Give you advice to do things you’ve already tried and you’ve said you’ve tried.
One lot of hold music that is repeated on a loop.
Frequent interruptions of hold music to have a recorded message to say there’s a queue and to go on the website. Each time you’ll think for a second that it’s someone picking up the phone.
“I just need to ask you a few security questions”.
Once someone mispronounced my last name as “lobster” and didn’t think to themselves that that might be not quite right.
Greensleeves, surely?
I’d have literally got a full house on that bingo card when calling Sky yesterday. Literally. I’m not even karma farming.
I say ‘bear with me’ a lot because I’m learning how to use the system on the fly
Most of these are the result of cost cutting, except the scripts, those are the results of customers claiming “You never told me that!” when confronted with bad news they should have known. I worked in an insurance call centre, about half of what I was saying was just trying to preempt the most common complaints. Yes, there’s a cancellation fee. Yes, you need to provide accurate info or your cover is void. Yes, you need to check your documents once you get them to make sure there’s no mistakes. Yes, we will/no we won’t renew your policy automatically (I’ve had complaints about both scenarios)
Do you cross both boxes when they transfer you to another department which then asks for all the info you’ve just given?
I have a fear that I will one day be in a call where I am referred to another department that (after half an hour) refers me back to the first department l, which refers me to the second, which… and I die of old age listening to the first three bars of Pachebel’s Canon played on a Stylophone.
The obstacle course involved with ending the call. The endless script they read instead of just saying goodbye while you keep saying “Goodbye, thanks… Yup… OK… Thanks. Bye, bye…” in the hope they’ll stop.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
No that’s great thanks. Goodb-
OK Mr. Mispronounced, in that case, if there’s nothing more I can help you with today I want to thank you so much for your call today and for your patience…
OK thanks, By-
… and thank you for choosing Acme, and if you have any further problems in the future you can assuredly call us back anytime and we will be happy to do our utmost to assist you further with any help you may need…
Great, cheers. B-
… and any…
B-b-
… questions you may have about any of the products or services you have purchased from us.
… Okay thank you. Bye.
Goodbye Mr. Mispronounced, I hope you have a wonderful day.
Er, thank you. You too. Bye. Bye.
Thank you so much Mr. Mispronounced.
Okay, bye. Bye.
*pray for a half-second of silence and hang up*
work in telecommunications, the outsourced agents are genuinely awful 99% of the time and will lie through their teeth to A) get you off the phone/ transfer you B) hope you give them a good survey report
yes Mr/ Mrs /Miss customer i have booked an engineer, we can 100% fix this and my manager will call you back in the next 6 hours
customer calls back up
no engineer booked, issue can’t be fixed for 72 hours, managers don’t do callbacks, most irrelevant note on account “spoke to customer about account”
This is like my call to HSBC the other day
“Hello, thanks for calling O2, you’re speaking to Mark Smith” in the strongest Indian accent you’ve ever heard
You should see the ones we did for customers when I worked in a few different call centres 😂
This is quite funny, I’m not taking away from this guy at all but an agents job is difficult. We are expected to be psychic, lightning fast miracle workers call after call, all day. We genuinely will bend over backwards to keep everyone happy (especially for anyone who just says please and thank you) but still feel a sense of dread everytime the phone rings incase this is the call where the customer shouts, screams, swears or wants to raise the pettiest of complaints and demand to speak to a manager. And the lazy upsell is because we are pressured into upselling even tho we are not in sales. We hate it too, we are fixers, not sellers but not doing so can have the call marked as failed. We take home alot of stress. I guess we can make our own bingo card too 😛
To go along with “harsh, jarring, tinny hold music” I would also add “hold music abruptly stops every 20 seconds so they can thank you for waiting, and every single time you’re tricked into thinking you’re finally through to a human”.
Also, “asking you for all the security information you had to type in while you were on hold”.
I have a visceral reaction to Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons resulting from the stage of my life I was on Jobseekers as they somehow have the tinniest, loudest version of that song known to man.
