I don't really want to keep going on about how much I hated working at call centers, but I found this list I wrote last year about all the things, big and small, that irritated me about working at a particular call center I was at. I added to the list every time something annoyed me, part of a coping mechanism I guess. I saved the list to Grammarly, where we kept our email templates, and after I left the job I logged back into Grammarly to retrieve the list. I thought it was worth saving on this blog. I actually want to use it as material for a novel I plan on writing down the line where my character, a vampire, is forced to work at a call center to pay their rent. This call center was the customer service for a makeup company. I don't know if I could get in trouble for saying which company or not; not that I ever plan on getting back into the call center business if I can help it. But we basically handled customer complaints, questions, and whatever else they called about. Most of the time we reshipped damaged items or helped correct their "bonus points" on their accounts that earned them free stuff when they purchased enough. I worked there for about seven months or so before we moved to the other side of Florida last year. They had both a phone team and an email team. Newcomers were automatically put on the phone team. I am a much better writer than a speaker so I worked hard to get to the email team, and when I finally made it I was still put on the phones roughly half the time. Anyway, I'll let the list tell the whole story. This was only the third worst call center I've ever worked at, by the way, and I've worked at four. If you'll remember that mix tape I made a while back which I posted a blog about, that one was about the worst call center I ever worked at, which I was trapped working for because I needed health insurance for my pregnant wife. This one I just kinda worked at for some extra money, and if it had been as bad as that other call center I would have definitely quit at that point; we already had health insurance after my son was born, you see. Anyway, here it is.
100 Call Center Pet Peeves
1. When everyone is being noisy; laughing, singing,
clapping, doing whatever, when I'm in the middle of a call and trying to listen
to a quiet customer! It's all the email
team's doing. Pesky email team (let me join you please)
2: Logging into the 20 systems at the beginning of each
shift and ending up punching in late even when I arrived 15 minutes early! This
is worse when my computer gets stolen.
3. Reward points in general. Too much math, too much hassle.
Life would be easier without them. Especially hate when they go into pending
after an order fails; and how management claims to have "fixed" the
issue and refuses to lend points out anymore, and yet it still happens
constantly and we get to hear the complaining.
4. How utterly sub-par the training was, leaving me
completely unprepared for the job.
5. Being ordered around by someone who isn't even your team
leader.
6. Customers who try to take advantage of an online BOGO
sale but don't put the "free" item in their shopping cart, and then
wonder where it went when it arrives. Imagine doing this in a physical store.
Would you not put the free item in your shopping cart and then wonder why it's
not magically in your bag when you get home?
7. When a call comes in the second you go into
"ready" on the call system they have.
8. When a call comes in before you're finished with the
notes on the last call. This is preventable (although the method to prevent
this, After Call Work, is heavily frowned upon), but sucks when it happens.
9. When the email team plays crappy music.
10. That feeling when you check a customer's account and
they've been flagged with (no refund) or (no reship) next to their name. Oh
this will be fun.
11. Having to play computer roulette when I get in after
someone steals my usual computer, to find a computer to sit at that will
actually work. Yeahhhh...that was the nice thing about having your own cubicle
at my last job.
12. When you put forth the effort to get to work early, but
the systems actually boot up quickly leaving you with nothing to do; these same
systems that take 20 minutes to boot up when you get here on time.
13. When you ask for a phone number and the customer gives
it to you at the speed of light. Maybe you'll have better luck with their name
and email, but probably not.
14. Accidentally opening a call saying “Welcome to (previous
company I worked at)” at the beginning of the call. Arrrg! Months of
brainwashing hasn't quite worn off.
15. Anything to do with gift cards, especially when I don't
have access to the systems we use to handle them.
16. Not being allowed to go into AUX for IT issues even
though my programs actually are on the fritz. Why does the option even exist
then if we can't use it?
17. When normally quiet Sundays get bizarrely busy, probably
due to under-staffing, co-workers not putting Sunday in their availability, or
other weird factors. Bah. Do something better with your Sunday nights,
customers. There's just something worse about it happening on Sundays, because
you expect an easy day.
18. The "you might be using illegitimate software"
popups. Because they're too cheap to give us legit software without stupid
popups. I especially hate it when they trick me into thinking a call is coming
in for a second.
19. Back to back calls out of nowhere, after 11pm on a
Sunday. Like why? (Also, any day that starts slow and suddenly gets busy out of
nowhere for some reason. Night shifts are supposed to start faster and then
slow down! It's the natural order of things!)
