TimtheHunter

I was hoping someone would ask this. If I don't mind spending time on the phone with you and you're polite, I'll go out of my way.

Someone called me and wanted a credit because they were 9 cents past due and they wanted their late charge reversed, but they were telling me how I was personally a piece of shit because I was working here for such a corrupt company in order to feed my family. I took it personally... In any normal circumstance, I would do the credit simply to satisfy the customer. But he pissed me off, I sustained the charges. He was late, he gonna pay dat late charge.

Moral of the story; stay calm and cool, make friends with your call center rep, and they'll treat you like a friend. At least if I'm the one on the other side of the phone.

Okay; so there is no sure fire way. However, if your promotional rate is over, you can just say 'okay, if you can't lower my rates I'm just going to disconnect my service', and they'll send you to a retention/saves department. They're the ones that can hand out the big discounts. Talking to me won't get you discounts because 'supervisors' use the same tools and have the same rules as the agents. You'll need to go to the retention guys. Having worked for multiple cable companies in this position, I can tell you that this is pretty much a universal rule of thumb.

In my experience, no. Our agents are trained to try to figure out why you're wanting to disconnect service before getting you over there because transfers show up negatively on us, and there's actually only like 5 people in the retention department at any given time. Bullshit? I think so. But I don't call the shots.

Personally, if someone knows what retention is and they're wanting to get over there I'll just say 'why you wantin to disconnect fam' and then transfer them over, but that's because personally, when I call in to my cable company I don't want to be on the phone for 3 hours so I just try to get people where they're wanting to go as quick as possible. I'm not supposed to do that, but my handle time is so low that my manager doesn't give me too much crap about it.

4 weeks of brainwashing and trying to teach you stuff that's invalid as soon as you walk out onto the call floor, if I'm being honest. It was pretty fun. The most important part of the training is learning how to talk to people, because if you can talk to people you can fumble around with the tools until you're able to help people.

Copying a previous answer for the stress part; I don't stress out. Talking to angry people is fun to me, it was stressful when I was first learning the tools cause I simply didn't know how to help people, but now I know when the call starts if I'm able to help them out or not, so it's all just talking.

Just facts about myself, I'm big into D&D so when I take escalations I just act like I'm someone else and it's just a scenario from D&D, that's why I think it's so fun. Probably not very professional, but at least I enjoy my job :)

A call got to me the other day, not the call itself but rather the circumstances? When an 'escalation specialist' isn't taking escalations, they take normal calls. And I can't pull the whole 'Bitch I am a supervisor' when they ask for one, so I have to escalate it. I'm really proud of my metrics, I take care of problems quick, with hardly any hold time. I escalated the call, the escalation specialist turned a 15 minute call into a 90 minute call, and 45 minutes of that was hold time. It ruined my metrics for the day, and thus ruined my day.

Kill 'em with kindness. If you can make them believe that you're doing everything possible, and you do that with just the nicest voice you can muster, that works most of the time. Unless they're just trying REALLY hard to be pissed off. It's a general rule that it's hard to be pissed off at someone that's doing their best to help you out.

On that note if someone is refusing to calm down, just lower your voice volume. They'll start being more quiet simply so that they can hear you, and when you go from yelling to talking in a more quiet voice, it typically calms you down. Lots of mind games when it comes to trying to help people on the phone.

Also, we are not allowed to hang up on customers under any circumstances. But if you threaten us, once you hang up we're allowed to call your local law enforcement, so that's pretty cool. Also from what I noticed, generally if people are cussing, they're just cussing because it's part of their normal vocabulary. Rarely do people cuss straight at you personally because, I mean think about it, would you help someone if they were cussing at you? I wouldn't try very hard personally.