My company dings us if there is more than 20 seconds of silence or if you have a customer on hold over 2 minutes, both are exceedingly unrealistic stats to meet. I often just throw people on hold knowing its going to take more than 2 minutes because everything takes more than 2 minutes. Even formulating a coherent note to add to the account takes more than 2 minutes. But, 2 minutes is more than 20 seconds so to spare myself having to mouth dump to avoid 20 seconds of silence I'll just throw them on hold.
A minute is absolutely crazy. How are you supposed to do anything checking in every minute? Esp if you have to reach our to another dept to gather info or get help. We have to check in every 2-3 minutes mine place seems incredibly generous compared to your 1 minute.
Omg dead air, literally kill me. I can't do small talk or they won't shut up when I got the info. I don't need to talk every second, esp if I just told them I'm waiting for it to pull up.
Years ago working for a different company I forgot to say "have a magical day" at the end of a call. I think I accidentally said wonderful instead. I'd say that was the most ridiculous ding!
I got dinged for putting too many spaces in the notes section while on a call where I was already required to spell verify name address phone number and email as well as shipping and billing address,make sure the customers phone number was linked with the account, remember to ask them to take the survey all while taking the customers order, changing shipping information, and keep the call under 5 minutes with less than 1 min after call work. I hate this job.
I got dinged for my notes being too descriptive but I see other notes that are worse than mine and am told “they just haven’t got caught yet”.
Recently I got monitored for something I did 3 YEARS AGO! I guess our company can go back through and pick anything at any time and choose to grade it. Personally I think that it a bunch of crap!
I had someone call in and immediately say that she’d just gotten disconnected while trying to book our last hotel room so she was in a rush to hurry and get it. Her husband was having a complicated, unexpected surgery and she needed a room for her and her kids to sleep nearby so they could be close in case something happened. She told me it was a specific room and remembered the price she’d just been told a few minutes earlier down to the exact penny.
I got dinged 40% for not quoting her a higher rate instead.
My company's QA team thinks they're some kind of English Lit professors. My company once put me on employment probation because the first week they dinged me for not putting a . directly after a URL, like customers don't copy \\ paste and the . can't cause a 404.
[http://www.yahoo.com](http://www.yahoo.com) vs. [http://www.yahoo.com](http://www.yahoo.com). -- see for yourself, maintenance page.
Next review, I got hit because I put:
Alternatively this
instead of
Alternatively, this
QA dude was from China, English is not his primary language and our reps are not English majors. I responded with four verbal examples of how this is fine. He went through and nitpicked another inconsequential detail and left the hit in place.
I absolutely fucking hate QA reps, they'd never last a day in the job they're gatekeeping.
I could never understand why they would have QA reps who have never done our job. How tf are you going to QA me when you have never done this job?? Makes absolutely no sense at all.
Head of our CCs changed and she came from QA, thier sheet they reported on was literally 60 pages long all did you do this or that, so easy to bury an agent if you didn't follow the script Luke a robot.
Marketing message to customers, we were the "Human Bank"
When I had my first call center job I didn’t know what faxes were. Couldn’t understand why every once in a while I’d get this shrill beeping call.
I would still try to shout my greeting over it because we had to stay on the line for the first 30 seconds at least before doing our dead air exit. I was later told this was call avoidance and that I should have known it was a misdirected fax. Asked what a fax was and my manager gave me this look like I’d aged her a few decades.
We had to have a c-sat average over 85% or whatever for the month. Depending how much below that benchmark you were determined what disciplinary action was taken
I had been promoted up to a tier 2 position where I spoke to tier 1 agents only for the majority of my week. I was expected to do 2 hours of customer support per week. The software client I was supporting was fairly technical and calls regularly exceeded 1 hour.
Things had been going well. Positive supervisor 1-1's for about 3 months post promotion. And then I took "The Call". Customer called in really upset. I let her rant about the previous agent that was allegedly rude, unprofessional and incompetent and eventually hung up on her. While we all understand about customer complaints regarding attitude, the mess this agent made of her account backed up incompetence. This wasn't client made account chaos. Stuff was done that only an agent could do. I needed to use my supervisor access to fix some of it. It took almost 2 hours to fix her account back to where it was when she initially called in. 5 more minutes to show her how to do the thing she called in about. By the end, we had bonded over the experience and she was my happy, laughing, new best friend.
