Get off the phones

IvanOpinion

People need to be a bit more patient in the current crisis.  A friend of mine is a manager in a call centre and I was talking to him last night asking how things were going.  He said he was down to about 70% of his team and everyone was still working from home (which means they do not have access to certain systems that they would have access to in the office).  He was saying that many of his staff were dropping with the stress of the abuse they were currently having to take which was simply making queues and backlogs longer.

He played me back one recording and it was a lady who started off all nicey-nicey about why her order hadn't arrived.  At that point-of-time it wasn't even overdue and was with the carrier, as was explained to her.  She then asked a question that could not be addressed because it needed one of the systems only available in the office, which again the operator explained to her. At that point it was like a light switch, the woman went on a rant and became quite abusive about how she had been waiting in the queue for over an hour (she wasn't, she was in the queue for 23 minutes - wait times are recorded) and how the company was offering poor service and she would never shop there again.  As my friend said to me 'I really hope she keeps her promise, we don't need people like her'.  The woman's rant went on for nearly 7 minutes.

He then told me about the backlog they had for processing orders, refunds etc. etc.- quite sizeable queues (in the thousands).  It is the same people trying to handle these as well and, as he said, while they are listening to someone rant on the phone that is another 1-2 people whose order or refund gets delayed.  Normally he would expect such a backlog to be cleared in about a week, but with reduced staff, increased orders (due to lockdown) and so many people on the phones, it is taking longer.

As he said, if people would stop wasting his call centre's time by 'going off on one' or asking the same question in 20 different ways hoping that the answer will change, then they could get the backlog smashed, but it is a tie off between keeping people waiting on the phone or resolving the backlog.  So, on his, and his staffs' behalf, please try to be a bit more patient and understanding .... and remember the reason why your refund may not have been received may be because the staff are too busy taking calls about people chasing up their refund which isn't due for another week, and then wasting more time by ranting at an already stressed out call centre operator.

Undervalued

IvanOpinion said:

People need to be a bit more patient in the current crisis.  A friend of mine is a manager in a call centre and I was talking to him last night asking how things were going.  He said he was down to about 70% of his team and everyone was still working from home (which means they do not have access to certain systems that they would have access to in the office).  He was saying that many of his staff were dropping with the stress of the abuse they were currently having to take which was simply making queues and backlogs longer.

He played me back one recording and it was a lady who started off all nicey-nicey about why her order hadn't arrived.  At that point-of-time it wasn't even overdue and was with the carrier, as was explained to her.  She then asked a question that could not be addressed because it needed one of the systems only available in the office, which again the operator explained to her. At that point it was like a light switch, the woman went on a rant and became quite abusive about how she had been waiting in the queue for over an hour (she wasn't, she was in the queue for 23 minutes - wait times are recorded) and how the company was offering poor service and she would never shop there again.  As my friend said to me 'I really hope she keeps her promise, we don't need people like her'.  The woman's rant went on for nearly 7 minutes.

Are you involved in this business?

If not then your "friend" has absolutely no right to play you this recording. In fact he has probably committed a criminal offence under the GDPR in doing so.

Tell him to put his own house in order first!

IvanOpinion

If you had have stuck with asking the question in the first place instead of answering it in your own mind.  I am contracted to do IT work for the call centre which gives me total access to all their systems including recordings (which I often have to listen to for various reasons).  I actually have more access to their systems than he has.  So let's dismiss silly GDPR arguments immediately and try to stick to the topic.

Undervalued

IvanOpinion said:

If you had have stuck with asking the question in the first place instead of answering it in your own mind.  I am contracted to do IT work for the call centre which gives me total access to all their systems including recordings (which I often have to listen to for various reasons).  I actually have more access to their systems than he has.  So let's dismiss silly GDPR arguments immediately and try to stick to the topic.

It is a discussion forum, you don't get to dictate how other people respond!

In any case, as you describe it, there was no legitimate reason for your friend to play you this particular recording to illustrate his "rant", as it is hard to see any need for an IT person to hear it in order to do his job.

