I’m a senior representative for a company that is outsourced for another company that is extremely well known. I work in technical support. The customers are privileged in that they have been able to expect outstanding customer service, every time they call no matter the issue with their product. I love my customers. I am thrilled when I get a response in the survey explaining how I was able to fix their issue.
I’m a fixer. In the past year that I have been working for the company, I have been promoted four times and my metric scores are in the top five percent of the country. I know more about my customers by the end of the call than I should, generally because they tell me.
Customers don’t call me directly, I am never the first person they speak to.
A call came in from an agent, he began by scoffing.
“This lady’s impossible to talk to.” He scoffed.
I spent almost two hours with her on the phone. She had some issues and has not previously been able to get anyone to talk to her and help her understand her products. She’s in her late seventies, disabled, and lives in a condo with her husband in the central midwest, three daughters, she’s very worried about her daughter in Colorado because of the fires. Her granddaughter is in medical school. She remembers when products like ours were not so easy to attain. She worked as a teacher up into her late sixties and then she had to retire. She listens to country music the most but her favorites are fun songs that make her smile. She has an entire collection of Leonard Cohen and thinks that he and Joni Mitchell smoked too much and changed their voices, she also likes the later version of Both Sides Now. We discussed her husband’s love for a foreign tv show she doesn’t like it because it is too bloody. He lost the remote and she had to assist him. Her cat who she found in her yard when he was a kitten, was being very rude by meowing loudly when it was time to feed him. She had already fed him. She lost her mother to dementia several years ago, and her daughter is too protective when she tries to leave the house. Shes worried her Thanksgiving will be over Zoom.
In the course of the hour and a half we alleviated her fears that a product was close to dying, it’s a bit old, but she had been misinformed that the cost would be much lower than she was told. Shes considered a new version and wanted to know if she would have trouble using it. She won’t. We preserved memories cleaned up a spill and made her product good as can be until she gets a new one or the tiny part to fix it. We looked at another product and went through all the steps to do the same. We went over an issue she was having in understanding another.
When I finally make it to her town I am to give her a call, we’re going on a boat ride to look at the architecture. It’s her favorite thing to do in her city. She’s gonna stick around until I call. She adores watching someone else’s first time. She spent the last five minutes of the call thanking me, telling me how I needed to stay safe, check on my friends in Colorado and she promised she’d do the same. I waited for her to hang up the call, I heard her panic when she thought she had messed something up. I reassured her and let her go.
She wrote two paragraphs about how helpful I was. 100% score.
I was impolitely informed I needed a better handle on the call.
I work in technical support.
I love my customers.
The lady was impossible to talk to.
I don’t plan to be working here much longer.
WRITTEN BY