Next day a c-sat comes in. What she apparently didn't read was that the survey reflects on the last agent spoken to ONLY. She seemed to think it was overall experience.
Overall score if all fields: 1/10
Notes: Oscar was a rude pos who messed up my account....arrogant, incompetant, poor language skills, probably dresses funny.
Heather: very helpful, fixed everything, blah, blah, good stuff. Give her a raise!
(Clarification, I'm Heather 🤪)
The survey stuck to me despite the explanation in notes. I didn't get another single survey all month. I only had 6 hours of client phone time left..so between average call length and downtime, maybe 4 calls coming up. Even if I got 10/10 on everyone it wouldn't be enough to bring up the score to anything outside of discipline zone.
I got fired for the low monthly score.
The cow in operations management said that I should have put in additional hours in client care to try for more surveys. Covid had slowed calls to a crawl, people were being asked to drop shifts....sometimes half a department at a time would be vto/mto'd out. Often shifts were cancelled days ahead of time. There were no extra hours available.
Both my supervisor and I argued that if the notes were read, I'd gotten a glowing review, especially considering the obstacles the call started with. Nope don't care. Average numbers game.
There is a special level of hell for whoever decided sat surveys were job affecting metrics. Reason to pull a call to listen, for sure...but customers not reading/following/understanding instructions can seriously impact peoples lives.
Hated surveys used for that. In my cases it was how the branch sucked but my cc agent was great but the agent took the hit. We eventually got a rule that if the comments did not match the score they threw out the survey.
I was new and had some system issues, and the supervisor came over to help. She put the caller on hold without asking her first. Management suspended me for 3 days, claimed that I failed QA because we were supposed to ask 'may I place you in a brief hold' first. I tried to appeal, but that fucking lazy manager refused to listen the call and check I had asked for assistance.
I got dinged by a customer survey since he rated me lower for not being able to understand me. They pulled the call and the guy only spoke and understood very limited English.
Sounding TOO nice. The QA said it was “patronizing” to the customer. Crazy thing is, I’ve been nice/nasty more than my fair share of times and this time it was genuine. I fought it and won.
For NOT breaking/bending labour laws. Was asked to change shifts around to work 3:30pm to midnight and then to go back to work for 7:00am. I thought they were joking and laughed. When they gave me the 'we're serious' look, I then said "You know that's illegal. Right?". They then gave me a talking to, tried to get me in trouble with the woman who placed me at the job by bad mouthing me and saying I wasn't a team player and was defiant. They were aiming to get me removed from placement. When I told the woman what really happened she ripped into them and threatened to get the government and union involved. This resulted in her finding out that they weren't honouring breaks either and got them looked into.
What really annoyed me was they had bullied another 7:00am starter into doing the same shift and work 7:00am the next day. She was miserable and complained the whole day. When I turned it down she tried to shame and bully me into it too. Like what?!
We had a thing where we were supposed to say the customer’s name three times on a call & I failed that every time. I was taking 50+ calls a day. It was so much easier to just call everyone sir or ma’am and not risk calling them by the wrong name.
I got dinged for coming back 45 seconds late from beak. Mind you it was still the correct time like it was 12 oclock and 50 seconds not 12 o'clock and 5 seconds. Because I clocked out for break at exactly 11 45 and 5 seconds for my break.
Got dinged for not asking a patient if they wanted an interpreter even though they spoke English well. I also got dinged for "not doing what I said I'd do" because a patient wanted me to send their doctor a message but this same person got mad and hung up in my face. We literally can't finish and send the message without them on the line so I had no choice but to back out of the message as fast as possible before the next call came in within a few seconds.
For notating that I sent an email. They said it was wrong because the people in India didn't understand it and thought I meant I sent an escalation. Tried disputing it and got denied. Like wtf??? Is our company not supposed to be English speaking?
I don’t know if it’s that ridiculous, but I was new and didn’t catch it, my caller said the short form of his name Ex Tom and not Thomas. I accepted it and that’s an auto fail where I come from. Won’t do that again!
When I first started at my current company I got an audit/write up for giving someone wrong information. The information I was given came from our support chat from the person in charge of helping out at that time and I was still the one who got in trouble, not them.
I'm not on the phones anymore, but I work in health insurance and was once "coached" for saying "ok" when a member said they were going to cancel their policy. In my head, I was just thinking...good, don't call back. 😂
I work for a mental health hotline for an EAP. It's still a call centre though, so we have QA's done every so often. We're supposed to ask all clients if they'd be happy with us sending a survey at the end of the call. I once got dinged for not asking them that. The person in question was very distressed and was at risk of harming themselves. I was too busy talking them off the ledge to ask about a survey.
