"I feel like I know you."You do, because I connect with you emotionally. Aaaaand...you don't, because you don't. I laugh with you because I can and because that is absolutely my response to the absurdity and beauty and unending challenge of communicating with people I "meet" on the phone. I also laugh because it gets you to chill out. It clues you in to the reassuring fact that you're not talking to a machine. It gives you the confident feeling that I don't hate my job and therefore you. Apparently, laughter is my Secret Weapon. A man named Alan has been on my mind in the last couple of months. He was the Call Center Manager for the Playhouse In the Park Subscriptions Call Center (if you can call one room a Call Center...but I digress). I wandered in there a few years ago and made outbound calls to sell subscriptions. When Alan appeared on the scene, I had one season under my belt and I was loaded for bear, phone-wise. Halfway through the season, Alan mused, "I think the reason people are responding to you is your laugh. I'm not sure, but I'm thinking that's what it is..." He was trying to work out what my "secret" was so that, possibly (?), he could teach others to do it. And now here I am, working for one of the country's biggest retailers, on the phones and laughing, and I suddenly realize that he's right! "It's a thing"! A woman called me about 2 weeks ago and purchased $500 worth of clothing. We spoke for 90 minutes and we laughed and I did my thing of connecting and selling. The next day, at her request, I called her back and she purchased $1,000 worth of clothing. She said she had told her husband the night before that she felt like she knew me. That pulled me up short a little. People do get attached easily, especially if they're not accustomed to being connected with. By the end of the call, it was close to 11:00PM. I was working a 4:30-12PM shift, and she and I had spoken for 3 or 4 HOURS. We were fine until the third hour. But when we tried to check her out, the system had a hiccup and then another hiccup, and it became a massive problem in terms of time. I ended up calling her back at 11:30 at night in order to finally place the order. But that wasn't what caused the problem. I actually showed a little bit of frustration during our fourth hour. She exhibited no sensitivity to the time this was all taking, and was going to squeeze every little bit of precision out of this order even though I had already had to redo the order once from memory and research (thank you so much, system). I didn't go off on her, and it was a matter of tone of voice which I did get back in check, but she was clearly not amused. I tried to make it all better by sending her a 25% off coupon, but it didn't help. When I came back to work after my weekend, I learned she had turned to someone else to place an order. She was mad at me. Clearly. And that was fascinating. "I feel like I know you" means you think you know what to expect. And when that doesn't happen, you get to be angry. But you don't know me. And what I know is that it is my responsibility to make it clear to people like that - though I won't be on the phones anymore (at least, not to my knowledge) - that it is "my pleasure" to help them, but that this is an exchange that I am happy to engage in, and not an engagement party. Call Center Sales is a thing that is so misunderstood as to be NOT understood. So, as I start into my new job, I put more items on my list of things to teach to others about how to be even better at their jobs. But I have something else to do first. I have to reveal what this job really is, and how skilled it actually is. And I have to be patient with other people not knowing...
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"It's the End of An Era!"
There are times I love being on the phones and times I loathe it. But all the time, I love the people I work with. We sit in groups of four as we do our work, and we talk with and at each other all the time, during calls, after calls, between calls. Sharing information, bitching, asking for help, rolling our eyes sympathetically at one another. And I'm about to leave all of that camaraderie.
We have most of us spent three weeks in training and two weeks in "nesting" before being set free to be "Ambassadors". Sales Ambassadors. Such a silly term, but not inexact. We have to spend 6 months from our start date in the positions we were hired for. Then we are free to apply for other internal positions. But getting through six months is no cake walk. This is energy- and emotion-intensive stuff! It took me all of four months to be able to come home and not jump into bed to sleep nearly instantly. And now I'm on the verge of a new job. A regular job. An 8-5 job instead of this 9:45-6:00 job. A job in which I don't have to be sat at a desk every stinkin' minute and push the right buttons to justify my going to the bathroom or whatever. And I'm thrilled and I'm sad. Not just about the people I don't get to work with every single day, but also about the people I won't get to talk to on the phone! What a parade of interesting people flow through that phone! Old people, young people, angry people, shy people, confused people, sweet people, rich people, kind people, utterly hilarious people, greedy people, mean people. I'll kind of miss them... So, truth be told, I am something the British call a "nutter". My version of nutterdom is that I'm intense, I'm driven, I'm friendly as all get-out (whatever that literally means - what is "get out"?), I'm gutted by the depths of spiritual devotion, I am a basketcase crying all over myself when I'm touched by something, and I'm also convinced that if I can't get ahead at this point, I'm going to die alone and poverty-stricken. That last one alone makes me want to move forward Right. Stinkin'. Now. Show me the money! But even more than that: Show me the meaning! I only want the money for that feeling of security. I'm working on feeling the security with or without it, but in the meanwhile SHOW ME THE MONEY! Along comes my new boss, just before Christmas. Takes one look at me and knows about me. Says to me within a month's time, "When I met you I thought, 'She's hungry.' I knew you'd rise to the top quickly, and that you'd get bored if there wasn't more to reach for." Too true! Ridiculously true. I'm freakin' Scarlett O'Hara: "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!" Scarlett O'Hara minus the petticoats. "What You Don't Know Can Kill You"
When a call comes through in the Call Center, we tend to think we know what we're about to do: Sell.
And the people who lead us - whose job it is to motivate, support, monitor, correct and improve us - tend to think they know what we're about to do:
All of the above while accepting that few, if any, of those above us will want to hear our point of view about what we do, how we do it, what the effects are, what could be done better, etcetera. We're just gonna do all that, just because we have a job. Yada yada yada. Sorry, but no.
I mean, yeah, of course. But...no no no no no.
"Honey, please..."
She might as well have said, "Hi, yes, this is the Voice of Doom."
Those freaking, fracking plates! You try it! You try navigating through arguably the WORST series of windows and options to find what belongs to each series of dinnerware. And good luck to you. Every single window takes approximately 10,000 years to open, and then when you try to scroll, it won't. So you try again. And then finally it scrolls...all the way to the bottom where you didn't want to be. To make it all the better, The internet is throwing up Pinterest tabs for no reason and then freezing the internet altogether. My boss tells me he thinks it's a personal problem. The look I give him is worthy of death. He doesn't care. He says, "I'm a philosopher. I never thought I'd be a boss, Lori..." and we both laugh. Do either of things have anything to do with the other? Hell no. But that's kind of the point of this rant - er - post. |
AuthorWorking in Sales at a Call Center for one of the biggest stores in the country should come with hazard pay. Archives
December 2019
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