IvanOpinion

Oh dear, you are intent in finding flaws and making things up in your own mind, instead of discussing the post.  I did not describe why we were listening to the call but there was an IT issue which is why he contacted me in the first place, and that happened to be one of the calls that highlighted the issue. 

If it is any help to the silly minutia you want to go into, then we used zoom conference, the call took place at 19:30 last night and lasted 68 minutes (of which 20 or so were passing time of day), there were 5 of us on the call, although one of my colleagues had to drop off because her baby started crying.  Is there anything else needed for you to stick to topic?

Undervalued

IvanOpinion said:

Oh dear, you are intent in finding flaws and making things up in your own mind, instead of discussing the post.  I did not describe why we were listening to the call but there was an IT issue which is why he contacted me in the first place, and that happened to be one of the calls that highlighted the issue. 

If it is any help to the silly minutia you want to go into, then we used zoom conference, the call took place at 19:30 last night and lasted 68 minutes (of which 20 or so were passing time of day), there were 5 of us on the call, although one of my colleagues had to drop off because her baby started crying.  Is there anything else needed for you to stick to topic?

Of course there was......

Barny1979

So he shared the call with multiple parties?

Hermione_Granger

IvanOpinion said:

Oh dear, you are intent in finding flaws and making things up in your own mind, instead of discussing the post.  I did not describe why we were listening to the call but there was an IT issue which is why he contacted me in the first place, and that happened to be one of the calls that highlighted the issue.  

So why did your initial post make no mention that the call was work related, instead of which you referred to the person you were talking to a "a friend" and not a work colleague? and from the way you worded the post, the only reason that the conversation with the customer was relayed to you was to point out how difficult she was being?

It was only after a breach of data protection was mentioned that your story changed.

IvanOpinion

Hermione_Granger said:

IvanOpinion said:

Oh dear, you are intent in finding flaws and making things up in your own mind, instead of discussing the post.  I did not describe why we were listening to the call but there was an IT issue which is why he contacted me in the first place, and that happened to be one of the calls that highlighted the issue.  

So why did your initial post make no mention that the call was work related, instead of which you referred to the person you were talking to a "a friend" and not a work colleague? and from the way you worded the post, the only reason that the conversation with the customer was relayed to you was to point out how difficult she was being?

It was only after a breach of data protection was mentioned that your story changed.

Another one that is making it up in their own mind.  The fact it was work related and what was said, why I was called in is irrelevant.  It reminds me why I stopped using this board, small minds, picking up on irrelevant minutia rather than discussing the topic - the same small minds that whinge when a poster makes an overly long post containing irrelevancies.

Maybe you can tell me where the story changed.  

Undervalued

IvanOpinion said:

Hermione_Granger said:

IvanOpinion said:

Oh dear, you are intent in finding flaws and making things up in your own mind, instead of discussing the post.  I did not describe why we were listening to the call but there was an IT issue which is why he contacted me in the first place, and that happened to be one of the calls that highlighted the issue.  

So why did your initial post make no mention that the call was work related, instead of which you referred to the person you were talking to a "a friend" and not a work colleague? and from the way you worded the post, the only reason that the conversation with the customer was relayed to you was to point out how difficult she was being?

It was only after a breach of data protection was mentioned that your story changed.

Another one that is making it up in their own mind.  The fact it was work related and what was said, why I was called in is irrelevant.  It reminds me why I stopped using this board, small minds, picking up on irrelevant minutia rather than discussing the topic - the same small minds that whinge when a poster makes an overly long post containing irrelevancies.

Maybe you can tell me where the story changed.  

You said.....

People need to be a bit more patient in the current crisis.  A friend of mine is a manager in a call centre and I was talking to him last night asking how things were going.  He said he was down to about 70% of his team and everyone was still working from home (which means they do not have access to certain systems that they would have access to in the office).  He was saying that many of his staff were dropping with the stress of the abuse they were currently having to take which was simply making queues and backlogs longer.

Nowhere does it say that he was your employer / client as you now claim.

You talk about "his team" and "his staff" and again nowhere do you give any indication that you are (apparently) part of that.

Plus, I wasn't aware that the owners / moderators of this site had died and put you in charge of deciding what can be discussed!