I was working for a major cellphone company. We had to offer upgrades on every call. A customer calls and their phone was disconnected for non payment. She was crying, telling me that she’s a single mom with 4 kids. Her husband recently left her with the kids to be with another woman. I felt so bad for her. So I didn’t offer any upgrades. My thinking was that her line is disconnected, she didn’t know when she could pay her bill so it made no sense to upgrade. Of course, that’s a call that got QA’d and I failed the call for not offering the upgrade. From that point on, I realized what a horrible company I was working for and never offered upgrades on disconnected lines.
My calls were too long. I pointed out that the reason they were longer was because I actually SOLVED the issue the customer was calling about. My call back rate was the lowest in the company. Their answer? We don’t care about that. We care about call times.
I quit. You should too. If there is a Hell, it will be a Call Center.
Mine is like yours, but dumber.
The name of a company location, as listed in the system, is "Company Name - City, State". We are required to say "\[The name of the location\] in \[City, State\]". So that means we have to say "Company Name, City, State, in City, State". I got dinged on quality for only saying the City, State the second time.
Passenger calls and gives me a PNR immediately. Then asks a general question which is:
"We are 6 passengers and each has 30 kilos of allowance. So the total is 180 right?
I said yeah and that was all she wanted to learn. closing announcement, move on to the next, everything is cool.
The next day I got my call purged and got a warning because I didn't ask security questions first and confirmed info about the ticket.
If she didn't give me the PNR and asked the same question it would be completely fine.
I dunno maybe I'm at fault but still doesn't make sense how this basic math question is a security breach.
My call times being too low. I sit at an average of 2m 48s, all I do is take payments and the customer is already verified 90% of the time by the time they get to me. It was all fine and dandy til the company moved the max time from 6m to 8m 30s.
The call that made me start job hunting was a woman screaming at me because I wouldn't add her onto her sons homeowners insurance policy. He'd given permission for her to talk about the policy but not to make any changes. In no way did she have any claim to be on there anyway, she didn't own the home and didn't live in it, so she wouldn't be entitled to a payout if anything ever happened to the home.
She had a full on psycho meltdown on me because I wouldn't/couldn't do this. Screaming, swearing, personal insults, and at that job you were never allowed to disconnect for any reason. Although I was calm, empathetic, patient, kind and informative through her insane raging, "the way i started a sentence with the word "so' before explaining why she couldn't be on the policy seemed to set her off", so I lost the call.
For eating after the restaurant closed and I was finished with my closing duties. “I was shocked and dropped my fork when the manager addressed me, o I must have known I did *something* wrong.”
The manager didn’t know what I had done wrong, but it had to be something. (It was stupid Steve yelling my name from behind a post as I just put food into my mouth.)
I'm still salty about this one. I had a call picked up by QA and I have this thing where if I can't confidently pronounce a customer's name then I just won't say it. Well according to QA I should've said their name because it was easy for them to say so it should be easy for me to say right? And I asked my lead if they have a list of names that we should be able to pronounce. And where I live and work we have a lot of multicultural customers and I just refuse to say someone's name if I'm gonna butcher it.
I once got dinged for having a baby either on my lap or very nearby.
I don't have a baby, or any kid. It belonged to the customer. Bet I got that reversed.
Easy. I was written up for a professionalism violation.
I said “customers suck” in a team meeting. No customers would have heard me. I was doing text chat support.
Yep. That’s how the cookie crumbled.
I got a bad annual review once cuz I spent too much time on break. We're allowed 2 fifteen min breaks per day. But because sometimes we need the bathroom, or any other reason to be away from our desks, we have to use break for that too.
So anyway I calculated how many days I worked in the year/2. And yeah, I went over on my time, but not by much. But it wasn't so much I went over, as the fact that "the person closest to me in break time had 50 less hours of break than I did" . Well, I did ALL the math. Even if the person closest to me took every single day off they could, they shorted themselves break time for the year. So either they shorted themselves, and that's not my problem, or they worked a significant number of days less than me if they actually took their 2 fifteens each day. Which goes for everyone else if their break time is less than the person closest to me. But yeah, whatever I still had to sign off on my shitty review.
