One of the myriad reasons phone customer service jobs are horrible, but also good at training you for interacting with horrible people if you can manage it.
when a company puts its reps at a disadvantage by always being grossly understaffed and having hour+ wait times… who’s the ‘horrible’ people? the company or the caller?
Had a customer insult a coworker’s mother. The coworker was in her early twenties, moved to this job from waiting because she couldn’t take dealing with people face to face while she was grieving her mother’s death. She was sobbing on the phone, while the customer kept being an antisocial asshole.
Many people think only students do these jobs (perplexed why they would even think that) and that makes them believe they can mistreat the employees. There was an interaction between a coworker with no kids and one of these assholes. She was fed up with this shit and bit back, telling them she’s a single mother of two, and to stop assuming who works these jobs. Funnily, it shut the customer up real fast, and suddenly they were apologetic.
These are just two from the sea of many that I remember off the top of my head years later.
It’s the same type of people who think fast food workers shouldn’t get a living wage because it’s a “high schooler’s job”.
My company has zero wait times and is a non-profit that gives money to children.
It’s the callers. There are a lot of people who are genuinely terrible and seem to feel like it’s okay to treat anyone they think is beneath them as terrible, to say nothing of the insane sexism/racism that people like to spew.
Both can be, I have worked phone customer service with zero wait time and long wait times across multiple sectors and some people are straight abusive over the phone even for problems they caused.
One of the myriad reasons phone customer service jobs are horrible, but also good at training you for interacting with horrible people if you can manage it.
when a company puts its reps at a disadvantage by always being grossly understaffed and having hour+ wait times… who’s the ‘horrible’ people? the company or the caller?
Both are. I worked for one of those.
Had a customer insult a coworker’s mother. The coworker was in her early twenties, moved to this job from waiting because she couldn’t take dealing with people face to face while she was grieving her mother’s death. She was sobbing on the phone, while the customer kept being an antisocial asshole.
Many people think only students do these jobs (perplexed why they would even think that) and that makes them believe they can mistreat the employees. There was an interaction between a coworker with no kids and one of these assholes. She was fed up with this shit and bit back, telling them she’s a single mother of two, and to stop assuming who works these jobs. Funnily, it shut the customer up real fast, and suddenly they were apologetic.
These are just two from the sea of many that I remember off the top of my head years later.
It’s the same type of people who think fast food workers shouldn’t get a living wage because it’s a “high schooler’s job”.
My company has zero wait times and is a non-profit that gives money to children.
It’s the callers. There are a lot of people who are genuinely terrible and seem to feel like it’s okay to treat anyone they think is beneath them as terrible, to say nothing of the insane sexism/racism that people like to spew.
Both can be, I have worked phone customer service with zero wait time and long wait times across multiple sectors and some people are straight abusive over the phone even for problems they caused.