Customer service thy name is kiss-a&$

[lordandrei]

EDIT: had posted an image instead of a link. That was annoying. Fixed that. Sorry.

I just got off the phone with my ISP. Last week someone got onto my network and ran a peer-to-peer downloading problem. I discovered the next day that my network had gone to hell. I disabled the ability for such programs to be run on my network. (Without certain

Comments

Having Worked in CS....

[tygeressdenacht]

Unfortunately most times it is not the reps fault. There is usually a certain dialogue that you MUST follow or face the wrath of your superiors and a bad score on your "listened" to calls. I had a fairly high call volume and a high sucess rate of helping people. (Then again working for the bank I was also one of the few people who ended up getting promoted within a year and sadly probably would have continued up the line and would have been more able to help people if I hadn't quit.)

The standard greeting of "Thank you for calling Company, my Name is Name, How May I help you." is started at the beginning of all calls. Then from there you get into the problem trying to keep it as short and simple as possible. This keeps the cost for employees down to a minimum. THe more efficient the more calls they can take care of, the less employees they need on the phones. So already you have all that working against you. Then from there you try to help but you have been given a company mandated list of information on what is acceptable to help the customer and what is not. Usually the customer is going to get screwed. You as a customer service rep (if you are good) will try to explain to the customer how they can protect themselves in the future from this happening again. However, this then leads into you selling them product that they may or may not need.

Once done with all that whether you truly have serviced them or if you've only managed to make them upset since you can't go above and beyond what the company mandates.. Then each call is REQUIRED to be ended with something similar to the following "Thank you for calling Company, Is there anything else I can help you with?, WEll then have a nice day."

It's litterally handed to each CSR that works for most companies when they are hired and trained and if you don't use that you are docked points on your reviews and then you can either lose out on bonuses (since they don't pay great either.) or they can just up and fire you. (I knew several people who had that happen to them at the bank..)

So in general... it sucks... you do your best.. but it's usually the companies fault... not the CSR.