Discussion on:

Put a lid on loudmouths in the call center

I understand the US of A is like a melting pot of humanity and everyone has certain rights and privileges. What is beginning to bug me is trying to get help from a person who speaks English very brokenly. Also, the head sets need attention daily.For both instances, it is difficult to be a good caller when I have to keep saying, "What? What? What, I'm sorry I can barely hear and understand you." There is a time for street talk and a time when the objective is helping someone with their problem. Lastly, for heaven sakes take the gum out.

I have to agree with You on this. I work in a small call center. our consists of a good percentage of individuals that speak broken english. I can thankfully say that is is not only myself that has taken over half a phone call to figure out the users name not to mention the problem they are calling in for

In order for a firm to provide 24 hour support, its becoming common to have call centers strategically around the world using VOIP. Ok now Dell for instance has call centers in Atlanta, Austin, and somewhere in India. Living here on the west coast, I make my calls between 5am and 3pm if I have to call Dell. I almost always tap into the US phone centers.

>>Ok now Dell for instance has call centers in Atlanta, Austin, and somewhere in India.

I've called Dell support before at 10 AM. Got the guy in India. I was even told when I called the supplier of the PC that I'd _have_ to call India, because that's where all their tech support was.

Simple solution. Don't buy a Dell computer.
Besides....they're crap, anyway. They're a random mishmash of assorted parts, even within the same model number, and the software they provide with it sometimes needs patching in order to work with the hardware they sell it with.

http://cbservices.dyndns.org/Computer/hardware_recs.html

This page doesn't say the three computers in question are Dell's, but since I wrote the page, I know they are.

I also work in a small Help Desk Center. This article was very informative. I will definitely distribute and discuss at my staff meeting today.

Being a Help Desk Guru in the South, I tend to find that most of my callers speak softly and with an accent. With the amount of noise in the background, (people, PC speakers, servers, UPS, fans, radios, Nextels, and phones) it's hard to hear the other person on the other end. Especially when they are chewing gum or eating frickin' popcorn!
"*Munch-crunch*.. mdaruhf isn't wo- *crunch-chew* cant msdklfjtvs it arou- "*gulp-smack-crunch* can you heufchdcmbjrfy?"
"Yes ma'am. Please stop eating inmy ear so I can correctly diagnose your problem. Your constant crunching makes it difficult to assist you. Perhaps you should call back when you are finished with your snack."

Not only is it the tech's that have broken english, but I'll bet 50% of my customers are using english as a second language. I know they get frustrated with me because I am constantly asking them to repeat themselves because I cannot understand them. I will sometimes try to go to e-mail support with them as I have found that they can write far better than they speak!
Tech Support

It sometimes can be impossible to walk someone through a solution when their english is poor. Not only the accent but just their grasp of abstract things like DOS Prompts and control panels and those types of situations. I have actually worked in a situation where we asked them to go get someone who spoke english better just to get somewhere on a problem that normally takes 10 minutes that we had been on for over a half hour with no progress. As far as broken English employees go, I am sure they are smart but when your job is to communicate in English 8 hours a day you better be able to do it for the whole 8 hours.

I understand for the need of professionalism when your shelling out major bucks. Your expectations are high, but we all know that these call centers are out sourced to companies that only care about call volume and not so much quality. They pay nextto nothing and hire anybody with a heartbeat to answer a phone. I used to work in one as my first job in the field. It was fun/horrible/great learning experience. We would have a blast some days blowin off steam being locked in those rooms listeningto music, watching movies, and playing indoor baseball dealing with unruly customers that were upset that they had to push buttons to clarify issue to expedite situation. No matter what they would be offensive and rude believing that their money gave them the right to people, while they couldnt figure out how to power up the pc. Yes, I played music to calm myself to deal with the stress listening to their munching, porn excuses or hitting/screaming at their kids for almost nothing at times I would be guilty of turning it up to much, but usually kept it at respectable levels. My highest calls taken in a 5hr shift was 75!! It's tough to keep positive at times and the caller before you could have been a real winner. And yes I've received horrible tech support being left on hold for 3.5 hrs, and when I called back to management I got the runaround despite how I proved how they can locate the employee, so karma wins in the end I guess LOL.

I work in a call center which is basicly one long desk, each operator has 2ft of deskspace allocated to them which is just enough to accomodate the phone and the monitor with a keyboard in front of it.

Seperated from us by about six feet is our production line and repairs dept.

