![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWhew.
I've been really busy over that last week or so, between being up at 4 a.m. for training until 3 p.m., then getting home and blogging for TeleRead until 7 or 8 p.m. and crashing hard. I kind of let myself get behind on my 100-post-per-month quota by taking a few days off, so I've been pulling down 6 posts per day to catch up: three written that afternoon for posting as they happened, then three more written for delayed posting the next morning while I'm in class. By the time I get done with those six posts, it's pretty much bedtime, so I haven't had a lot of time or brain cells left over to update the LJ.
Now I'm over the quota and getting a bonus for each extra blog post I make before the end of the month tomorrow night, which is the first time I've been able to do that in a couple of months. (Last month I barely squeaked past the 85 post minimum and felt a little guilty; I'm feeling good about pushing past that this month. It's also going to help a bit with the three-week stutter between going off unemployment and getting my first paycheck.) Hopefully in the month to come I'll be able to keep up better and have more time to myself in the evening and on the weekends. For now, it's time to relax and talk a bit about the week.
The training hasn't really been bad. It's been very interesting, and I feel like I've learned a lot. And much of what I've learned has centered around what a perfect job this is really going to be for me. When I left MCI, I swore up and down that I was never going to work in a phone center ever again. I didn't need the stress and strain.
You can imagine my feelings when my first job offer in 16 months came not only from a phone center, but from one that was housed in the exact same building as the one that turned me off the work all those years ago! Even the decor is the same—the phone center company that took it over didn't even bother to change the room signs, or remove the telephone bank where MCI employees could make free long distance calls. (They just disconnected it.)
But over the first few days I began to get the sense that this company was different—and the last week has confirmed it. They really are as different from MCI as night was from day. Where the MCI experience was totally scripted, and they wanted us to get those customers off the phone as fast as we could so we could handle more calls, with this company it's more like improv.
We're given specific points to cover, but specifically told to use our own words, and to converse with the customer rather than just talking at him. We're supposed to take an interest in who they are as people and build trust: when they call in having a problem with their computer, we ask open-ended questions like, "What do you use the computer for?"
If they mention having been on vacation recently, we're supposed to ask them where, and how was it, if they think they'll go back next year, and so on. If we hear a baby crying in the background, we should ask whether they need to take a moment away from the phone to take care of it. That kind of thing. Not wander completely afield, but make them feel like they're talking to a real person who really is interested in the details of their lives before and while we get down to the nitty-gritty of figuring out what's wrong.
At MCI, we were told specifically not to "get into conversations," because conversations lengthened the call. If we were monitored "getting into a conversation" we'd get chewed out by our supervisors. Some of MCI's restrictions made no sense at all. I remember being told that we were never to use the word "sorry" if we were apologizing to a customer. We could only say we "apologized". Not "I'm sorry". What a joke.
Anyway, today was the Big Day when we were to take our written and oral tests. And par for the course (pun not intended), some technical snafus led to the written test being delayed a little. First it wasn't on the computer system at all—then when it was first placed there it only asked one question before delivering a "final grade". (As you might imagine, there was a lot of, "Yaaaay, I got 100%!" and much laughter at that point.) But finally everything got settled and started working.
The written test was in the form of 48 multiple choice questions; the oral was in the form of a role-played call between me and my instructor. In both cases I did "all right", but nowhere near as well as I hoped or expected. I got a 91% on the written test and a 75% on the oral—the latter coming from my being way too nervous and that leading me to make assumptions, mistakes, and omissions.
My instructor told me he was sure that I'd do better when I had some experience and got over that nervousness. I'm sure I'll do better my very first time on the phone (which it's looking like will come Wednesday, rather than the Monday it had originally been intended for). There's a significant difference between talking to a real live customer and having your instructor unintentionally intimidate you into forgetting to do half the things you should.
