PSC_Pats_Fan on 06-27-2007 at 08:48 PM said:
I work in customer service for a major cable company and I can tell you its one of the most thankless jobs in America.
Maybe the customer service for these companies would be better if A) Customers didn't treat us like their own personal verbal punching bags and B) The company paid us more.
I never understood why the employee most important for determining wether the customer has a good experience or a bad one is the least paid and thought of as the most expendable.
I try to do the best job I can, but I know the next customer I talk to suffers (even if just a little) when I just spent getting screamed at for something that's not my fault for 20 minutes.
I'd love to see the CEO and his 5 million dollar a year salary deal with some of these people. It is NOT easy and I think the customer service quality really suffers when the representatives feel underpaid, unappreciated, and stressed out.
And YES, I am looking for a new job.
Preach on, Brother PSC.
For over two years after college I was stuck as a customer service person for a window manufacturer in my home town. I would not wish this job on my worst enemy.
As for the "person with the most contact is the least paid", I can attest to that. When I started I was told that the starting wage for the job was $7/hr, but since I had a bachelor's degree I was worth $8/hr.
First off, I had no idea windows could be so f***ing complicated. I figured, "What, there's glass, some wood, a screen? I can handle that." Oh nooooooooooo. The typical window has about 800 parts in it, and by God you had better know the exact name, function, size, weight and price of all of them RIGHT F***ING NOW because (as I was told 50 times every day by the jerkwad dealers who called me) time is money and every minute they spent on the phone with me meant they had less money to help feed their poor, starving families.
It was unbelievable how much s**t I was expected to know. One day a guy from Oklahoma called up and asked if the company's windows met some obscure state requirement. I was on the phone with this clown for damn near an hour, looking in every spec manual, reference guide, conference calling with architectural and other technical departments, and when I finally got an answer for him his response was "Thanks for nothing" and hung up.
The other real treat was the Joe Public a$$holes who would call up asking about the status of their order with us that they placed through a dealer. Company policy was you don't give out this information to anyone but the dealer, which I can understand. You never know what the situation is; maybe the dealer has the order but is holding on to them because the customer hasn't paid his bill yet. Or they would call up and try to get the price that the dealer paid because they didn't want to pay the dealer anymore than what the dealer paid for them. HELLO? It's called CAPITALISM. I know it sucks that you have to pay a middleman a little more, but that's the way the system works. You don't go up to Ford's corporate office in Detroit and buy a Mustang, you buy it from a dealer; nor do you go to a farmer's house to buy milk, you get it at the supermarket.
Another fun rule was "Nothing goes out for nothing" - i.e., we were supposed to charge for every single part we sent out, or at least get the part it had to replace. So if the dealer got a window that didn't have one of the little crank handles (which more than likely meant the high school dropouts who worked at the plant forgot to put one in with the window) I was supposed to tell this guy he had to pay for it. Or, if they broke one, I was supposed to tell them "You have to send me the broken one first before I can send you a new one." Yeah, right.
Then there were the "special" customers who got all their orders expedited because they built homes like crazy in subdivisions and agreed to use only our windows and doors. (One of these companies was later on "20/20" or one of those shows because the houses they built in a southern state were so flimsy that if you slammed the front door a window at the back of the house would vibrate like there was an earthquake.) First of all, these morons were ALWAYS sending orders to the wrong jobsite, but rather than call their coworkers at the other site they expected us to give them a completely new unit free. (And the company would.)
Better yet was the time one of the a$$hole foremen called up and said he needed a new entrance door because one of his men had put a ladder through the big oval of decorative leaded glass. I said, "Okay, you'll have it in 10 days." Which was standard because of their deal with the company; normally these doors took a minimum of four weeks to be produced and shipped. So then he gives me this big sigh like a seven-year-old and says, "Can't you get it here any sooner?" At that point I just lost it; how I kept myself from swearing at him I'll never know. But I did say, "Look, pal, you're already getting the door in less than half the time it normally takes. Tell your men to watch where they're swinging the ladder and maybe you won't have this problem, huh?" I got a butt-chewing for that one, even though the sales manager who bitched at me for it said he pretty much told the guy the same thing.
Worse yet, my boss was a total, absolute bitch who couldn't understand why I didn't know all about the business even though she had been working for them for 20+ years and I had only been there a few months. She was always telling us that we had "the privelege of working with the customers directly". More like a curse, you ask me.
Today I am almost always nice to customer service people, because I know they probably don't get paid much, they're not responsible for the problem(s) and yelling at them won't do any good. But it is absolutely true that customer service as a whole sucks.
