Yes, I have been whining about my call center job since I got it. It's been a year and a half of agony.
A large part of that was taking to heart the opinion of 1 or 2 people when even my bosses told me not to. I'm referring to quality control people who seem to want to nitpick everything to death. I thought I was over-reacting but my coworker has had some terrible reviews and she's good with customers. So my good news there is that hey, our director told me to disregard their opinions and my own boss doesn't take the reports seriously, so I know it's possible to keep on doing what I'm doing and learn to not let it bother me. It won't change overnight, but I can do it.
Another problem was stats. Now, it takes as long as it takes to note a ticket and do other stuff for customers and even if I wanted to keep them on the phone long enough to cut my wrap-up time I can't seem to. They don't want to stay on when they had to hold 40 minutes for me. That's not an exaggeration and that's been consistent since I started. It's been 20-45 minutes every day. All that has changed. Our hold time has gone down to 5 minutes because a certain type of call has now been outsourced and most of what we get is on lease contract billing, as it should be. The other calls were clogging the lines. First tier off-shore can handle the non-lease stuff and if billing is affecting the access to the equipment, they can then call us over in billing and have us look at it. But the calls go to them in the first place which helps so much. We have time between calls when no one is in queue! That was an elusive dream. It's back to the way it was before our billing system upgrade, or so I hear. I could get used to this. So now sometimes I can finish my work after hanging up while in ready mode which doesn't count against me.
I'm being given tons more account time because it's slower for us. I worked on accounts for at least an hour today and took care of 6 or 7 customers. Other people used to have to do my job for me. Now I can take care of it as I promised to do.
The best news is that there's room for growth. I was angry that they were forcing us to use our "bible" more because it's so hard to search, but what that's done is reinforce that I actually do know what I'm doing. And that comes in handy because our two assistants to Boss Lady are going to different departments (sad). One is a permanent move; she is an acct. manager. The other is being borrowed for back office stuff and she's supposed to return after 6 months but historically people don't. If she stays back there, there is a chance she will be our team's person. How awesome it would be to know that she was going to have my back on stuff! I'll miss the acct manager but it will be a good job for her, so I'm happy for her. We will need people to take their place so I emailed Boss Lady. It's not anything you interview for so I laid out reasons why I think it would be a good challenge for me so we'll see... I would be working on the team's accounts when they didn't have time and watching the team messaging to see who needs help and helping them, mostly. On occasion I'd spend a day taking calls as needed but mostly I'd be off the phone.
Even if I don't get to move that half step up, at least the job will be more manageable now.
A large part of that was taking to heart the opinion of 1 or 2 people when even my bosses told me not to. I'm referring to quality control people who seem to want to nitpick everything to death. I thought I was over-reacting but my coworker has had some terrible reviews and she's good with customers. So my good news there is that hey, our director told me to disregard their opinions and my own boss doesn't take the reports seriously, so I know it's possible to keep on doing what I'm doing and learn to not let it bother me. It won't change overnight, but I can do it.
Another problem was stats. Now, it takes as long as it takes to note a ticket and do other stuff for customers and even if I wanted to keep them on the phone long enough to cut my wrap-up time I can't seem to. They don't want to stay on when they had to hold 40 minutes for me. That's not an exaggeration and that's been consistent since I started. It's been 20-45 minutes every day. All that has changed. Our hold time has gone down to 5 minutes because a certain type of call has now been outsourced and most of what we get is on lease contract billing, as it should be. The other calls were clogging the lines. First tier off-shore can handle the non-lease stuff and if billing is affecting the access to the equipment, they can then call us over in billing and have us look at it. But the calls go to them in the first place which helps so much. We have time between calls when no one is in queue! That was an elusive dream. It's back to the way it was before our billing system upgrade, or so I hear. I could get used to this. So now sometimes I can finish my work after hanging up while in ready mode which doesn't count against me.
I'm being given tons more account time because it's slower for us. I worked on accounts for at least an hour today and took care of 6 or 7 customers. Other people used to have to do my job for me. Now I can take care of it as I promised to do.
The best news is that there's room for growth. I was angry that they were forcing us to use our "bible" more because it's so hard to search, but what that's done is reinforce that I actually do know what I'm doing. And that comes in handy because our two assistants to Boss Lady are going to different departments (sad). One is a permanent move; she is an acct. manager. The other is being borrowed for back office stuff and she's supposed to return after 6 months but historically people don't. If she stays back there, there is a chance she will be our team's person. How awesome it would be to know that she was going to have my back on stuff! I'll miss the acct manager but it will be a good job for her, so I'm happy for her. We will need people to take their place so I emailed Boss Lady. It's not anything you interview for so I laid out reasons why I think it would be a good challenge for me so we'll see... I would be working on the team's accounts when they didn't have time and watching the team messaging to see who needs help and helping them, mostly. On occasion I'd spend a day taking calls as needed but mostly I'd be off the phone.
Even if I don't get to move that half step up, at least the job will be more manageable now.
Comment