Anyway, by the end of the day I was extremely ready to go home. Even having a Best Buy corporate rep come into the room and give out $5 gift cards for trivia answers (some about Best Buy, a few others not—I won one for happening to know that the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince's full name is "Prince Rogers Nelson". (Funny, I'd just been thinking about that very fact a couple of days before, which helped me recall it fast enough to blurt it out in time)) wasn't quite sufficient to revive me. So here I am, relaxing and typing a long post that will undoubtedly bring back memories when I look back on it in a few years just as the ones I linked recently about MCI have done for me now.
So anyway, I'm rather excited about being able to use my own unique expertise to help people calling in with computer issues—things I know about already, rather than things that have been beat into my head from a training course. Even if it means selling them service plans.
And boy, is there some bitterness out there on the 'net about those service plans. If you go to The Consumerist, a consumer advocacy site, and search on the name of the tech support outfit I'm working for, you'll find a lot of "fun" stories about it, each reported with a good deal of vitriol. Make no mistake, there are bad apples in every bunch—including, allegedly, some who poked through customers' computers to find, ahem, explicit material, which they copied off and shared with associates.
But I think the glee with which the Consumerist seized upon these incidents (and even added negative slants to incidents where employees did good things, such as alerting police to stolen merchandise) stems from a kind of indignant shortsightedness where computer geeks quail at paying what they see as rip-off prices for geek technicans to render services that they could (and often do) render themselves for free. (Remember, the geek culture was founded by people who did such things as write complete operating systems for love, not money, and a lot of geeks still feel like technical advice should be free for the asking.)
But I'm coming to realize that a lot of people don't know anything about computers, and don't have friendly geeks of their own. To those people it might be just as worth paying $200 or $300 to get their computer running again as it would be worth paying $500 or $600 to get their car running again. Especially since most mechanics don't do house calls (and for that matter, neither do most doctors).
And people seize upon stories of incompetent tech support reps and spread them far and wide with just as much glee as they do stories of bad mechanics. What doesn't get reported are the orders of magnitude more cases where people feel they were well-served, that what they paid to get their computer working again was money well spent. It's only the ones with an ax to grind who speak up, after all.
Anyway, I've written considerably more than I intended. I think I'm just gonna go relax now.
I've been really busy over that last week or so, between being up at 4 a.m. for training until 3 p.m., then getting home and blogging for TeleRead until 7 or 8 p.m. and crashing hard. I kind of let myself get behind on my 100-post-per-month quota by taking a few days off, so I've been pulling down 6 posts per day to catch up: three written that afternoon for posting as they happened, then three more written for delayed posting the next morning while I'm in class. By the time I get done with those six posts, it's pretty much bedtime, so I haven't had a lot of time or brain cells left over to update the LJ.
Now I'm over the quota and getting a bonus for each extra blog post I make before the end of the month tomorrow night, which is the first time I've been able to do that in a couple of months. (Last month I barely squeaked past the 85 post minimum and felt a little guilty; I'm feeling good about pushing past that this month. It's also going to help a bit with the three-week stutter between going off unemployment and getting my first paycheck.) Hopefully in the month to come I'll be able to keep up better and have more time to myself in the evening and on the weekends. For now, it's time to relax and talk a bit about the week.
The training hasn't really been bad. It's been very interesting, and I feel like I've learned a lot. And much of what I've learned has centered around what a perfect job this is really going to be for me. When I left MCI, I swore up and down that I was never going to work in a phone center ever again. I didn't need the stress and strain.
You can imagine my feelings when my first job offer in 16 months came not only from a phone center, but from one that was housed in the exact same building as the one that turned me off the work all those years ago! Even the decor is the same—the phone center company that took it over didn't even bother to change the room signs, or remove the telephone bank where MCI employees could make free long distance calls. (They just disconnected it.)
But over the first few days I began to get the sense that this company was different—and the last week has confirmed it. They really are as different from MCI as night was from day. Where the MCI experience was totally scripted, and they wanted us to get those customers off the phone as fast as we could so we could handle more calls, with this company it's more like improv.
We're given specific points to cover, but specifically told to use our own words, and to converse with the customer rather than just talking at him. We're supposed to take an interest in who they are as people and build trust: when they call in having a problem with their computer, we ask open-ended questions like, "What do you use the computer for?"
