Mister_Jacquel

Former AT&T U-Verse tech support here. It sounds phony because we were forced to bloat our calls with such unnecessary shlock or else the folks listening in on us would write us up for not following the guideline the management set up for us. Even if it turns a five minute call into a ten minute call.

We couldn't really be genuine with it because they had script snippets for us to follow and would dock us points if we didn't do it verbatim.

Ugh, right? It's like, come on. If you wanted the customer to talk to an IVR the entire time, don't even bother with human employees. To be honest, the few calls that I actually enjoyed were the ones where I basically had a cool bonding experience with the customer on the other end of the phone. Usually that happened when I started to care less and less about verbatim as I got closer to quitting.

I do have a question for you. Did you ever feel hard core depressed while working the phones?

For me personally, after working over 40 hours a week repeating the same thing basically over and over while attempting to assist reasonably angry customers and ultimately not being able to help in some cases due to the limitations placed upon me by the higher ups, I fell into a really bad funk. It just wears on a person. Thankfully I got out of there and wound up much better off in the end.

You're also getting an unnecessary bit of flak from people that think you're the reason for shoddy business practices, but you're keeping a positive attitude so kudos to you. Must be all that customer service training eh?