20. Calls that come in right before your shift ends.
Especially 40-minute-long ones. Those make me want to break things.
21. When people are given VTO because we're apparently
"over-staffed", and then there's a deluge of calls with only like 5
people to take them, so they make the email team handle the incoming phone
calls because they got rid of everyone else who would normally take them. WHAT
WERE THEY THINKING?? Gods, the idiocy! Only give VTO out if someone comes up
and asks for it! Greedy bastards, they'd rather be short-staffed than pay
people.
22. Day after holiday call volume levels. Ughh. Also holiday
sales, coupons, and anything that drives up sales and leads to high call
volume. Hate them. Hate them all.
23. Hearing the team leaders butcher my name for the 100th
time while trying to nag me for being in Aux or leaving a customer on hold too
long.
24. The fact that a call placed on hold can disconnect when
you're away from your desk asking a team leader for help, and you could come
back on an entirely different call. There's an obscure safeguard against this;
of course I wasn't trained in this and had to figure it out myself. Imagine
that!
25. That nobody is in any hurry to get me access to various
computer systems that I’m locked out of. It's ridiculous at this point.
"Oh I'll send in a ticket". Sure.
26. How heavily-enforced the hold time is here. It was a lot
more lax at my last workplace. Here they get right on your ass about it after 2
minutes. (The grass really is always greener on the other side of the fence).
27. How hyper-vigilant the team leaders are about every
single thing you do when we're understaffed, since they have fewer people to
focus on, making me a bigger target.
28. The fact that nothing tells you what time you clocked
out for break. It's like they want you to lose track.
29. How a call never fails to come in the moment you start
to think "huh, been a while since a call came in". It's a jinx.
30. The system we use for taking notes on a call and email. Would
it be too much to ask to have a big button saying "Create New
Incident"? Do we really have to go through so many stupid tabs for
something we need to do every single call? Would it cost too much to get us a
system where we don't have to fill out every little bit of info manually and in
two seconds? It's the most user-unfriendly computer program I've had to use on
a job, and is the sole reason I'm in After Call Work so much. Yet I get blamed.
31. Coding out calls. A lot of the time no code fits the
call. And you have to dig through dozens of categories to find the right one if
it is there. And we're expected to do this in like two seconds.
32. Being expected to listen to a customer, and start a new
incident (because starting them ahead of time isn't allowed), and fill out the
categories, and notate EVERYWHERE, and navigate dozens of systems, all at the
same time, as fast as possible. For 9 dollars an hour! I'm going into After
Call Work, fire me if you don't like it, I don't care. Let's see the rich
bastards who made up these rules do all that without After Call Work when the
calls are back-to-back.
33. When the customer can't hear you for some reason, so you
have to practically put the headset speaker inside your mouth for them to hear.
34. The way the whip-crackers prowl up and down the aisles
like hawks, waiting for an excuse to nag us for being in After Call Work for 20
seconds. like they're correction officers and we're in jail or something. (I
know I've already complained about this sort of thing, but the prowling; Gods I
hate it.)
35. The mixed bag when you enter a customer's email into the
system and the name comes right up. Sure it means you don't have to fill in the
rest, but it also means they have a history of calling, probably about the
exact issue they're about to dump on you which a previous agent was unable to
solve. How exciting...
36. Digging for email templates in Standard Text. Half the
time the template you need doesn't exist. The other maybe one third of the time
it takes forever to find unless you get lucky. Searching it almost never brings
up the right one. We wouldn't need Grammarly and have to write our own if
Standard Text didn't suck so bad.
37. Whenever you get assigned an email that has a long back
and forth history that another agent was working on, but they went home or
something so now the ball is in your court, and most of the time by this point
the customer is pissed and/or has a really long convoluted problem beyond your
expertise.
38. Biting off more than you can chew on the email right
before your shift ends, taking on an email that's going to take 20 minutes to
do. Roughly the equivalent of getting a complicated call at 11:58.
39. Entitled Karens who want to speak to your manager over
some minor, first world grievance. That's a given at any call center.
40. As overall better as it is to be on emails, you have to
constantly work. You don't get long idle periods like on phone calls. There are
no slow days. But it's still better.
41. Being thrown back onto the phones out of email,
particularly if I was only on emails for like 15 minutes or less, and
particularly if I'm being bounced back and forth. I HATE THAT. Make up your
mind, and keep me in one place. It's worse to give me false hope by putting me
on email for 3 minutes than to just be kept on the phones. The words "Can
I have you go live?" make me want to punch my monitor.