My GP uses this weird kind of 80s sounding guitar music
You’re giving me awful flashbacks to my ten years of working in a call centre. Thank God I got out.
Thats cool I hate 02 so much bunch of cock sucking liars
Had someone at the bank arguing with me about the 14 day right to cancel a personal loan agreement and repay the money.
And I don’t mean just arguing, she was nearly at the point of tears shouting at me that I was wrong and she refused to pass me on to someone else because I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I read verbatim the line from the contract that I signed and before I’d even finished the sentence she was shouting ‘NOOO THATS WRONG! YOU CANT DO THAT!’. I swear I wasn’t upset or mean or personal with her even once.
Eventually I just hung up and called back (despite the almost hour long hold time) and the cancellation was sorted in about 5 minutes. Can only assume she was just having a rotten day so didn’t complain or anything, but really shocked me.
You’ve just showed me the kind of thing I need to be doing to make depressing chores bearable
Edit: I’d like to add ‘Have to spell your name at least 3 times, using a made up phonetic alphabet’
Who ya gonna call?
Where is the “impenetrable maze of IVR options that result in you cutting yourself off”
Them: Ok, wait, whist we transfer you to our customer service department
PHONELINE: BRRRRRRRRRR
Here’s a list of ideas for a customer service bingo card, which customer service/call centre staff can use to keep themselves entertained during the day:
– customer gets angry when you ask for their details/account number/order number etc, despite the recorded message telling them they need it before they even get through to a person
– customer says ‘I’m not angry at YOU’ and then continues to shout at you for something entirely out of your control
– customer doesn’t let you finish a sentence without interrupting you even though you could solve their problem if they’d just let you talk
– customer demands to speak to a manager but won’t tell you the reason why. bonus points if, once they do speak to a manager, you find out it’s something you could’ve helped them with in the first place
– customer didn’t read terms and conditions and is now furious
– customer is angry about being on hold waiting to speak to someone for 20 minutes when you can see they’ve only been waiting for 2 minutes
26 comments
Is that a pun in the bottom right?
Who you gonna call indeed.
Neat writing
Give you advice to do things you’ve already tried and you’ve said you’ve tried.
One lot of hold music that is repeated on a loop.
Frequent interruptions of hold music to have a recorded message to say there’s a queue and to go on the website. Each time you’ll think for a second that it’s someone picking up the phone.
“I just need to ask you a few security questions”.
Once someone mispronounced my last name as “lobster” and didn’t think to themselves that that might be not quite right.
Greensleeves, surely?
I’d have literally got a full house on that bingo card when calling Sky yesterday. Literally. I’m not even karma farming.
I say ‘bear with me’ a lot because I’m learning how to use the system on the fly
Most of these are the result of cost cutting, except the scripts, those are the results of customers claiming “You never told me that!” when confronted with bad news they should have known. I worked in an insurance call centre, about half of what I was saying was just trying to preempt the most common complaints. Yes, there’s a cancellation fee. Yes, you need to provide accurate info or your cover is void. Yes, you need to check your documents once you get them to make sure there’s no mistakes. Yes, we will/no we won’t renew your policy automatically (I’ve had complaints about both scenarios)
Do you cross both boxes when they transfer you to another department which then asks for all the info you’ve just given?
I have a fear that I will one day be in a call where I am referred to another department that (after half an hour) refers me back to the first department l, which refers me to the second, which… and I die of old age listening to the first three bars of Pachebel’s Canon played on a Stylophone.
The obstacle course involved with ending the call. The endless script they read instead of just saying goodbye while you keep saying “Goodbye, thanks… Yup… OK… Thanks. Bye, bye…” in the hope they’ll stop.
Is there anything else I can help you with today?
No that’s great thanks. Goodb-
OK Mr. Mispronounced, in that case, if there’s nothing more I can help you with today I want to thank you so much for your call today and for your patience…
OK thanks, By-
… and thank you for choosing Acme, and if you have any further problems in the future you can assuredly call us back anytime and we will be happy to do our utmost to assist you further with any help you may need…
Great, cheers. B-
… and any…
B-b-
… questions you may have about any of the products or services you have purchased from us.
