34: Call Center Nightmare | Career Growth

Office Horror Stories: True Workplace Nightmares

Call center employees take more abuse than you could imagine. Impatient customers on a mission to shut down and destroy anyone in their path who simply want to help. Today we hear stories of call center nightmares!

Here’s a preview of the office horror story we will be talking about:

Nurses, cooks, salesmen, etc. suddenly became IT experts in weeks. This could be a trade secret, but the real reason why we don't have to be experts is that most centers follow a flow that mostly consists of questions and clicks to the proper box. I guess many people back in the states will relate to this. We must follow that flow even if it means we must ask questions that sometimes don't have anything to do with the issue. We can't reveal that we follow a flow and we can't do freestyle to quicken the call as that will be a death sentence for us. With all fairness to the system, 90% of the flows work and fix stuff, the rest is when we send technician to the customer's address. That is an entirely a different process, we can relay all we want, give all the information, but after that it really depends on the company and the technicians if they will show up. We also encountered racists comments from customers and some agents won't take this easily, we have cases that when a customer asks for an "American" agent, they were transferred to the Spanish queue. Our agents, at least in the company that I worked for speaks English properly. Some have accents close to those in the US so for them it's sometimes unfair for customers not giving them a chance. To end this, I'll give a series of tips for American listeners who from time to time must speak with customer service reps with hopes that we can help each other even more.

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