IvanOpinion

Some of you are obviously bored and only have the intention of trolling and whinging while desperately clutching at straws about irrelevancies,  let me clear it all up for those that need the minutia.  Here is rest of the irrelevant stuff

1. I work in IT and have done so for over almost 37 years, I wear glasses, have dark hair, although it is going a bit grey in places.  I live in a house that is about 2100 sqft with my wife and 3 dogs (their names are non of your business).  We have been married for over 35 years and this is our third house that we moved into in Nov 2000.  I have been working for my current company now for over 7 years - it is my third full time position and I have worked my way up the ranks to quite a senior level.
2. a JIRA ticket had been raised at the start of last week about multiple complaints from users that voice quality was poor
3. it was assigned to me yesterday morning at 09:45ish to which I accepted it and added it into my work queue 
4. I immediately called a couple of my techies to review the hardware and get back to me (one of which had been with the company for 5 years and the other had been with the company for 2 months and was being mentored by the first techy)
5. at 15:20ish yesterday afternoon they said that they could find nothing obvious and all tests they had run where clear. This was done through a Teams meeting that had myself and the two techies dialled in
6. I contacted the call centre manager (a good friend of mine) to get more detail and asked him to let me know the next time it occurred because I would like to eavesdrop on the live call (not an uncommon scenario for me or someone else e,g, manager, trainee, mentor etc. to be eavesdropping on calls) to see if I could detect anything.  Oh, seriously, did you not realise that there may be multiple people listening in on your call or that they may be used afterwards for training, legal, regularity, ombudsman, research, technical and other purposes?
7. that evening (about 18:15) my mate, who was a manager in the call centre (wanted to make sure that 'i' was crossed and 't' was dotted), pinged me on Microsoft Teams to say it had happened again, but the call had ended, did I want the recording?  
8. I immediately sent out a zoom invite to my techy and his mentee and two of the call centre managers. I also asked them to round up the agent so that we could all review the sound quality together.  I also CC'd in a couple of other people (if you need to know who they were just let me know what information you need and why)
9. I set the meeting for 19:00 but due to one thing and another it got pushed back to 19:15 and then at the last minute we all got pinged on Microsoft Teams because my techy could not join until 19:30
10. I opened the meeting at 19:30 and by 19:33 everyone had joined except for the other call centre manager who sent a message via Microsoft Teams that he would be unable to join (we suspect he was down the pub)
11. the full attendee list was the call centre manager (my mate), one of the agents (who coincidentally happened to be a friend of my wife), 2 engineers (one of which had been with the company for 5 years and the other had been with the company for 2 months and was invited on as a learning experience - just in case I did not mention that before)
12. We started by passing the time of day.  Topics included the current coronavirus, how it was affecting everyone and generally asking if everyone was OK (standard chat in our company); we then discussed Boris's announcement of people going back into the offices; and several other topics (if you need a full list of casual topics please let me know and I will try to recall them as best I can)
13. The actual technical discussion started at 19:40ish when I hit the zoom record function.  During the initial discussion we looked for any common patterns, operators, equipment or other possibilities.  We found nothing that raised any particular red flags so we decided to review a couple of the call recordings.
14. The first recording was quite uneventful but we could hear the agent being asked to repeat stuff quite regularly (but there were actually no sound issues with the recording).  The call itself lasted for a little over 2 minutes and the agent did fully resolve the issue (but due to GDPR I will not relate anything of a personal nature about that call) and at the end the caller said 'Thank you; stay safe'
15. The second call was the one I referenced in my original post (again due to GDPR I will not relate any personal information or anything that may allow an individual to be identified).  We started listening to it a few minutes before 20:00 and it was close to 20:05 when it ended.  During the recording we could hear the caller asking the agent to repeat stuff on multiple occasions, but in this instance we could hear sound issues on the recording
16. it should be noted that during the playback of the call a time signal is overlaid - why this is important to any of you I have absolutely no idea, but you seem intent on focusing on irrelevant minutia
17. It was immediately obvious what the issue was (none of your business, such information would be considered IP) 
