hi liza

i'm writing this from my cubicle at the call center where i'm employed. right now, no one is on hold. yay. a few days ago, we had up to 21 people on hold; golly, that was fun.

we have a call routing system here. otherwise, we'd need about 10 phone numbers -- and half the people would still end up calling the wrong stinking number.

i hate such systems, too, but they are necessary evils. we have 10 different depts here. any suggestion on how to make that more efficient? operators? and you want to add that cost to your bill? or take it away from my salary?

sadly, these are products of corporate industry. work is done in bulk so that profits can be maximized (the only part of adam smith modern capitalists believe in). i'm under the whip to keep my calls short; failure to do so could cost me my job. i take pride in helping my callers; i don't blow them off just to keep the call short, and i try to avoid leaving them without a real fix. not all techs do, i know. but until we can replace the current industrial-corporate state with a humane way of doing business and providing services to millions of people, i'm not sure we have any alternatives.

(i've skipped my side of the story about the people who are too stupid to know what product they have and whether to press "2" or "3". and believe me, you do this job enough, you despair for the future of an intelligent human race.)

peace,
todd

Hey Tood,

I totally hear you. I used to not only answer the phones, but I trained and wrote out the reference manual that people at Colgate-Palmolive have used since 1996. They didn't like to call them scripts because they really encouraged people to talk as opposed to follow a script.

This is the reason why I can be the phone-in customer from heaven or hell. I know what is involved in creating these answering centers. It's management, who never has to pick up a phone, who does not understand the difference between protocol and good communication. At Colgate, though, management answered the phones ON A DAILY BASIS. They knew what worked and what did not because they did the talking themselves. Those women were just awesome. Yeah, it was a corporate job and it sucked in many levels but my respect for the women who ran the Consumer Affairs division at Colgate-Palmolive is just unwavering. Business should be more like what they created for that company.

Case in point : I HATE IT when I am asked for my "vital statistics" before I start talking. I think that is rude and what it tells me is that the rep is an automaton following a script and is not necessarily invested in dealing with me as a person. Jan Guifarro was very hip to the idea that good business was all about conversations and part of my job was to help reps engage people in conversation and TAG it accordingly. I was doing TAXONOMIES and TAGS waaaaay before it was hip with the likes of delicious, Flickr and now Technorati.

There is a NYT article about "employers" demanding a new layer of tests for high school grads because they have no communication skills. I'd love to know who these people in business are and what do they mean by communication skills. If it means they need automatons that will not question the "sanctity" of their employment and business policies, then, hell yeah!, NYC kids are going to be a tough buy. But if they are talking about simple rules of good communications, empathy and resolution, that can only be cultivated as part of the company's "culture". And unfortunately, not a lot of company's are cued in this. People make companies but they use the excuse of the non-personal legal entity to alienate themselves from the simple rules of respect and compassion.

If they did not, believe me, Call Routers would be a major NO-NO in the services and tech industries.

I feel your pain as a rep.

Still, because I a so respectful and compassionate, I believe RCN MUST DIE!

:)