42. When you just cannot understand a single thing a
customer says; either they have a weird accent, talk too fast, loudness in the
background, or the sound gets all distorted and inaudible. So awkward.
43. How tight-fisted this company is with money. Almost
never allowed to give appeasements. Can't just throw money at customers to get
them to go away like I could at my last job.
44. I know I already mentioned gift cards, and I do hate
everything about them, but a special shout-out to third-party gift cards which
we cannot do a single thing with and have to tell the customer to go back to
where it was purchased. They should be banned.
45. When everyone goes on break at the same time but me,
leaving me to take ALL the calls. They do it on purpose. It's a conspiracy.
46. The fun times when our systems are down, and we get to
tell customers to call back later. They so love hearing that. And even the
email team gets put on phones so there's no escape. Lovely. Good time to take
your break.
47. When you find the correct email template AFTER you've
already sent a response and are looking through the templates for another email
response. You never find it when you're looking for it.
48. The stupid "duplicate email" error message in the
note taking system. Another example of how user-unfriendly it is. And of course,
no one tells you the work-around, you have to figure it out yourself.
49. Whip-cracking on a Sunday when the call volume is low.
That doesn't even make sense! It's going to be 10+ minutes before my next call
anyway, let me finish my notes. Or put me on emails if you really want me to be
productive.
50. Why does every other customer have two rewards profiles?
It makes things so confusing! What incompetence led to this epidemic? And then
everything has to be to exact specifications to merge them! But only sometimes!
It makes no sense at all. And you've gotta love those extra special customers
with three or even four profiles.
51. When the systems get sluggishly slow. Makes for awkward
waiting with potentially impatient customers. They almost always kick the email
team onto the phones when it happens too.
52. Incoming transfers. Just don't take them. Don't. It's
always going to be some extremely pissed off customer that you can't even help,
because 9 times out of 10 they're being transferred to the wrong department
anyway. The other agent just wants to dump them off. Even worse when it's a
blind transfer, can't refuse those. Remember: it's going to be a lot easier to
say no to the agent than it will be to deal with a customer screaming at you
because they've been on the phone for two hours and have spoken to three
different representatives.
53. Related to 52: super-irate transfer customers who whine
about having been on the phone for two hours, refuse to give you their info
because they gave it to the last five people they spoke to, and scream at you.
Maybe it's time for a break. Put the phone down, take a few deep breaths, go
for a walk, hug a puppy, and call back later once you've cheered up. And
remember, if you keep getting passed around, maybe it's you. Bad customers get
bad customer service. It costs zero dollars to not be a jerk. 'Kay? *smile,
eye-twitch*
54. The fact that being in After Call Work is such a big
no-no anyway. I'm never in after call work out of laziness. I'm in after call
work because I'm wrestling with your stupid, counter-intuitive user-unfriendly
systems that you have to enter absolutely everything into manually. I'm in
after call work because the customer hung up before I was done with the notes.
I'm in after call work because it's impossible to do 50 things at once during a
call. I'm working, leave me alone. "Notate EVERYTHING, but don't take time
to notate. Just magically have it done!"
55. Customers who can't do simple things on the website so
you have to walk them through it. They should require everyone over 50 to pass
a computer training course before they're allowed to spend money on the
internet. But, that'd be bad for business so it'll never happen.
56. "But by the time you fix my problem the items won't
be on sale anymore whaaaaa!"
57. The times when there's nothing you can do to help a
customer. When there are no solutions. Those times are just great.
58. The "I can't log into my account" calls.
There's literally nothing we can do to help them that they haven't already
tried 50 times (ie send out change password/username emails). Why does the
website tell them to contact us when this happens? Have them contact the IT
department! We just reship and refund stuff!
59. The stupid vacuum cleaners when I'm on a call. It
usually happens on Sunday evening. Can't you do it after midnight or something?
Of course, no one else cares about the poor fools on phones when everyone else
is being as loud as possible, see item #1.
60. Gift with purchases. I hate them. Can't refund or
reship, can't do anything with them. And customers get so pissed over them for
some reason. It was free, boo hoo, shut up. Just get rid of them.
61. Getting nagged about being in bathroom break aux for too
long. Yeah, my 3-minute bathroom break was too long for you? Got it, I'll wear
a catheter from now on and just sit here doing my job like the mindless robot
you just wish you could replace me with, thanks. "You can be in Unscheduled
Break aux longer than 10 minutes if you show us a doctor's note." Sure,
I'll get right on that with the excellent health insurance I'm getting through
this part-time, barely above minimum wage job...oh, wait.