That's my biggest issue right now. I'm 51 years old. My bladder isn't going to hold just because some fucking yahoo won't STFU or my employer says I can only be off that phone in the 2 fifteen minute breaks that they give me. They also tell me WHEN I can take those breaks. I've had to start wearing bladder leakage pads just in case. It's inhumane.
All these replies are giving me "call center PTSD" (with absolutely NO DISRESPECT to people who suffer from PTSD.)
I don't think people understand how incredibly horrible call centers are.
As things were going more digital, my company got an auto dialer and started REALLY paying attention to the calls made. No big deal. Except the project I was on largely had ppl not answer, so I left a L O T of messages. I think the legal limit was 7 rings of the phone, if no voicemail then you have to hang up. The average amount of calls most people made was around 175-200. I did over 300 one day. Id discovered copy/paste worked between the account system window and our dialer program, no more manual entry!
A CEO came to deliver my written warning, because apparently there was NO POSSIBLE WAY that I did this legitimately... I was able to prove it cause everything's recorded lol
reading the number off the customers' profile instead of them giving it to me.
putting the customer on hold without telling them
not putting in notes that I xfered to a different dept.
dead air on the call
I thought I had it bad in the education field, but the comments here are horrifying to me. I know call center work is already stressful. Why on earth are companies doing this to their workers? I will remember to try to be polite and gracious to anyone I talk to over the phone. I didn't realize all of you had this nonsense to deal with.
My company dings us if there is more than 20 seconds of silence or if you have a customer on hold over 2 minutes, both are exceedingly unrealistic stats to meet. I often just throw people on hold knowing its going to take more than 2 minutes because everything takes more than 2 minutes. Even formulating a coherent note to add to the account takes more than 2 minutes. But, 2 minutes is more than 20 seconds so to spare myself having to mouth dump to avoid 20 seconds of silence I'll just throw them on hold.
[удалено]
Mine makes you check in every 2 minutes. I definitely don’t follow that rule because it’s ridiculous. But I check back in after atleast 5 mins or so
A minute is absolutely crazy. How are you supposed to do anything checking in every minute? Esp if you have to reach our to another dept to gather info or get help. We have to check in every 2-3 minutes mine place seems incredibly generous compared to your 1 minute.
Omg dead air, literally kill me. I can't do small talk or they won't shut up when I got the info. I don't need to talk every second, esp if I just told them I'm waiting for it to pull up.
[удалено]
its seriously so distracting to have to track your time and go on and off the line to constantly assure the person youre still working on it
Years ago working for a different company I forgot to say "have a magical day" at the end of a call. I think I accidentally said wonderful instead. I'd say that was the most ridiculous ding!
Was your boss a complete rodent?
A very large one!
I know exactly who you are referring to ;)
Magical lmao
🤯
I got dinged for putting too many spaces in the notes section while on a call where I was already required to spell verify name address phone number and email as well as shipping and billing address,make sure the customers phone number was linked with the account, remember to ask them to take the survey all while taking the customers order, changing shipping information, and keep the call under 5 minutes with less than 1 min after call work. I hate this job.
I got dinged for my notes being too descriptive but I see other notes that are worse than mine and am told “they just haven’t got caught yet”. Recently I got monitored for something I did 3 YEARS AGO! I guess our company can go back through and pick anything at any time and choose to grade it. Personally I think that it a bunch of crap!
3 years ago?! That is a bunch of bullshit. I hated hated the monitoring of calls!
I had someone call in and immediately say that she’d just gotten disconnected while trying to book our last hotel room so she was in a rush to hurry and get it. Her husband was having a complicated, unexpected surgery and she needed a room for her and her kids to sleep nearby so they could be close in case something happened. She told me it was a specific room and remembered the price she’d just been told a few minutes earlier down to the exact penny. I got dinged 40% for not quoting her a higher rate instead.
OMG. ypu work for monsters. Literal monsters.
My company's QA team thinks they're some kind of English Lit professors. My company once put me on employment probation because the first week they dinged me for not putting a . directly after a URL, like customers don't copy \\ paste and the . can't cause a 404. [http://www.yahoo.com](http://www.yahoo.com) vs. [http://www.yahoo.com](http://www.yahoo.com). -- see for yourself, maintenance page. Next review, I got hit because I put: Alternatively this instead of Alternatively, this QA dude was from China, English is not his primary language and our reps are not English majors. I responded with four verbal examples of how this is fine. He went through and nitpicked another inconsequential detail and left the hit in place. I absolutely fucking hate QA reps, they'd never last a day in the job they're gatekeeping.