18. several comments were passed among us about the unnecessary attitude of the woman caller.  Having heard a lot of call centre conversations, this one annoyed me a bit because the agent that took the call was a friend of my wife's (did I mention that before - to some trolls that bit of information could be vitally important), and had to face the abuse despite remaining calm, polite and professional throughout.
19. I then asked again how the agent was and how she was coping with this sort of call and the other workload (being that I knew her since she was a friend of my wife ... was that mentioned previously?).  She talked a bit about the stress and how unreasonable some callers were .. including that since the start of lockdown they were getting more and more calls from the 'obnoxious and entitled'.  She also mentioned that she was not able to get through her backlog of non-call work as quickly as she would like because she was spending so much time on calls asking why we were not getting through the backlog
20. At this point the agents baby started crying and she asked if she could drop to attend to the baby because her partner had gone out for the evening.  We said off course it was OK, I also said that if she wanted to talk to anyone then please fell free to phone my wife. She dropped off the call.  I am sorry I do not have the exact time that this happaned at but if necessary I could play back the zoom recording and work this out.
21. we followed up with a quick strategy discussion and my techy said he would get in touch with the relevant parties in the morning (which would be this morning Saturday 18th July) and have it addressed by COP today. He and his mentee dropped off the call
22. by this time it was about 20:20ish, but I took the opportunity to talk a bit with my mate ... after ending the zoom recording (allowing it to save the conversation in the background).  I saw no sense in recording some idle prittle prattle between us - some people do, some people don;t I would place myself firmly in the camp that shuts the recording off when the idle prittle prattle starts.
23. the conversation worked its way around to concerns he had about the amount of abuse his agents were taking and the stress they were under, especially since they were down X people (sorry but the value of 'X' would also be commercially confidential) and due to the virus there was an increasing number of returns and refunds.  He commented that normally they would have an X day backlog (oops, sorry but again 'X' would be considered commercially sensitive information), and even the current number could be handled in that time period, but because he was down on staff and there was an increased volume of calls (many of whom were from customers chasing up refunds that were in the pipeline but had not yet been handled - because they were answering calls from other customers chasing up theirs ... plus some calls from people that really had no question or issue but just wanted to talk to someone) his team could not get around to actually handling the returns and refunds.
24. I made a comment on how there is no way I could handle calls like the one we had just listened to - I would have told the person what to do in 2 words, 3 'F's, 2 vowels, 2 other consonants - except I didn't spell it out I said the actual words, however I am working on the assumption that MSE would not like it if I typed in the full words
25. I asked about his wife and he asked about mine and we talked a bit about a holiday we had been on together a few years back and how we looked forward to meeting up for a meal out in the near future.  We discussed several different possible restaurant options
26. at 20:38 (or thereabouts, it could have been a few seconds either way) we wished each other a good night and I ended the zoom conference
27. I opened up the JIRA ticket and added a comment at the bottom describing the strategy we would be taking.  I attached the two recordings we reviewed (the call centre manager sent me references to them through the zoom chat facility).  I also attached the recording of our meeting.  These took a while to upload so I read a couple of news stories while they were uploading
28. I opened up Outlook and composed a new email to my boss and the head of the call centres telling them what we had found.  In the email I also expressed concern about the stress the call centre workers were under - and suggested that they do another 'Pizza Friday' whereby everyone was allowed to buy themselves pizzas and put it through expenses (they had done this several times before during lockdown) - a small gesture, but helps morale.
29. it was probably about 21:00 by the time I logged out (after reading a couple of news stories)
30. I then went and got myself a tin of drink out of the fridge (Coca Cola), a bag of crisps from the kitchen drawer (Quavers) and sat down to watch something I had recorded a few nights back.  I can't remember what it was called, I think it was something like BlackWater, but it had Jean Claude Van Damme in it playing a CIA agent.  Wasn't particular good - not the sort of movie that I woulod recommend people to go and see.  While it was on I also completed several games of Wordscape on my mobile phone (taking me to just under 330,000 brilliance points, along with over 75,000 coins to spend, 48 rockets, 147 bullseyes and goodness knows how many hints) - if that informaiton is important to you, let me know and I will look it up on my phone