62. If you have something important and work-related to take
care of that doesn't involve taking a call or an email, have fun waiting for a
chance to do it. You have to work every single solitary second of your shift.
Doesn't matter if you have a follow-up to do, if you have to give your team
leader an absence code, trying to get your direct deposit situated, trying to
gain access to a system you've been locked out of, etc. You're screwed.
63. Customers who place an order two days before they're
moving or going out of the country, and then complain when their package isn't
coming before they leave and expect you to magically get UPS/USPS to send it
faster, as if this is just some secret option we have for customers who yell
loudly enough. You know you could have ordered this like two weeks ago,
right? It's called an estimated delivery
date for a reason.
64. Being forced to go on the phones even though the call
volume is low and everyone else is on emails, and even though it should be
pretty clear by now I'm objectively better at emails.
65. The shipping companies dumping angry customers on us
whenever anything that went wrong with shipping is their fault by misinforming
them and telling them to call us.
66. When a customer emails you an attached image of a
damaged item or something and explains little to nothing, expecting you to be
Sherlock Holmes and figure everything out yourself by downloading the image and
examining it, leading to it being a 10+ minute email. It is especially annoying
when you ask them for item numbers and they just send you pictures instead.
67. Sitting next to nagging, snooping know-it-alls who will
eavesdrop on you and tell you when you're doing something against the rules,
which are all-too-vague and were never brought up in training. If I want your
advice I'll ask for it. Am I in coaching? Are you my new team leader? No? Then
shut up.
68. When you get an email and the customer wasn't the last
one to reply, but another agent. Soooo....what do I do here?
69. The struggle to make it to the email team, being teased week
after week with the team leader saying she’s "thinking" about moving
me as long as I keep my emails per hour above average, which was hard to do
since I was thrown all the phones all the time. Were they just stringing me
along with empty promises to get more work out of me?
70. Getting hassled by a team leader for being in After Call
Work when I've actually been live for the last 30+ seconds. Especially when I'm
literally in the middle of a call. Think I'm talking to myself here? (To be
fair I might be, but still!)
71. Whenever some coworker or team leader tries to make
small talk with me while I'm on a phone call. Gods shut up! I can't talk to you
right now! Especially when it's a team leader who should really know better by
now. It's hard enough doing 50 things at once on your stupid systems without
you distracting me.
72. The blue screen of death! Oh, what fun! Most likely to
occur when all my usual computers have been stolen and I happened to be unlucky
enough to pick one that barely works.
73. Related to 67; secret and obscure rules that we weren't
taught in training and nobody ever brings up until you break them.
74. Guests who threaten to never shop at our store again if
you don't accomplish some impossible feat for them that they've already been
told we can't do, like reship an order to a different address or speed up the
shipping. Oh, we only do that for special customers.
75. Whenever someone has an actual question about the
product we sell, which I know nothing about.
76. Expired incidents when a customer replies to an email
like two weeks later. Why do they have to expire? It just makes us have to do
archaeology to figure out what's going on.
77. When a customer starts a whole new email instead of
replying to the one they were sent, throwing you into a situation you know nothing
about and necessitating you to go digging for the previous incident.
78. Why are we unable to cancel or alter orders and update
addresses, exactly? The customers want it, clearly, and it sucks having to be
the bearer of bad news for every other call/email and gets screamed/ALL CAPPED
at. My last job had a computer system that was older than the hills and looked
like it was on a 1980's computer, and we were still able to alter and cancel
orders.
79. Points issues whenever they have to do with the stupid
Credit Card. Gaaah. Stop hurting my brain. Can't some other department handle
those?
80. People who misspell my name even though it is plainly
spelled out for them in the email! You could just copy and paste it if you're
too lazy to spell it! Now mispronouncing it I can sort of understand (I have a
very foreign-sounding name by the way although it is short), but come on! I
also get misgendered a lot, which is always fun.
81. Those heartless bastards who at the end of their shift
leave their computer locked without logging off and restarting it so no one
else can use their actual working computer when they come in for work,
lengthening the amount of time the rest of us have to play computer roulette
looking for a computer that works and making us late.
82. When a guest posts a gigantic image in their email that
you have to zoom out to even begin to tell what it is; worse when it keeps
getting reposted with each reply making the chain of emails you inherit seem
200 miles long.
83. The sluggish Return to Sender process which takes 30
days and just pisses everyone off. Especially sucks when it takes longer than
30 days and then you get to be the one to explain why that happened.
84. How the products in the order system have different
names from what's on the website so when the customer says one is missing it
takes 10 minutes to figure out which one they're talking about.
