Work Update

This week has been a cross between “business as usual” and testing the waters in an environment where it’s been determined “the big, big bosses” won’t back us up on matters where we are dealing with customers.  In fact, it’s like walking on eggshells, afraid that you will fall through at any moment.

My attitude on the phone, when taking an escalation, is not very process-oriented as it is goal-oriented.  My intent, and my behavior on calls in the past, is to find a resolution for an issue as quickly as possible while getting through the B.S. that the customer usually has to say…anything from how they hate the company…yadda yadda…to I am a bad person…yadda yadda…to, well, you get the picture.  I know better:  People like to vent, and giving them some time to vent is often a good thing to defuse a situation.  

Most of the time, however, the customer simply perceives that they have a problem.  The computer systems have automated most every routine transaction as to ensure that errors aren’t made as much as people think they are.  

Oh yeah, I had one guy tell me today that he thought we were trying to de-fraud him out of money.  This becomes funnier in the context that this is not the first time I’ve heard the argument.  However, let me assure you…there is no wrongdoing.

Regardless, most perceptions are not reality.  Most everything is remedied with proper customer education, and I attempt to do that.  People just have a problem with not wanting to hear what, well, they don’t want to hear.  They impress and project their own thoughts and feelings into a situation and no amount of rational thought or intelligent interaction will make them realize, think, or perceive otherwise.

Having a mind for theory in whichever endeavor I am in at the time, I began thinking on the topic of call handling earlier this week.  To my good friend and colleague Rick, I state something along the lines of:  “You know, back here we take 2 kinds of calls…advice calls from representatives and escalated calls from customers.  However, in both circumstances we are always doing the very same thing:  Offering resolutions.  So why don’t we change the paradigm of an escalated call and an advice call to being a paradigm of all ‘resolutions calls.’”

There is a stigma throughout my organization about my work.  We take escalated calls and draw upon obscure policy and workarounds (ahem, hocus pocus?) to make things work.  Escalated calls carry with them a certain aura that is impressed upon representatives in their first days in training.  Changing the paradigm from escalations to resolutions was such a big hit I got my supervisor to thinking about implementation.

And then there is the new application that we are working on…one to generate notes for a calls with a few clicks of a mouse.  We are close, but the included feature set increased by about a fourth this week on a whim of mine to make the program more of a policy guide than it originally was conceptualized as being.
I also learned of a new word that a colleague of mine devised this week:  Dodophobia:  The fear of stupid people.

I fear stupid people, but I need to talk to them most of the time.