Pkchukiss - Reality Wine

I have many people to apologise to, and all for one thing: the bunch of innocently looking servers hidden in the farm located somewhere else in the building.

It isn’t that the server has done something naughty to deserve some spanking, but being direct and objective without being offensive, the coding sounds like something I would come up with at 3 am in the morning after sticking toothpicks in my eyelids.

I know coding at 3 am sounds cool and nerdy in everybody’s eyes, but I seriously doubt it is going to impress anybody when the code is ridden with colons where semi-colons are supposed to be. Usually, the worst code happens when you get a bug that appears only on run-time, which is what we get these days.

And users get really frustrated when they don’t get what they want, and in a short time. The patient ones try again and again in the same futile attempt, and turn into angry bombs when they are unable to login for the umpteen time. To make matters worse, the angry users all queue up in the phone systems while we attempt to pacify the ones at the front of the queue.

I know that it is theraupatic to listen to soothing music, but our users don’t get appeased by listening to the radio station we relay over as the sound byte users hear while they are on hold. Generally, these users are ready to explode onto us poor CSOs after being exposed to 45 minutes of expensive radio (especially if you call from a cell phone). I do know how stiff necked anybody can get when you have to clamp a small device between your shoulder and ear while getting frustrated by an uncooperative server.

And so they do… and you’ll understand what it feels like to be a verbal punching bag. This is a job that is at the forefront of the service industry. Not only do customer service officers handle users who are frustrated by the product, they must also handle it with a professionalism that doesn’t break their momentum; and they must be able to get off a really angry call and jump right into the next call with the same positive energy as if nothing had happened.

Thankfully my National Service experience has allowed me to survive most of the angry rants (you will be surprised how unreasonable some people sound when they get angry), and come out of it a more tolerant person. Really! Angry callers now slide off me more easily, and I can now go home without bringing home the emotional outbursts from work. I dare say that customer service is a challenge to provide service to angry users without further soiling their experience with the product. After all, who would want to call a CSO if the product was working perfectly well? 

Filed under: General