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I just felt the urge to post (rare I know) about my work. Atm I work in a pensions company in a department purely dealing with existing customers; it involves no selling, no coldcalling, just dealing with their calls, annual statements and claims.
Mostly the callers are nice, polite and patient (generally ranging from 60-75 years of age) and it's no effort to be polite and cheerful to them, except in some cases.
Clearly I upset the deity of the workplace this morning, and ended up with three randomly ranting calls in a row.
The first one was a lady who'd informed us of her divorce and that she wanted a pension purely for her, with nothing for her ex-husband, which is fine and what she got. The problem was that she'd somehow linked the type of pension fund with the idea of widower's pension and proceeded to argue with me for ten minutes about how she didn't want him to get anything. Ten minutes later she paused for breath and I pointed out to her that the statement she was quoting from specifically said that no widower's pension was included, at which point I got a "Oh, good then. Thankyou." and the phone hung up.
The next caller was someone who'd been hit by the sudden drop in pension funds (a minor issue atm which can result in about 10% of their pension fund vanishing in about a month if they invested unwisely, of course it should go back up in the long term but that aspect rarely works on the old). Fifteen minutes of random complaining about the drop in his fund and how he'd used our "guaranteed" prices to plan out his retirement before he agreed to give me a chance to find his file and call him back. Five minutes later he called back anyway to say that he'd found "in the small print", by which he meant the second page of his statement, the bold print paragraph stating that we don't guarantee prices until they're actually paid out. After another fifteen minutes of complaints and my repeating the same facts to him in different yet unfailingly polite terms (basically that I am unable to advise him and that the price was not guaranteed), he finally agreed to find an adviser, but would apparently keep my name and phone number handy as I was so helpful. Lucky, lucky me.
The last one wasn't too bad on the whole, and only took five minutes, being a simple wrong address on file. The problem was that the person who passed the call over to me had "checked" all the information first, somehow missed the glaring error in the address, and told the planholder that the missing statement must have been a mistake on my team's behalf. Most of the time was spent trying to check the information over the muttering of "the last person already checked all that" and the last minute or so was complaints about the last person who couldn't read.
Mostly the callers are nice, polite and patient (generally ranging from 60-75 years of age) and it's no effort to be polite and cheerful to them, except in some cases.
Clearly I upset the deity of the workplace this morning, and ended up with three randomly ranting calls in a row.
The first one was a lady who'd informed us of her divorce and that she wanted a pension purely for her, with nothing for her ex-husband, which is fine and what she got. The problem was that she'd somehow linked the type of pension fund with the idea of widower's pension and proceeded to argue with me for ten minutes about how she didn't want him to get anything. Ten minutes later she paused for breath and I pointed out to her that the statement she was quoting from specifically said that no widower's pension was included, at which point I got a "Oh, good then. Thankyou." and the phone hung up.
The next caller was someone who'd been hit by the sudden drop in pension funds (a minor issue atm which can result in about 10% of their pension fund vanishing in about a month if they invested unwisely, of course it should go back up in the long term but that aspect rarely works on the old). Fifteen minutes of random complaining about the drop in his fund and how he'd used our "guaranteed" prices to plan out his retirement before he agreed to give me a chance to find his file and call him back. Five minutes later he called back anyway to say that he'd found "in the small print", by which he meant the second page of his statement, the bold print paragraph stating that we don't guarantee prices until they're actually paid out. After another fifteen minutes of complaints and my repeating the same facts to him in different yet unfailingly polite terms (basically that I am unable to advise him and that the price was not guaranteed), he finally agreed to find an adviser, but would apparently keep my name and phone number handy as I was so helpful. Lucky, lucky me.
The last one wasn't too bad on the whole, and only took five minutes, being a simple wrong address on file. The problem was that the person who passed the call over to me had "checked" all the information first, somehow missed the glaring error in the address, and told the planholder that the missing statement must have been a mistake on my team's behalf. Most of the time was spent trying to check the information over the muttering of "the last person already checked all that" and the last minute or so was complaints about the last person who couldn't read.
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