Ever since I sacrificed my weekends and essentially my social life to avoid working Mondays, the job became more manageable. I also have Tuesdays off.
Obviously, I don't want to do this long term, but it's the only way I see myself here going forward.
I cannot and will not work Mondays ever again. If they force it on my schedule, I'll just call out.
AI keeps messing with us. I keep getting calls about "I went online and I saw you guys do this" and it's literally Gemini giving them false information.
The pains of having to explain that AI overviews can be false is annoying. Annoyingly they follow up with "Do you know a place that does it", like are you fckn serious?
I'm tired of people gaming extensions too, ik i cry about this all the time, but it is really annoying. Some will call and literally throw a random extension at you "Give me extension 34737", then I'll say, you can enter it yourself (of course with professionality and eMpAtHy haha) and they'll say "you can't transfer me directly?".
Riddle me this, if I'm trying to go to location B and location B has a waiting line or isn't available right, where is the sense in going to another open location you can find just to "speak to someone" despite them not being the person you should be speaking to, isn't this madness?
One of them even said the other day "I couldn't get her extension and I just clicked yours to speak to someone, the recording said click 2 for after hours emergency and I clicked it". I was so hot.
In my real life I find conversations stressful, I've tried to explain to my family members that talking to one million different emotions for 40 hours every week is draining and they don't get it, my friends at least understand.
I don't know if it's nervousness, but some callers don't know how to land the point, they just keep going around in circles. It's so annoying. Like, just land the fckn point. The interrupting is also really getting on my nerves, did you call to talk to yourself?
Someone also refuses to get off the line. I'm not your friend, I don't want to chat with you, and I just want you to hang up once we're done.
Also, I'm strong considering just hanging up on boomers, I'm really tired of their nonsense. They act like kids. They are making this job harder than it needs to be, I'm sick of them.
Queue spiking in the slightest when you are working at night is one of the scariest things ever, but it has calmed down now. There was a brief 30-minute period when it was back-to-back, which pissed me off. It is almost midnight bro, some people need to go to bed. If this queue spikes one more time, I will turn this computer off and go to sleep.
I'm working a double today (16 hours). It's as if they put me on respectful routing today, callers have been respectful, the volume is super low, and I've had just one difficult call. It was this boomer who had hearing issues and asked me to scream into the mic and speak super slowly, lol, but other than that, it's been a super chill day. Let me not jinx it I still have a lot of hours to go, lol.
Even the notoriously difficult callers and other providers who use our services are nice today, lol.
Did something in the water change? 😂 Am I dreaming?
I'm crying! I haven't even been at this company for a year, and I'm already one of the older employees on my team 😂
The new recruits aren't even lasting a month after training lol. I was chatting with a new guy who joined our team recently from training, logged in the other day, and his profile was gone (basically, he resigned).
Our Indeed and Glassdoor review pages are looking angrier than ever. I also noticed the CEO and company ratings dropped (and should be lower, in my humble opinion).
I always get annoyed whenever someone asks me, "How's your day going?" I've posted before about how this usually means it's going to be a difficult and demanding call.
When you think about it, it's actually sad that something meant to be courteous has become a bat signal for trouble. It's frustrating because there are genuinely nice customers who ask, but my guard is already up whenever I hear "How are you" or "How's your day going", and I'm prepared to make the conversation as transactional as possible.
These days, I don't even answer the greeting anymore; I just jump straight to "What can I help you with?" or even on the rare occasion "I can hear you"😭. I'm going to need some form of procedure or brain reset to revert to the person I was before working at a call center. This job is so depressing.
It's insane how many callers can't arrange their thoughts or properly state what they're calling for. A conversation that should last 2 minutes ends up taking 10.
Listening to a lot of these callers trying to arrange their thoughts is probably similar to cavemen who discovered fire for the first time. When I'm tired and don't feel like playing tour guide, I just let them ramble until they finally realize what they're calling for.