If they mention having been on vacation recently, we're supposed to ask them where, and how was it, if they think they'll go back next year, and so on. If we hear a baby crying in the background, we should ask whether they need to take a moment away from the phone to take care of it. That kind of thing. Not wander completely afield, but make them feel like they're talking to a real person who really is interested in the details of their lives before and while we get down to the nitty-gritty of figuring out what's wrong.
At MCI, we were told specifically not to "get into conversations," because conversations lengthened the call. If we were monitored "getting into a conversation" we'd get chewed out by our supervisors. Some of MCI's restrictions made no sense at all. I remember being told that we were never to use the word "sorry" if we were apologizing to a customer. We could only say we "apologized". Not "I'm sorry". What a joke.
Anyway, today was the Big Day when we were to take our written and oral tests. And par for the course (pun not intended), some technical snafus led to the written test being delayed a little. First it wasn't on the computer system at all—then when it was first placed there it only asked one question before delivering a "final grade". (As you might imagine, there was a lot of, "Yaaaay, I got 100%!" and much laughter at that point.) But finally everything got settled and started working.
The written test was in the form of 48 multiple choice questions; the oral was in the form of a role-played call between me and my instructor. In both cases I did "all right", but nowhere near as well as I hoped or expected. I got a 91% on the written test and a 75% on the oral—the latter coming from my being way too nervous and that leading me to make assumptions, mistakes, and omissions.
My instructor told me he was sure that I'd do better when I had some experience and got over that nervousness. I'm sure I'll do better my very first time on the phone (which it's looking like will come Wednesday, rather than the Monday it had originally been intended for). There's a significant difference between talking to a real live customer and having your instructor unintentionally intimidate you into forgetting to do half the things you should.
Anyway, by the end of the day I was extremely ready to go home. Even having a Best Buy corporate rep come into the room and give out $5 gift cards for trivia answers (some about Best Buy, a few others not—I won one for happening to know that the artist formerly known as the artist formerly known as Prince's full name is "Prince Rogers Nelson". (Funny, I'd just been thinking about that very fact a couple of days before, which helped me recall it fast enough to blurt it out in time)) wasn't quite sufficient to revive me. So here I am, relaxing and typing a long post that will undoubtedly bring back memories when I look back on it in a few years just as the ones I linked recently about MCI have done for me now.
So anyway, I'm rather excited about being able to use my own unique expertise to help people calling in with computer issues—things I know about already, rather than things that have been beat into my head from a training course. Even if it means selling them service plans.
And boy, is there some bitterness out there on the 'net about those service plans. If you go to The Consumerist, a consumer advocacy site, and search on the name of the tech support outfit I'm working for, you'll find a lot of "fun" stories about it, each reported with a good deal of vitriol. Make no mistake, there are bad apples in every bunch—including, allegedly, some who poked through customers' computers to find, ahem, explicit material, which they copied off and shared with associates.
But I think the glee with which the Consumerist seized upon these incidents (and even added negative slants to incidents where employees did good things, such as alerting police to stolen merchandise) stems from a kind of indignant shortsightedness where computer geeks quail at paying what they see as rip-off prices for geek technicans to render services that they could (and often do) render themselves for free. (Remember, the geek culture was founded by people who did such things as write complete operating systems for love, not money, and a lot of geeks still feel like technical advice should be free for the asking.)
But I'm coming to realize that a lot of people don't know anything about computers, and don't have friendly geeks of their own. To those people it might be just as worth paying $200 or $300 to get their computer running again as it would be worth paying $500 or $600 to get their car running again. Especially since most mechanics don't do house calls (and for that matter, neither do most doctors).
And people seize upon stories of incompetent tech support reps and spread them far and wide with just as much glee as they do stories of bad mechanics. What doesn't get reported are the orders of magnitude more cases where people feel they were well-served, that what they paid to get their computer working again was money well spent. It's only the ones with an ax to grind who speak up, after all.
Anyway, I've written considerably more than I intended. I think I'm just gonna go relax now.
