Training

The first 6 weeks were training for the account I would be taking calls for. Now this call center actually handled 6 different accounts. None of these accounts were related to each other, they were all different companies that the company I worked for was handling the customer support or service calls for.

The training included classroom time and on the phones training. The classroom training was suppose to cover everything you might need to know about the account to resolve any issue the customer of the company we were taking calls for might have. Now they claimed that they could train anyone to take these calls and did try to do just that. The other people in the class with me included a wide range of age, from retires looking for another job to college students who would be part time during the school year. And we also had just about every race as well. Not to mention sexual orientation.

At the end of the training we took a test and no matter what the score was that you got, everyone passed and the actual results were destroyed.

Then you spent a week on the phones under supervision with consultants right there to assist with the questions you might have from taking calls. Since we broke often to meet and discus the calls we had taken and how we handled them, we actually only probably took three or four calls a day in this part of our training. So actually we only took maybe 30 calls the whole week. And then the next week we were on our own. We were expected to take calls and resolve the customers issue as if we had been there for years. Not to mention when a customer calls in we are suppose to convince the customer we actually work for the company that they need the assistance for. Not a third party company employee.

Now as a call center employee your work quality is measured by your metrics. These determine your ranking and your pay raises. In my next post I will tell you about those and they measure.

Introduction To My Blog

This is my place to vent about my job. And although this blog will mostly focus around the call center I work at, it is also a statement on how customer service is handled now a days, and what you as the customer will now accept as customer service

This is meant to be taken as a humours look at a call center from the eyes of someone who works in one.

I have been working at this call center for a couple years. Prior to this I actually ran my own business with my ex-wife for over 20 years. We were very successful until one of those life experiences that I always preyed would never happen to anyone happened to us. It cost us the business and the marriage. At my age and experience it is not as easy as I would have expected to re-enter the work force as an employee rather than and employer.

I had been working for a large retailer stocking shelves at night when a help wanted ad was pointed out to me in the local news paper. It was talking about needing customer service skills and computer skills. Now I had worked retail and sales and even inside commission sales for several large retail companies and even had some management experience, not to mention running my own business. Sounded like something I could do and sounded better than stocking shelves. After all I even had a computer software engineers college degree that I could pull out and dust off. Well to make a short story shorter, after a couple tests they offered me the job on the spot.