The main obstacle to hearing on the telephone is the voice of the person next to or behind you, as you'd expect in such an ambiently noisy environment the noise escalates.

As I see it our problem is space, we are all crammed into one space and compressing the people compresses the noise.

As you say above its quantities and not quality which count to these people as they are businessmen, their aim is to make money by selling these PC's and support is viewed as something they must supply to avoid getting sued but it is a cost they try to minimise.

I sat and had a think about this and realised that most of our customers buy our PC's because they win magasine reviews, the PC's win magasine reviews because they score the highest benchmark BANG for the lowest bucks.

Thus we are stuck in a cycle whereby to get customers and stay afloat we have to win reviews, to win reviews support is further economised and lower quality parts are used to keep the price down, aslong as it performs in the benchmarks.

The only thing I've ever seen encourage the management to improve support is when the magasines threaten to withdraw us from reviews after an excess of customer complaints TO THE MAG, I've never seen any changes due to complaints made directly to us by our customers.

So if you are suffering from call center economy, remember that you did by the cheapest one...

I'm sorry, I can't see where you recieved 75 calls in a 5 hour period and provided excellent customer support, 35 might be reasonable and thats is supporting windows 95 issues.I'm sure you asked "is there anything else I can do for you" that reply would only be used if you resolved their problem. You certainly would not even dream of asking that statement if you did not resolve the problem.

Yes, old school while tech supporting Gateway computers, the mantra was " hose and close" as you are well aware of the saying. I did my best on most issues trying to give them the support they needed, however with a constant call volume of 60+ in the que, management would push you to hose and go to next call or replace not fix. It was a jungle, I learned alot about good and bad. The second the caller hung up on you the next call beeped in without interuption. As for the 75 calls that was after we lost the Gateway account due to poor service and I was moved to a dialup isp account. It was a cake walk resetting passwords and email settings due to user forgeting their email address and passwords getting them confused constantly. That day the servers went down where I had to explain that it wasnt their computer , but the network would be up in a short time. Believe me when I tell you that I earned every last cent that day getting rude behavior including threats. The typical user is stupidand I used to get into arguements with them about troubleshooting their printer that they bought in Walmart when I was on the isp account. Their arguement was the free tech support offered with the isp account believing that we support anything thatinvolves their computer. Lastly the no#1 question asked was "do you provide a chat program?, or how do I get a chat program?, or What's the best chat program that you could recommend?, and my favorite how do you spell yahoo?"

When you get to 300+ per day, you have worked in a call center.

There were 4 of us in one office at my former employer. It was difficult to talk to the users when 1 tech was discipling her kids on the phone, 1 was playing music and 1 didn't want to walk to the break room to take her break and visit with other employees. It made us look bad to the users (What do you guys do all day?) because they could hear everything in the background. The coworkers got angry when I asked them to tone it down and the boss didn't want to get involved.

One suggestion to help with the noise level if you have walls...

We invested in wall carpet, at one of the desks I managed. The same sort of material is often used in Video Teleconferencing Rooms. Made a huge difference!

Also, using your "inside voice" as I was once fond of telling my 4-year old, often works.

Great article

mshanahan@sytel.com

I work in a very small Help Desk Center (5) and although it's not as bad as some of the situations you describe, it is way too noisy. I am forwarding this to my manager!

I worked for a cell phone call center for awhile. Calls were monitored randomly and scored for quality. Whenever a rep received a 100% quality score, the team managers and supervisors would shake noisemakers, whoop it up and applaud. When this was going on you could barely hear and I often had customers ask "are you guys having a party over there?" There were also team meetings held in a central atrium which sometimes got loud with yelling and cheering. I understand and applaud the company's attempt at keeping morale up, but it was very distracting and unprofessional in my opinion.

In my opinion, it's also worth noting that it's not just other techs talking, music, etc. that are the problems. I used to work the night shift in a medium-large (500-technician) outsource call center, and was constantly finding myself yelling overthe sound of the maintenance staff vacuuming and performing other routine maintenance tasks -- occasionally to the extent that the customer gave up and called back later. Since our section of the building was predominantly unoccupied during the day, we constantly asked the maint. staff and the management to have our section maintained then, but apparently the convenience of only getting the vacuum/powertool out once was more important than the company's core business...

