@Ladybug724 wrote:
Customer service in this country has gotten awful. Most times anymore when I have to call a company (ESPECIALLY cable) I get a bored sounding rep who could care less about helping me.
Then the inevitable "I'm going to place you on a brief hold while I pull up your account" comes, followed by a very long hold.
It's aggravating, especially if you have a real issue and you have to repeat yourself a hundred times just so the rep can comprehend what you're trying to say.
No, they aren't all like that. But most are anymore.
The "I'm putting you on hold while I pull up your account" is more often so the CSR can finish writing the notes on the previous account before they get involved with your call. At Frontier, we were given eight seconds between calls for note-taking. Yeah, eight seconds. You could only have a maximum of three accounts opened at once and some callers would hang up on you almost immediately and you'd get a new call while you were finishing their note and if that call ended quickly, you could have all three accounts up and notes due with another call coming in.
And the notes they want are detailed notes. Who called? What did they ask for? How did you resolve the issue? If a price was quoted what was the price and what was the service? Not stuff you can just jot down in the eight whole seconds you have before a new caller is on the phone. Notes have to be in a specific place also and more often than not you weren't in that app when the call ended, so you had to bring up that app, type the note, submit it all in the eight seconds they generously give you. As a CSR you learned to stall to get the notes written. You really don't have a choice.
If they gave you a minute between calls it would be easier, but they give you eight seconds. Here would be a typical note. "Ladybug724 called about her bill. Advised bill was $100. She said she'd pay it next week."
And that would be a very easy call. Some calls required pages of notes. Especially if you had other departments involved. I had a customer who had been inadvertently disconnected at midnight the night before. He'd been bounced back and forth between customer service and tech support all morning because our customer support records showed everything was fine, but the tech support system showed he'd been disconnected and they can't reconnect someone who's been disconnected. That's a job for customer service. I think I was his seventh person that morning and I was about to send him back to tech support when he groaned and begged me not to. One of my coworkers had discovered we could sneak into the tech support system using one of our nearly twenty passwords and logins, so hopped into their systems to see what they were seeing, and sure enough, their system said he was disconnected.
I then reached out to our Conn FIOS people to verify that and they said yep, they'd disconnected him at midnight. I asked why? They said there had to have been an RO (resident out) order. There wasn't one. They couldn't reconnect him though without a RI (resident in) order. I couldn't write an RI order though as my system said he was still connected. So, we had to get him officially disconnected by having an RO order made and pushed through the system (three different offices) and then cleared, then write the RI order and push that through those same three offices. And of course, he had promos that would fall off and need to be put back in place. I had to reach out to promotions to get that done.
So, the next step was to reach out to Saves and Retention to get them to write the RO order, which only they could do. Then that order had to be pushed through three offices and finally get to Conn so they could officially, legally disconnect hjm. Then there was the twenty-minute wait for it to clear the customer service system so I could then write the RI order and push that through all three offices necessary to get Conn to reconnect his service. Then adjust his bills and get promotions to put his promos back on his account.
Suffice to say there were pages of notes for all of those conversations and interactions. Far more than anyone could type in eight seconds. Each department I talked to had to be noted. The time, who I talked to, what was said, why, etc. I was able to do most of the note-taking while still on the call, but if I'd waited until the end, it would have taken a lot more than the eight seconds we're allotted.
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