem and yes, it irritates us when you tell us 'I don't have time for this'. You are the ones who called us, not the other way around, call when you have the time, it will save a headache for all involved.
4.) If you are not technologically inclined, we understand I promise, but if you tell us you aren't and then proceed to doubt our answers and diagnosis then we want to strangle you with the phone cord, honestly people we know what we are talking about, listen to us once in a while.
These are just the ones I can think of, I am sure there are more so if you work in the field then feel free to email me with anything I might have missed or if you had a bad experience with someone from a technical support standpoint let me know too, I always want to hear from you all.
Thursday, July 5, 2007
Happy Late 4th Everyone!!
Hey guys, sorry I haven't gotten a post up since the 2nd, I have been fairly busy and spent the fourth of july lounging by the pool and haven't had the chance to update, but I promised more stories and I have more stories.
I once worked for a company that handled the promotions for a major cellular phone carrier, and a lot of the people I worked with weren't exactly the quickest of the bunch when it came to computers. Here's a small list of some of the more 'interesting' ones.
- The lady who thought in order to turn her computer off she had to completely unplug it, then when her harddrive crashed I had to explain to her why, she still didn't get it.
- One of the higher up managers who asked me to take a look at his computer (at this point I was dubbed 'The Computer Guy') as he was wonderingwhy his keyboard wasn't working......he had spilled a LARGE cup of water into it and asked 'If that was a problem'.
But one of my favorites, one of my absolute favorites was the reaction that came from one of my co-workers who recently had bought a new Mac computer and received the infamous 'bomb' error, she actually freaked out, unplugged her computer and rushed everyone out of her house and called the cops thinking there was a bomb in her computer.
Yeah, those are the people I used to work with, and people wonder why I worry about the sanity and future of the world.
Tomorrow I will be back to my typical customer stories, unless something interesting comes up beyond that, hope everyone had a good and safe fourth of july!
I once worked for a company that handled the promotions for a major cellular phone carrier, and a lot of the people I worked with weren't exactly the quickest of the bunch when it came to computers. Here's a small list of some of the more 'interesting' ones.
- The lady who thought in order to turn her computer off she had to completely unplug it, then when her harddrive crashed I had to explain to her why, she still didn't get it.
- One of the higher up managers who asked me to take a look at his computer (at this point I was dubbed 'The Computer Guy') as he was wonderingwhy his keyboard wasn't working......he had spilled a LARGE cup of water into it and asked 'If that was a problem'.
But one of my favorites, one of my absolute favorites was the reaction that came from one of my co-workers who recently had bought a new Mac computer and received the infamous 'bomb' error, she actually freaked out, unplugged her computer and rushed everyone out of her house and called the cops thinking there was a bomb in her computer.
Yeah, those are the people I used to work with, and people wonder why I worry about the sanity and future of the world.
Tomorrow I will be back to my typical customer stories, unless something interesting comes up beyond that, hope everyone had a good and safe fourth of july!
Monday, July 2, 2007
One from a co-worker of mine
This is one from a co-worker of mine, this will be one of the first of many stories from my other co-workers and, coming up, stories ABOUT some co-workers of mine as well, so enjoy!
So heres a great example of how ignorant people can be these day with computers.
Customer calls saying there internet is not working, after the initiate troubleshooting and checking there modem lights, reseting router blah blah blah, I move into the Computer Troubleshooting portion.
I ask the customer to click on start when suddenly she says "I cant."
"Well why are you unable to? Do you have a mac?"
"No, theres this blue screen with an error on it."
"Oh well that means your computer has crashed and you'll need to contact your manufacture of the computer or go to a local repair center."
"No its the internet, I have it through you guys thats why its not working"
After 20 minutes of explaining how the internet does not effect the computer in that way and how the internet worked with a computer she refused to believe me and requested a supervisor. Of course my supervisor instantly gave me a chuckle and, thinking this will be easy, accepted the call.
Later on that day I come to find out my supervisor spent about 30 minutes arguing with the customer explaining to her that its not our fault her computer crashed and that she has to pay for it to get fixed...
She wound up canceling her service with us.
50% of all of our calls are user errors or as I like to say ID10T errors.
The majority of those are caused by customers routers just needing to be reset.
No one realizes that when they hook up a router is that the router, routes data from the modem and that it may be a cause of there malfunction. If people actually took the time to try and understand how there electronics worked instead of just caring weather it works or not there wouldn't be a need for tech support and I wouldn't mind losing my job to educate society, just because thats more important than all the money in the world.
We arn't tech support because we spent our entire lives with computers (sure some of us have but thats not the reason) We are tech support because we are motivated enough to actually want to learn about modern technology and to better educate ourselves so we can be self efficient*, because honestly who like relying on some guy that gets paid crap and hates his job to fix something that you've placed so much reliability into that you can't have it not working, your computer.
*That last statement is the only one I have a problem with, the main reason we take the jobs is because it's experience that helps us get into that nice cushy supervisor or IT Administration position and a paycheck, to be honest some of us just don't care and it is a job that can burn you out within a year, if not before then.
So heres a great example of how ignorant people can be these day with computers.
Customer calls saying there internet is not working, after the initiate troubleshooting and checking there modem lights, reseting router blah blah blah, I move into the Computer Troubleshooting portion.
I ask the customer to click on start when suddenly she says "I cant."
"Well why are you unable to? Do you have a mac?"
"No, theres this blue screen with an error on it."
"Oh well that means your computer has crashed and you'll need to contact your manufacture of the computer or go to a local repair center."
"No its the internet, I have it through you guys thats why its not working"
After 20 minutes of explaining how the internet does not effect the computer in that way and how the internet worked with a computer she refused to believe me and requested a supervisor. Of course my supervisor instantly gave me a chuckle and, thinking this will be easy, accepted the call.
Later on that day I come to find out my supervisor spent about 30 minutes arguing with the customer explaining to her that its not our fault her computer crashed and that she has to pay for it to get fixed...
She wound up canceling her service with us.
50% of all of our calls are user errors or as I like to say ID10T errors.
The majority of those are caused by customers routers just needing to be reset.
No one realizes that when they hook up a router is that the router, routes data from the modem and that it may be a cause of there malfunction. If people actually took the time to try and understand how there electronics worked instead of just caring weather it works or not there wouldn't be a need for tech support and I wouldn't mind losing my job to educate society, just because thats more important than all the money in the world.
We arn't tech support because we spent our entire lives with computers (sure some of us have but thats not the reason) We are tech support because we are motivated enough to actually want to learn about modern technology and to better educate ourselves so we can be self efficient*, because honestly who like relying on some guy that gets paid crap and hates his job to fix something that you've placed so much reliability into that you can't have it not working, your computer.
*That last statement is the only one I have a problem with, the main reason we take the jobs is because it's experience that helps us get into that nice cushy supervisor or IT Administration position and a paycheck, to be honest some of us just don't care and it is a job that can burn you out within a year, if not before then.
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