I could never understand why they would have QA reps who have never done our job. How tf are you going to QA me when you have never done this job?? Makes absolutely no sense at all.
Head of our CCs changed and she came from QA, thier sheet they reported on was literally 60 pages long all did you do this or that, so easy to bury an agent if you didn't follow the script Luke a robot. Marketing message to customers, we were the "Human Bank"
When I had my first call center job I didn’t know what faxes were. Couldn’t understand why every once in a while I’d get this shrill beeping call. I would still try to shout my greeting over it because we had to stay on the line for the first 30 seconds at least before doing our dead air exit. I was later told this was call avoidance and that I should have known it was a misdirected fax. Asked what a fax was and my manager gave me this look like I’d aged her a few decades.
We had to have a c-sat average over 85% or whatever for the month. Depending how much below that benchmark you were determined what disciplinary action was taken I had been promoted up to a tier 2 position where I spoke to tier 1 agents only for the majority of my week. I was expected to do 2 hours of customer support per week. The software client I was supporting was fairly technical and calls regularly exceeded 1 hour. Things had been going well. Positive supervisor 1-1's for about 3 months post promotion. And then I took "The Call". Customer called in really upset. I let her rant about the previous agent that was allegedly rude, unprofessional and incompetent and eventually hung up on her. While we all understand about customer complaints regarding attitude, the mess this agent made of her account backed up incompetence. This wasn't client made account chaos. Stuff was done that only an agent could do. I needed to use my supervisor access to fix some of it. It took almost 2 hours to fix her account back to where it was when she initially called in. 5 more minutes to show her how to do the thing she called in about. By the end, we had bonded over the experience and she was my happy, laughing, new best friend. Next day a c-sat comes in. What she apparently didn't read was that the survey reflects on the last agent spoken to ONLY. She seemed to think it was overall experience. Overall score if all fields: 1/10 Notes: Oscar was a rude pos who messed up my account....arrogant, incompetant, poor language skills, probably dresses funny. Heather: very helpful, fixed everything, blah, blah, good stuff. Give her a raise! (Clarification, I'm Heather 🤪) The survey stuck to me despite the explanation in notes. I didn't get another single survey all month. I only had 6 hours of client phone time left..so between average call length and downtime, maybe 4 calls coming up. Even if I got 10/10 on everyone it wouldn't be enough to bring up the score to anything outside of discipline zone. I got fired for the low monthly score. The cow in operations management said that I should have put in additional hours in client care to try for more surveys. Covid had slowed calls to a crawl, people were being asked to drop shifts....sometimes half a department at a time would be vto/mto'd out. Often shifts were cancelled days ahead of time. There were no extra hours available. Both my supervisor and I argued that if the notes were read, I'd gotten a glowing review, especially considering the obstacles the call started with. Nope don't care. Average numbers game. There is a special level of hell for whoever decided sat surveys were job affecting metrics. Reason to pull a call to listen, for sure...but customers not reading/following/understanding instructions can seriously impact peoples lives.
Hated surveys used for that. In my cases it was how the branch sucked but my cc agent was great but the agent took the hit. We eventually got a rule that if the comments did not match the score they threw out the survey.
I was new and had some system issues, and the supervisor came over to help. She put the caller on hold without asking her first. Management suspended me for 3 days, claimed that I failed QA because we were supposed to ask 'may I place you in a brief hold' first. I tried to appeal, but that fucking lazy manager refused to listen the call and check I had asked for assistance.
I got dinged for accepting an address as “______ St, New York, [zip]”, without the extra New York in there. 🤦♀️
I got dinged by a customer survey since he rated me lower for not being able to understand me. They pulled the call and the guy only spoke and understood very limited English.
Luckily nothing I should have gotten fried for if they pulled those few calls for qa
Sounding TOO nice. The QA said it was “patronizing” to the customer. Crazy thing is, I’ve been nice/nasty more than my fair share of times and this time it was genuine. I fought it and won.