I've probably mentioned this before, but it happens so frequently that I feel the need to bring it up again. I had a guy today where I felt like I was stuck in an infinite loop. He kept spouting a bunch of nonsense without ever stating what the actual issue was, forcing me to keep repeating, "Okay, so what's the issue? Is it X, Y, or Z?" He was completely hopeless, but I eventually found a way to end the call. It was terrible.
For those of us who wfh, how easy is it to make friends with other associates or just even chat in general?
The way my place is set up, it's really very hard. You can reach out privately, but you have to be careful what you say, because you really can't trust anyone.
I just have a few coworkers who I speak with outside of work that I can say with confidence that I trust.
There's leads in literally every team chat, even the fun ones. You have to be careful what you say.
It initially started off as a normal call, but all of a sudden, it pivoted to some nonsense about Covid, the FBI, and being watched. Calls like this are usually weird because they started legitimately and pivoted to nonsense, and you pretty much know this will not be a serious customer, but QA will hound you for not saying some bullshit affirming phrase and putting the customer back in focus. I understand QA members are doing their job, but a lot of the so-called resources only work in theory.
He mentioned some other weird stuff that is too disgusting to go into. The call surprisingly ended peacefully, and he thanked me for speaking with him. It's amusing how he was more polite than the regular customer.
At the point in the call when I realised what the deal was, I sort of smirked and just closed the intake form. I tried bringing him back in focus, but he kept pulling away. Best conversation I've had all day, I will never meet him but wish him all the best.
I also had this other fellow who got pissed at something I never said. I told the caller, "I can't do x because I'm not in the billing department. If you want to do x, y, or z, you can call back in a few minutes, or I can have a billing member call you back," and she says, "I never said I want to get y done," and I'm close to saying, "Ma'am, you clicked the wrong extension on purpose. I'm not saying you want to get Y done, I'm saying for future reference, Y and Z and anything money/payment related are outside of the scope of my duties, and for future reference, maybe you shouldn't be gaming the IVR in the hopes of getting literally anyone to respond to your tantrums.
I am also starting to have a sneaky suspicion callers queue up on different extensions to line-jump. Our department gets most of these "wrong" extension dialed calls since we're sort of like a jack of all trades department and we have the shortest AHTs, so callers have figured that we have way less wait times. They'll reach us and ask to be transferred to billing and we tell them to just call the billing extension directly because there's nothing we can do. I can't jump the queue for you lol. They say it so entitled lol:
Caller: Transfer me to extension 4
Me: You can do that yourself (I say this professionally of course)
Caller: You mean you can't transfer me to billing?
Me: It's alright, I'll help you out (Immediately transfers them and places them last in queue haha)
I love when the pseudo-intellectual ones do it, and I sarcastically say, "Just because we all work here doesn't mean we do the same thing. A member of a group doesn't necessarily have to share the exact same traits with all other members. I understand it's inherent in a group that they all have commonality, but we do different things." Logic 101.
Nothing pisses me off more than when I'm on a night shift and someone calls asking, "What are your business hours?". It's on freaking google.
It's looking like a long night already due to a lot of call outs, I will lose it on someone. I am a few annoying calls from shutting down my computer and just going to bed.
Speaking to providers (Nurses, Doctors, Specialists) from other facilities or agencies is absolute hell. You’d expect them to have basic professionalism and an understanding of how things work, but they are condescending, and frustrating to deal with than regular callers.
I spoke to one recently who made me get out of character.
Scripts make the job much harder than it needs to be.
They only work if a rational being is on the other side of the phone, and 9 times out of 10, the other caller isn't rational. They only work if the caller even follows the script.
99% of the time they go off script, everything gets messy, and we always have to bring them back on scripting. We complain about this stuff, and the supervisor will just give some rehearsed answer that does nothing.
The scripts are clearly Ai written, using words that real humans don't talk in, we have to reword basically everything because they are so cringe and robotic
My lead is so fake, I've never seen this level of fakeness in my life before. I'm tired of the pretend games and fake smiling. I tried to excuse and rationalise her nonsense, but it might just be who she is.
