More strain, but now with payoff
QOTD:Trainer: "How long do customers have to make a return?"
Class: "Fourteen days."
Trainer: "So what's that like?"
Sam: "Two weeks."
Training proceeds apace. Tuesday we took live calls for the first time. We were all pretty terrified. A lot of it was us just psyching ourselves out. Poor Maddy was super anxious and the first call she got was a woman demanding to be told the last number that called her husband, which isn't something we can provide (we can't even access/see that information). Maddy's positioning wasn't so good because she was caught off guard and the woman hung up on her. Maddy was made to call her back, as is policy for this kind of dropped call, and the woman hung up on her again. Didn't help her anxiety at all.
I was very lucky with my first call and got an older woman from New Hampshire who was looking to confirm some information about her bill and to get more information about her device payment and a possible trade-in. I was working on some other stuff before the call came in, and the second it came through, all my software just sort of exploded. I was super glad I had a coach standing over my shoulder when it happened because even with the help I had to do all kinds of stalling maneuvers to give myself the time to get everything back the way it should be. The lady was very nice once I got past that, though, and actually went on a bit more than I would've liked, talking about the Presidential race and, unrelated, the various animals she sees in her backyard. She was obviously fairly new to smartphones because as we were ending the call, I heard her saying, "How do I turn this damn thing off?" and I had to work really hard to not laugh. After a few seconds of her fumbling with it, I offered a recommendation and she was surprised I was still on the line. She did manage to eventually hang up.
The second call I got was from a very upset woman who was receiving unsolicited calls from third parties on her phone. The calls were coming from different numbers, so she couldn't block all of them. After working fairly hard in my discovery phase, I uncovered that most of the calls were coming in on her AT&T home line and she'd only received one such call on her cell phone, but the phone was new and she was very upset about the idea that she'd have to deal with calls coming in now on her cell phone from credit consolidators and people from India insisting that she needed to give them access to her computer. This was a challenging call because with the manner in which these calls are coming in, there's not much we can do about it. I was struggling to gain traction even halfway through the call, but eventually I was able to suggest letting unknown calls go to voicemail and recommended taking a "let it go" approach to these crazy callers. I seemed to finally get her into a more empowered mindset and I could hear her tone change enough that I was finally okay with her leaving the call. It definitely wasn't a call type I had been trained for, so I was pretty pleased that I was able to resolve it to my satisfaction.
We got paid today! Our pay details showed up two days ago in our systems and I was able to see my hourly breakdown. My base pay is $1.31/hr more than I've ever made, which is super nice. I've also gotten a few hours of overtime in training and we got a differential worth a total of about $85 for working on Sundays. This was a three-week paycheck because of when we started at the company, so I can expect future checks to be about 60% less. I saw the pay of the guy next to me and I was kind of upset because he got $50 more than I did and I got a fair bonus for having two degrees and I know he's still in school, but I kept myself in check when I remembered he's bilingual and I am most certainly not and that's a skill that's worth getting paid more for. And $50 across three weeks is nothing, so yeah, reality check.
We were to take more calls yesterday, but no one got any. We've been working in a limited queue to try and ensure we only get customers asking about things we can actually help them with, but apparently we weren't identified as a priority, so those calls were going elsewhere first. And since we had a low call volume anyway, we weren't getting any. It was funny because everyone was much more confident and ready to take on calls yesterday and nothing happened. On Tuesday we got three positive surveys (surveys are randomly solicited) and two of them were for Adrian. Adrian is in the Army Reserve and yesterday told a story about how he accidentally went on a date with his Army roommate who he didn't know was gay. Apparently the guys in his platoon haven't let him live it down. I felt kinda bad for him because he's a really friendly, extrovertial guy who just hadn't had much experience dealing with that kind of thing. And in fairness, his roommate wasn't very clear about expectations, and that didn't help the situation terribly much.
Last week HR had stress balls they were giving out. Sam had gotten one and while Alex and I were playing pool, he said, "If I drop this in here," referring to a corner pocket, "do you think it will come back to me?" I said, "Probably not." With that, he dropped it in. Indeed, it didn't come back. Alex scratched, and the cue ball didn't return, either. In an attempt to push them through, they put all the remaining balls in. None came back. They tried tilting the table. They tried getting under the table. Nothing. Our break ended and Sam apologized for ruining my game. With an honest hyperbole, I said, "You didn't ruin it for me - you ruined it for the whole building! Did you see those two guys playing before we came in? We aren't the only ones that use it. You have to tell someone." After some pushback, to his credit, he told our coach and supervisor, who went looking for someone to fix it. There's an access to the side of the table that requires a key. The next week we discover the key has been lost, so it can't be opened. The balls still haven't been recovered. At least we know they won't be misplaced.