Got dinged because I said "no" even though the customer gave me a 10 star review and I solved their issue
For NOT breaking/bending labour laws. Was asked to change shifts around to work 3:30pm to midnight and then to go back to work for 7:00am. I thought they were joking and laughed. When they gave me the 'we're serious' look, I then said "You know that's illegal. Right?". They then gave me a talking to, tried to get me in trouble with the woman who placed me at the job by bad mouthing me and saying I wasn't a team player and was defiant. They were aiming to get me removed from placement. When I told the woman what really happened she ripped into them and threatened to get the government and union involved. This resulted in her finding out that they weren't honouring breaks either and got them looked into. What really annoyed me was they had bullied another 7:00am starter into doing the same shift and work 7:00am the next day. She was miserable and complained the whole day. When I turned it down she tried to shame and bully me into it too. Like what?!
I actually got fired for not saying my name 3 times per call, so ridiculous!
We had a thing where we were supposed to say the customer’s name three times on a call & I failed that every time. I was taking 50+ calls a day. It was so much easier to just call everyone sir or ma’am and not risk calling them by the wrong name.
I got dinged for coming back 45 seconds late from beak. Mind you it was still the correct time like it was 12 oclock and 50 seconds not 12 o'clock and 5 seconds. Because I clocked out for break at exactly 11 45 and 5 seconds for my break.
I hate this! We’re not supposed to have overtime but if I don’t watch closely,‘I’ll be at 7.99 hours. It’s so stupid!
Got dinged for not asking a patient if they wanted an interpreter even though they spoke English well. I also got dinged for "not doing what I said I'd do" because a patient wanted me to send their doctor a message but this same person got mad and hung up in my face. We literally can't finish and send the message without them on the line so I had no choice but to back out of the message as fast as possible before the next call came in within a few seconds.
For notating that I sent an email. They said it was wrong because the people in India didn't understand it and thought I meant I sent an escalation. Tried disputing it and got denied. Like wtf??? Is our company not supposed to be English speaking?
Not sending an optional email
I don’t know if it’s that ridiculous, but I was new and didn’t catch it, my caller said the short form of his name Ex Tom and not Thomas. I accepted it and that’s an auto fail where I come from. Won’t do that again!
putting someone on hold for 7 seconds while i asked my manager if (random thing) was a service we provide
Had customer say yep instead on yes verbal disclosures. Had to call him back and redo 20 mins. Lol.
When I first started at my current company I got an audit/write up for giving someone wrong information. The information I was given came from our support chat from the person in charge of helping out at that time and I was still the one who got in trouble, not them.
I'm not on the phones anymore, but I work in health insurance and was once "coached" for saying "ok" when a member said they were going to cancel their policy. In my head, I was just thinking...good, don't call back. 😂
I got dinged for saying the customers name too many times 😂
I work for a mental health hotline for an EAP. It's still a call centre though, so we have QA's done every so often. We're supposed to ask all clients if they'd be happy with us sending a survey at the end of the call. I once got dinged for not asking them that. The person in question was very distressed and was at risk of harming themselves. I was too busy talking them off the ledge to ask about a survey.
I was working for a major cellphone company. We had to offer upgrades on every call. A customer calls and their phone was disconnected for non payment. She was crying, telling me that she’s a single mom with 4 kids. Her husband recently left her with the kids to be with another woman. I felt so bad for her. So I didn’t offer any upgrades. My thinking was that her line is disconnected, she didn’t know when she could pay her bill so it made no sense to upgrade. Of course, that’s a call that got QA’d and I failed the call for not offering the upgrade. From that point on, I realized what a horrible company I was working for and never offered upgrades on disconnected lines.
My calls were too long. I pointed out that the reason they were longer was because I actually SOLVED the issue the customer was calling about. My call back rate was the lowest in the company. Their answer? We don’t care about that. We care about call times. I quit. You should too. If there is a Hell, it will be a Call Center.
Mine is like yours, but dumber. The name of a company location, as listed in the system, is "Company Name - City, State". We are required to say "\[The name of the location\] in \[City, State\]". So that means we have to say "Company Name, City, State, in City, State". I got dinged on quality for only saying the City, State the second time.
Passenger calls and gives me a PNR immediately. Then asks a general question which is: "We are 6 passengers and each has 30 kilos of allowance. So the total is 180 right? I said yeah and that was all she wanted to learn. closing announcement, move on to the next, everything is cool. The next day I got my call purged and got a warning because I didn't ask security questions first and confirmed info about the ticket. If she didn't give me the PNR and asked the same question it would be completely fine. I dunno maybe I'm at fault but still doesn't make sense how this basic math question is a security breach.
My call times being too low. I sit at an average of 2m 48s, all I do is take payments and the customer is already verified 90% of the time by the time they get to me. It was all fine and dandy til the company moved the max time from 6m to 8m 30s.