85. The stupid red text in the standard text templates that
we have to change the color to black on every time, costing us precious seconds
and lowering our Emails Per Hour. You're supposed to be saving us time!
86. Having to take over an email from another agent who's a
newbie and did a shit job on it for me to clean up. I mean okay I was a newbie
not long ago and I didn't know what I was doing until like two months into the
job, but still. Annoying.
87. Sales on a Sunday when we're understaffed and
ill-equipped to handle the call volume! Thanks, marketing team!! Way to kick us
when we're down!
89. Being on the "email team" but still being forced
to take calls, because the volumes are high and we only have five people
working here. I guess being on the email team is really meaningless. (A special
way to incur my wrath is to make me take a call right before my shift ends!)
90. Still getting nagged and coached over petty bullcrap
when the team leader already knows I'm quitting because I put my two weeks'
notice in days ago. Like I'm pretty sure my stats aren't going to matter in the
slightest by the end of the month.
91. The attendance system and its smug "we noticed you
were late so we're deducting an attendance point" emails, particularly
since whenever I have clocked in late it's been because of bullshit computer
issues and no fault of my own.
92. Survey callbacks, where someone contacts a customer who
left a negative survey after their call or email. I am unsure what contacting
guests who had unsatisfactory experiences only because of policies which we
can't change is supposed to achieve, we'll just be upsetting them all over
again because we can't edit orders, cancel orders after two hours or resend
gifts with purchase or what have you. Why pick at a scab? Why open a can of
worms that doesn't need to be opened? Why poke an angry sleeping bear? It's
utterly stupid. All it does is throw whoever ends up with that email in their
inbox under the bus automatically.
93. Having to go through all this red tape just to use the
gift card system. Particularly having to download and install Google
Authenticator every time I'm on a computer I haven't used before. Couldn't you
just already have it downloaded on every computer? Is that too much damn
trouble for you?
94. When a customer emails twice or emails and then calls
about the same problem, and I go through all this hassle to try to solve their
problem only to find another agent already helped them. It wouldn't bother me
if I found out right away, but I hate it when it's after I did a bunch of
investigating for nothing.
95. When I get thrown onto the phones because we apparently
have "calls in queue", but I sit there for two minutes and don't get
a single call! I'm not annoyed that there were no calls, but why was I put on
phones in the first place if there's no calls coming in?! Nevermind that I'm on
the EMAIL TEAM, as if that means anything around here.
96. They're always having like a million promotions and they
never tell us about any of them. The customers always know more about these
promotions than we do. So the customers bombard us with "Why didn't I get
6x the bonus points for buying this obscure product?" And it'll be the
first we've ever heard of this promotion. Then we get to dig through their
account and try to match up the one promotion they're talking about out of
dozens and see if they activated it, then we get to sift through their dozens of
purchases and see if they bought the one product that qualifies it. Would it be
so bad to do one promotion at a time? Or at least send us an email informing us
about them? I've already mentioned how much I hate reward points but this is a
big reason why.
97. Related to the previous one: Store transactions where
the customer never got the correct amount of bonus points from their promotion.
I swear the store cashiers must be too lazy to do the math so they make our
department do it. It's hardly ever online transactions that have this problem,
because those points are added automatically.
98. Customers who argue with you over points adjustments you
gave them and suddenly become math professors, demanding you share with them
every single step of the complex calculus equation you had to do to arrive upon
the correct number of bonus points they should have gotten. They can't just be
happy I did the adjustment at all. Bonus points are apparently serious
business. Please, do something better with your life, Karen the Soccer Mom.
99. Ungrateful
customers. You generously bend the rules for them, give them an appeasement,
maybe even do something for them that could raise the ire of your team leader,
and sometimes it's still not enough. They'll make increasingly impossible
demands and then get pissed at you when you can't do it. What a thankless job.
Makes you wish you'd just sent the generic apology email template and moved on.
Generosity is pointless in the end.
100. Everyone tells you something different, and when rules
and procedures change, no one tells you. One team leader says "Yes, we can
cancel an order as long as its less than two hours old". And the other
team leader says "No! No cancellations ever! How dare you tell a customer
there's even a glimmer of hope their order will be canceled! You're getting a
warning!" And of course, it's YOUR fault you were misinformed by someone
else, or never told the procedure had changed. They never change or update
their email templates either, so why have email templates with inaccurate
information? This place is an absolute shitshow, no one knows what they're
doing. Too many cooks spoil the soup and all that.
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