Class: "Fourteen days."
Trainer: "So what's that like?"
Sam: "Two weeks."
Training proceeds apace. Tuesday we took live calls for the first time. We were all pretty terrified. A lot of it was us just psyching ourselves out. Poor Maddy was super anxious and the first call she got was a woman demanding to be told the last number that called her husband, which isn't something we can provide (we can't even access/see that information). Maddy's positioning wasn't so good because she was caught off guard and the woman hung up on her. Maddy was made to call her back, as is policy for this kind of dropped call, and the woman hung up on her again. Didn't help her anxiety at all.
I was very lucky with my first call and got an older woman from New Hampshire who was looking to confirm some information about her bill and to get more information about her device payment and a possible trade-in. I was working on some other stuff before the call came in, and the second it came through, all my software just sort of exploded. I was super glad I had a coach standing over my shoulder when it happened because even with the help I had to do all kinds of stalling maneuvers to give myself the time to get everything back the way it should be. The lady was very nice once I got past that, though, and actually went on a bit more than I would've liked, talking about the Presidential race and, unrelated, the various animals she sees in her backyard. She was obviously fairly new to smartphones because as we were ending the call, I heard her saying, "How do I turn this damn thing off?" and I had to work really hard to not laugh. After a few seconds of her fumbling with it, I offered a recommendation and she was surprised I was still on the line. She did manage to eventually hang up.
The second call I got was from a very upset woman who was receiving unsolicited calls from third parties on her phone. The calls were coming from different numbers, so she couldn't block all of them. After working fairly hard in my discovery phase, I uncovered that most of the calls were coming in on her AT&T home line and she'd only received one such call on her cell phone, but the phone was new and she was very upset about the idea that she'd have to deal with calls coming in now on her cell phone from credit consolidators and people from India insisting that she needed to give them access to her computer. This was a challenging call because with the manner in which these calls are coming in, there's not much we can do about it. I was struggling to gain traction even halfway through the call, but eventually I was able to suggest letting unknown calls go to voicemail and recommended taking a "let it go" approach to these crazy callers. I seemed to finally get her into a more empowered mindset and I could hear her tone change enough that I was finally okay with her leaving the call. It definitely wasn't a call type I had been trained for, so I was pretty pleased that I was able to resolve it to my satisfaction.
We got paid today! Our pay details showed up two days ago in our systems and I was able to see my hourly breakdown. My base pay is $1.31/hr more than I've ever made, which is super nice. I've also gotten a few hours of overtime in training and we got a differential worth a total of about $85 for working on Sundays. This was a three-week paycheck because of when we started at the company, so I can expect future checks to be about 60% less. I saw the pay of the guy next to me and I was kind of upset because he got $50 more than I did and I got a fair bonus for having two degrees and I know he's still in school, but I kept myself in check when I remembered he's bilingual and I am most certainly not and that's a skill that's worth getting paid more for. And $50 across three weeks is nothing, so yeah, reality check.
We were to take more calls yesterday, but no one got any. We've been working in a limited queue to try and ensure we only get customers asking about things we can actually help them with, but apparently we weren't identified as a priority, so those calls were going elsewhere first. And since we had a low call volume anyway, we weren't getting any. It was funny because everyone was much more confident and ready to take on calls yesterday and nothing happened. On Tuesday we got three positive surveys (surveys are randomly solicited) and two of them were for Adrian. Adrian is in the Army Reserve and yesterday told a story about how he accidentally went on a date with his Army roommate who he didn't know was gay. Apparently the guys in his platoon haven't let him live it down. I felt kinda bad for him because he's a really friendly, extrovertial guy who just hadn't had much experience dealing with that kind of thing. And in fairness, his roommate wasn't very clear about expectations, and that didn't help the situation terribly much.
Last week HR had stress balls they were giving out. Sam had gotten one and while Alex and I were playing pool, he said, "If I drop this in here," referring to a corner pocket, "do you think it will come back to me?" I said, "Probably not." With that, he dropped it in. Indeed, it didn't come back. Alex scratched, and the cue ball didn't return, either. In an attempt to push them through, they put all the remaining balls in. None came back. They tried tilting the table. They tried getting under the table. Nothing. Our break ended and Sam apologized for ruining my game. With an honest hyperbole, I said, "You didn't ruin it for me - you ruined it for the whole building! Did you see those two guys playing before we came in? We aren't the only ones that use it. You have to tell someone." After some pushback, to his credit, he told our coach and supervisor, who went looking for someone to fix it. There's an access to the side of the table that requires a key. The next week we discover the key has been lost, so it can't be opened. The balls still haven't been recovered. At least we know they won't be misplaced.