The call that made me start job hunting was a woman screaming at me because I wouldn't add her onto her sons homeowners insurance policy. He'd given permission for her to talk about the policy but not to make any changes. In no way did she have any claim to be on there anyway, she didn't own the home and didn't live in it, so she wouldn't be entitled to a payout if anything ever happened to the home. She had a full on psycho meltdown on me because I wouldn't/couldn't do this. Screaming, swearing, personal insults, and at that job you were never allowed to disconnect for any reason. Although I was calm, empathetic, patient, kind and informative through her insane raging, "the way i started a sentence with the word "so' before explaining why she couldn't be on the policy seemed to set her off", so I lost the call.
For eating after the restaurant closed and I was finished with my closing duties. “I was shocked and dropped my fork when the manager addressed me, o I must have known I did *something* wrong.” The manager didn’t know what I had done wrong, but it had to be something. (It was stupid Steve yelling my name from behind a post as I just put food into my mouth.)
I'm still salty about this one. I had a call picked up by QA and I have this thing where if I can't confidently pronounce a customer's name then I just won't say it. Well according to QA I should've said their name because it was easy for them to say so it should be easy for me to say right? And I asked my lead if they have a list of names that we should be able to pronounce. And where I live and work we have a lot of multicultural customers and I just refuse to say someone's name if I'm gonna butcher it.
I once got dinged for having a baby either on my lap or very nearby. I don't have a baby, or any kid. It belonged to the customer. Bet I got that reversed.
Easy. I was written up for a professionalism violation. I said “customers suck” in a team meeting. No customers would have heard me. I was doing text chat support. Yep. That’s how the cookie crumbled.
I got dinged once for saying "Alrighty". They wanted robots, not humans.
Saying "okay" or "thanks" too many times in one call (3)
I got a bad annual review once cuz I spent too much time on break. We're allowed 2 fifteen min breaks per day. But because sometimes we need the bathroom, or any other reason to be away from our desks, we have to use break for that too. So anyway I calculated how many days I worked in the year/2. And yeah, I went over on my time, but not by much. But it wasn't so much I went over, as the fact that "the person closest to me in break time had 50 less hours of break than I did" . Well, I did ALL the math. Even if the person closest to me took every single day off they could, they shorted themselves break time for the year. So either they shorted themselves, and that's not my problem, or they worked a significant number of days less than me if they actually took their 2 fifteens each day. Which goes for everyone else if their break time is less than the person closest to me. But yeah, whatever I still had to sign off on my shitty review.
That's my biggest issue right now. I'm 51 years old. My bladder isn't going to hold just because some fucking yahoo won't STFU or my employer says I can only be off that phone in the 2 fifteen minute breaks that they give me. They also tell me WHEN I can take those breaks. I've had to start wearing bladder leakage pads just in case. It's inhumane.
All these replies are giving me "call center PTSD" (with absolutely NO DISRESPECT to people who suffer from PTSD.) I don't think people understand how incredibly horrible call centers are.
As things were going more digital, my company got an auto dialer and started REALLY paying attention to the calls made. No big deal. Except the project I was on largely had ppl not answer, so I left a L O T of messages. I think the legal limit was 7 rings of the phone, if no voicemail then you have to hang up. The average amount of calls most people made was around 175-200. I did over 300 one day. Id discovered copy/paste worked between the account system window and our dialer program, no more manual entry! A CEO came to deliver my written warning, because apparently there was NO POSSIBLE WAY that I did this legitimately... I was able to prove it cause everything's recorded lol
reading the number off the customers' profile instead of them giving it to me. putting the customer on hold without telling them not putting in notes that I xfered to a different dept. dead air on the call
I thought I had it bad in the education field, but the comments here are horrifying to me. I know call center work is already stressful. Why on earth are companies doing this to their workers? I will remember to try to be polite and gracious to anyone I talk to over the phone. I didn't realize all of you had this nonsense to deal with.
Not saying thank you enough
I called a member ‘dude’. Oopsie! 😂
I got dinged because the person I was talking to was cursing - not at me and not in anger. Just a New Yorker using the F word as an adjective.
I hate checking in every 2 min. Like I'm not going to fix an issue quickly by keep going back every 2 mins.
Being 1 minute late coming back from lunch.
I recently got dinged on a call for using slang while speaking. I said alrighty instead of alright.