It's unfortunate some folks don't respect others needs. I too have worked in 3 call centers in a medium size corporation. Too often someone stops by with thier new baby or to talk about thier new car or what was on TV last night while the co workersare on the phones. It is quite disruptive to the others who are tring to help the callers. Another point of disruption is people who walk in to the call center stating that they were not able to get through on the phone. THAT is ususally an indication that the call center is BUSY. Users don't seem to understand that a system outage usually equates to high call volume. This is an excellent starting point and I am planning on discussing with co workers and mgmt.
Thanks

Your article hit the nail on the head. What do you do when the biggest offenders are the supervisor and department head? Thanks for the great poster material.

Having worked on a small helpdesk in the level 2 area I constantly had to deal with the constant noise of packing boxes to be shipped out. This added to the noise of the "discussions" that were taking place would drown out the person at the other end of the phone. What do you do when you discuss this with the manager/supervisor and nothing gets done?

Three of us share an office in a call center environment. We have a radio playing quietly in the background and try to keep our calls at a level not to disturb each other. It's common courtesy that seems to be missing. On the other hand, when the General Manager is in the office, he gets on the intercom and makes his announcements so loud, we can't hear our phone calls. Not setting a good example, in my book.

IF you're in the call center then place pins on their chairs, catch their trash can on fire, take all the ink out of their pens, etc.....

If you call a help desk and you talk to an idiot then get their name and then ask for their manager after you're done. If that doesn't work then try and contact customer service. Get above them as many times as you can.

I can't stand talking to those who treat me like I'm the one who's suppose to know everything or the one's who can't speak a dam bit of english.

I work in a very small office with 10 others on 3 floors - No Cubicles or Partitions, just ajoining desks.
Like Geoff said, there is one clown/idiot who sits opposite me who just won't shut up.
I'm on a support call to a customer (I may have been on the call for 1/2 an hour trying to get the problem sorted out) when he starts up spouting about some article he's just read on the BBC news site. It's not just ordinary speech volume, HE MAKES SURE ALL THE OFFICE CAN HERE HIM! Sometimes I have to put the caller on hold and go to another part of the building to continue!!
Oh the joys of support!

I have an issue with the strength of my voice. I feel as if the level of my voice is normal and others consistently say otherwise. While not intentionally trying to interupt or disturb others while on the phone supporting our clients, it seems I do. It seems part of the issue revolves around the fact that we are packed like sardines in an area where sound carries easily.
Any suggestions?

My wife has the same problem. After putting up with it for a few years, I finally talked her into getting her hearing checked. Sure enough, she hears at a "slightly below average" volume and talks more loudly than average to compensate. She's tried hearing aids, but they tend to be stronger than she needs. So we're still looking. I hope I lose my hearing before my mind......

I also work in a call center, and one of my co-workers was consistently very loud when he was talking normally to customers over the phone. Once, after he left for the day, I looked at the control box for his headset, and the microphone volume was set very low. I set it higher, now he doesn't have to talk as loud to be able to hear himself over the headset. Works for me!

I have that problem. I just work at bringing the tone down. I try to bring my voice more into my upper chest and that seams to help. It might not be the volume but the tone in your voice. We have a guy her that has a deep voice an he doesn't think that he is talking loud but I can hear every word he says.

It's quite obvious that call centres are totally inadequate for the job. If you cram dozens of people into a tiny space with no sound insulation between them, no amount of people management is going to help. There are always going to be problems with faint or noisy lines, incomprehensible foreign accents or people not positioning the mouthpiece over the mouth. Just building a decent call centre with each operator having his or her own soundproof cubicle will get rid of most of these problems. It will also shut up the office clown.

Installing a white noise generation system in a call center can be very helpful. White noise is all audible frequencies. It sounds like what you get between stations on the FM dial. When set up properly (just below noticeable volume) it serves tocancel extraneous noise and produces a more calming atmosphere.

From an end-users standpoint, the majority of call centers are staffed with morons that barely even read a script. Perhaps Tier 2 is better than this but with my local cable modem provider as well as a recent laptop issue with an extended warranty company (GE-Zurich), I have had very little success.

One comes to expect lack of intelligence in many help desk environments, which is par-for-the-course with service providers. However, when dealing with an extenede warranty, an ounce of intelligence (or even foresight to ESCALATE the call if unable to resolve) goes a long way!

In short, I had an extended warranty on a laptop I purchased a few years ago which needed a new drive which crashed. Would not format, while the rep INSISTED I reinstall the software. Suffice it to say after a week and a half of this and being lied to, being told that I've physically damaged the drive by fdisking, I was at the end of my rope. Then I was told I was "uncooperative!" To add insult to injury,they begrudgingly accepted it RMA only to return it in WORSE condition than before! I know, beside the point. However, the help desk was help LESS!