31. at some point my wife came in and told me how her friend (yes the call centre worker I mentioned above - I did say she was a friend of my wife? If not then she was a friend of my wife) had phoned her. She said that her friend had been a bit down at the start of the call but seemed somewhat cheerier by the end.  Apparently she mentioned how nice it had been to talk to me again during the zoom conference (the one I documented above) and liked that I actually cared about the staff
32. I also got to thinking about the stupidity of people contacting call centres asking where their orders/returns/refunds were and wasting peoples times by staying on the phone for no other reason than to rant at someone who ultimately has little control over the situation.
33. my next line of thought was about reading on this board about the number of people complaining about long waits trying to contact call centres and was wondering how many of those calls were unnecessary and simply adding to the backlog versus how many of them were actually required.
34. I got no more calls that night (I should have mentioned that as an IT worker I was on call last night so had to be available until the end of my shift at midnight and I get paid whether or not there are any calls - better than working for a living).  It made me think how lucky it was that I was in full time employment and how hard some of the furloughed staff must be finding it - not just because of their reduced wages, but also with finding things to occupy their minds (daytime TV is purely for the brain dead).
35. I finally joined the wife in bed about 00:30
36. *** CENSORED ** although I don't know why , it wasn't my birthday, her birthday, christmas or our anniversary.  Have you ever counted back 9 months from these important dates for your parents and figured out which event gave rise to yourself?
37. After a restful nights sleep (I decided not to document my sleep period, but if that is pertinent just let me know and I will document it ... spoiler alert, mostly covered by the letter 'z'), I got up at just after 6AM (my usual time) and went down to let the dogs out.  I checked some email and then checked some investments and read various news items and chatboards. 
38. For breakfast I had some mixed fruit (pineapple, melon (3 types - water, honeydew, cantaloupe), strawberries and grapes) followed by a couple of rounds of plain bread toasted, spread with Flora and some Tesco's finest strawbery jam (note that is not 'Tescos Finest' who may or may not make strawberry jam (I have no idea) which is totally different to my reference to 'Tesco's finest' which is purely a reference to the quality of their goods which may or may not be their 'Finest' in reality)
39. I thought I would maybe post of my experience of the night before, deliberately cutting out all the irrelevant stuff and sticking to the basic facts.  
40. I used the story of the irate lady who called up prematurely and wasted the time of an agent ... an agent that could have been handling refunds, returns, and other aspects of her job but had instead wasted 7 minutes of her life explaining to the lady why she wasn't handling refunds, returns and other aspects of her job because people like her were clogging the lines
41. It was meant to be a reasonably light hearted message saying to treat call centre agents with a bit of respect and accept that they are human beings and struggling with things as well.  There are things they can do and things they cannot do, and no matter how much ranting, raving, swearing and whining you do they still cannot do things they cannot or are not authorised to do.
42. Sadly however the basic concept for the post went right over the heads of some small minded people who picked up on irrelevant minutia (now detailed above) and decided to troll the post
43. if you reach the bottom of this then you will realise that I am again on call, bored, the wife is out with the dogs, and I have nothing urgent to do and yes I am taking the michael out of the small minded trolls above.
44. I would also have posted this detaioled account of yesterday evenings goings on much earlier but my techy has updated the JIRA ticket to say that it has been escalated since the issue is not at our end (again it is none of your business what the problem is since that is considered commercially sensitive).  So I had to reassign the ticket to a third party for review.
45. They will probably listen to the same 2 recordings that I attached to the ticket (please try not to faint at the thought of this) as well as the recording of our zoom session (should I get all indignant about someone listening to a recording that I am on?).  However under GDPR they are fully allowed to since we have an agreement with them.

If there is any other irrelevant minutia you feel I have left out then please let me know - just don't whine that the post is too long.  I had thought about writing it as a single paragraph but felt I didn't want to give the trolls something else to whine about, so I have even included numbered bullet points.  Please refer to these in any future discussions if you need more irrelevant information. Apologies if I have missed anything but it is virtually impossible to figure out which elements of minutia are important to people that are obviously just as bored as I am.