I wish people would stop telling me about their problems. Idk what gives them the impression that I'm there to listen. Once I put on those headphones, I really don't care, the pay isn't enough to make me care in the slightest.
I was almost on the verge of telling some caller, "Just land bro, I'm not your therapist." It really hurts me to think this way, but a lot of these callers are manipulators, and my defensive mechanism to survive this job is by literally not caring.
A lot of these callers think they are special for some reason, when they just get the same slop that management tells us to give everyone.
I don't have it in me to fake care, and I've already been coached on this funnily enough. But I just can't do it.
Seeing names of former team members who left makes me sad, I'm happy they escaped this hell, but seeing logs of my chats with them makes me sad. Even seeing their photos and jokes about calls we would exchange, it feels so sad. I have some of them as personal contacts, thankfully, but it is still a weird feeling. Like some sort of game show where I moved to the next level and they got canned.
Also update on my previous post, I did speak to our top performer who left, I was scared she would think the company sent me lol, but we spoke and she pretty much stated that she left for mental health reasons and like I suspected, she didn't give two weeks. Out of respect I didn't try to probe into more of what happened behind the scenes with management, but I pretty much know how it played out.
I also have this weird feeling that I may not be here for much longer, I hope I can at least survive till December.
I just checked out the team list, and it looks like our top performer is no longer with us. Sometimes I would love to know what happened. In one of our last meetings, she did make a comment that I won't go into details about, but she basically said something that all of the agents agreed with but don't have the balls to say in public, including me.
There is a chance that she left on good terms, but funny enough, months earlier, a team member raised something similar, and they were gone by the next week. Our supervisor during the meeting also preemptively said that they left on good terms, which is clearly a lie since two weeks were most likely not given, which our company hates.
We're mutuals on LinkedIn, and if she got a new job, she 100% would've posted it. I'm tempted to ask what happened but don't want to intrude.
The job sucks, but top performers do get some perks, and she was one of the happier team members (from the outside looking in). I wish her all the best, the queue will suck even more now.
Also, the vibes are getting even weirder (Didn't think this was possible)
One thing this job has taught me is that something is really wrong with the educational sector. The stuff that I have to engage with daily is insane.
A lot of these people can't comprehend, they can't read, can't use technology, or can't communicate their thoughts coherently. It's not just the boomers, it's literally every generation. Did no one go to school at all?
Having to read a disclaimer is hell, literally having to explain everything.
Scene 1:
Me: We may contact you through automated text.
Customer: I don't want that automated machine thing, I want to speak to a human.
Me: No, what I mean is that you may get text reminders for equipment delivery dates. You won't be speaking to a machine.
Customer: I don't understand.
Me: *thinking* (how did I get in this situation).
Scene 2
Me: You can always opt out of these text reminders, you also are not being billed for x, y, and z.
Customer: What does 'opt out' mean?
Scene 3:
Me: Can I get your email associated with the account?
Customer: Why do I have to answer all these questions?
Me: (finally pissed off after dealing with vermin all day) It's all right if you don't want to answer these questions right now, you can always call back tomorrow.
My company also has simplified disclaimers multiple times and a lot of callers still don't understand it.
Anytime a callers asks how is my day going, I take it as a threat. 9.9 times out of 10, it will be a difficult call.
It never fails. Also most of them will ask that question and will bombard you with complaints.
I have worked long enough at my current job to see it get worse. I'm not even up to a year here and I can already recall the glory days (when it was at least bareable)
Some of the fun activities and group meets for agents to relieve stress and speak with one another have been cancelled and now people have to get on queue.
I absolutely hate my job, I can't stand this anymore. Standards are being raised for whatever reason, calls have increased despite getting a lot of new hires recently, the whole thing just feels dystopian and a lot of veteran staff are leaving.
Lots of call ins, corporate slop, and difficult callers. I WANT OUT.
This feels like a prison i can leave but can't afford to leave yet. My mental and physical have taken a toll, this is torture.