So that's my experience..

I work in an IT department supporting our end users. Frequently I have to call tech support for one of the major computer manufacturers to order a replacement part. My call comes AFTER I have extensively troubleshot the issue, asked another memberof my department for a second opinion and then begrudgingly called the manufacturer. I have dealt with everything from incomprehensible broken English (I always ask to speak to a representative who speaks better English) to rude "tech support" repswho insist I go through another 90 minutes of "troubleshooting" with them. I have received email support from reps who don't know what spell check is, and live chat support from representatives who don't even know proper grammer. A note to all whowork in a help desk call center, take a minute and LISTEN to what the caller is trying to tell you. I can't begin to count all the wasted time I have spent re-troubleshooting an issue with a level one tech after I have told them the steps I have allready taken to determine the problem. Give us some credit, not all callers to the help desk are complete morons.

The article sounds familiar. Working on a desk providing second level support one would think the noise level would be controlled to some degree as the support is often related to situations where many users are unable to perform their work because a server is down or perhaps a router improperly configured stopping users cold in performing normal business routines.
That is not the case however. It is very frustrating to ask the person on the other side of the phone to repeat what they are trying to relay because a moron happens to have nothing to do at the moment and starts a boisterous laughter or loud discussion with someone near the desk (or across the room!!).
I ask myself where did these derelicts come from? Obviously their mommiesnever instilled an ideology that there is a time and place for everything including a bit of respect and consideration for others.
Astonishingly I see this in both younger and older individuals. Where does this come from? How did we get this way? Attitudes are much the same as seen in "road rage" incidents. It seems at times each of us is the "only one". I remember a time when disruptive loudmouths were not tolerated in a office environment for obvious reasons. Now days it seems you are looked upon as someone "different" if you do not participate in the nonsense. I am only trying to make a living. Does anyone have a suggestion how I can sue for damages? Sometimes I leave my workday with a headache, exhausted and depressed from having to fight for tolerable noise levels in order to provide my customers the service they deserve.
Being ourselves and expressing opinions in a free country is one thing. Being a turd and disrupting those you work with ultimately affecting the quality of customer service is another. Thanks for a good article.

This sounds like one of those questions where the audience would say "How loud is your crowd?" and my response would be...
My helpdesk crowd is so loud that once an enduser phoned and thought there was a fight going on.

I was on the phone one afternoon with the Support desk of a vendor. I'd been working on this issue since about 1am, and was extremely tired and cranky. One of my co-workers, who was an obnoxious twit, delighted in standing behind me and making lots of noise, or turning up his music full volume when I was on the phone. This day, I'd had enough. I politely put the support tech on hold, went over and ripped the speakers off his desk, unplugged them, and threw them in the trash, then told my rude co-worker that he was welcome to come in at 1am next time. I never had the issue with him again.

Not at all. NOISE is not rude for a call center or support desk. Your complaint of laughter when answering the phone, is okay with in reason but rude laughing in the mouthpiece I would probably comment on. I actually like someone answering while stifling a laugh they just had, it is a great positive energy that makes our world a better place (if only everyone was like that).

As for Rock Music blaring in the background, that's not a call center, that is not somewhere I would conduct business, within reason of course. However I am pretty sure nobody was laughing down the phone at you, and the music was not really that loud.

What WOULD bother me more than anything else though, is some meek and insecure person QUIETLY asking how they can help me. That's just the absolute opposite of conidence building tone and I would generally request another agent. A meek agent is one to be replaced, sorry no room for passive players in this game. Stand up and be counted or sit down and look for a job better suited to your personality.

Your comments indicate that oyu really have no idea about productivity in a call center, you are not aware of the rules and methods of sales and product support that doesn't equate in multiple calls from one caller due to a lack of confidence in what they were told.

Do you track recall rates? Why should a client call three times because he is unsure of a reply e got or doesn't clearly understand the rep hey spoke with?

Again, if you can't stand teh noise, get out of the call center, it's not for you. If you are a caller that doesn't like the noise, you are on the weak end of teh argument, that energy creates more revenue for the company than the loss of your busienss does.

when you reply in a discussion, only to realize that it is three years old?




I know I do.....

Ever since TR botched our My Discussions tracking, I find I just wander aound aimlessly posting whereever something nutty catches my eye. It's a bit like real life actually.

Max commented on teh same thing a few days ago, when I dragged up an old one. I figure I'll restart the Evolution thread again soon.