… Okay thank you. Bye.
Goodbye Mr. Mispronounced, I hope you have a wonderful day.
Er, thank you. You too. Bye. Bye.
Thank you so much Mr. Mispronounced.
Okay, bye. Bye.
*pray for a half-second of silence and hang up*
work in telecommunications, the outsourced agents are genuinely awful 99% of the time and will lie through their teeth to A) get you off the phone/ transfer you B) hope you give them a good survey report
yes Mr/ Mrs /Miss customer i have booked an engineer, we can 100% fix this and my manager will call you back in the next 6 hours
customer calls back up
no engineer booked, issue can’t be fixed for 72 hours, managers don’t do callbacks, most irrelevant note on account “spoke to customer about account”
This is like my call to HSBC the other day
“Hello, thanks for calling O2, you’re speaking to Mark Smith” in the strongest Indian accent you’ve ever heard
You should see the ones we did for customers when I worked in a few different call centres 😂
This is quite funny, I’m not taking away from this guy at all but an agents job is difficult. We are expected to be psychic, lightning fast miracle workers call after call, all day. We genuinely will bend over backwards to keep everyone happy (especially for anyone who just says please and thank you) but still feel a sense of dread everytime the phone rings incase this is the call where the customer shouts, screams, swears or wants to raise the pettiest of complaints and demand to speak to a manager. And the lazy upsell is because we are pressured into upselling even tho we are not in sales. We hate it too, we are fixers, not sellers but not doing so can have the call marked as failed. We take home alot of stress. I guess we can make our own bingo card too 😛
To go along with “harsh, jarring, tinny hold music” I would also add “hold music abruptly stops every 20 seconds so they can thank you for waiting, and every single time you’re tricked into thinking you’re finally through to a human”.
Also, “asking you for all the security information you had to type in while you were on hold”.
I have a visceral reaction to Spring from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons resulting from the stage of my life I was on Jobseekers as they somehow have the tinniest, loudest version of that song known to man.
My GP uses this weird kind of 80s sounding guitar music
You’re giving me awful flashbacks to my ten years of working in a call centre. Thank God I got out.
Thats cool I hate 02 so much bunch of cock sucking liars
Had someone at the bank arguing with me about the 14 day right to cancel a personal loan agreement and repay the money.
And I don’t mean just arguing, she was nearly at the point of tears shouting at me that I was wrong and she refused to pass me on to someone else because I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I read verbatim the line from the contract that I signed and before I’d even finished the sentence she was shouting ‘NOOO THATS WRONG! YOU CANT DO THAT!’. I swear I wasn’t upset or mean or personal with her even once.
Eventually I just hung up and called back (despite the almost hour long hold time) and the cancellation was sorted in about 5 minutes. Can only assume she was just having a rotten day so didn’t complain or anything, but really shocked me.
You’ve just showed me the kind of thing I need to be doing to make depressing chores bearable
Edit: I’d like to add ‘Have to spell your name at least 3 times, using a made up phonetic alphabet’
Who ya gonna call?
Where is the “impenetrable maze of IVR options that result in you cutting yourself off”
Martin Lewis is currently investigating companies using the “unexpectedly high call volume” excuse and is asking people to report it here: https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/report-high-call-volumes/
Me: Speak to someone
Me: Speak TO SOMEONE
ME: SPEAK TO A FUCKING HUMAN
Them: Ok, wait, whist we transfer you to our customer service department
PHONELINE: BRRRRRRRRRR
Here’s a list of ideas for a customer service bingo card, which customer service/call centre staff can use to keep themselves entertained during the day:
– customer gets angry when you ask for their details/account number/order number etc, despite the recorded message telling them they need it before they even get through to a person
– customer says ‘I’m not angry at YOU’ and then continues to shout at you for something entirely out of your control
– customer doesn’t let you finish a sentence without interrupting you even though you could solve their problem if they’d just let you talk
– customer demands to speak to a manager but won’t tell you the reason why. bonus points if, once they do speak to a manager, you find out it’s something you could’ve helped them with in the first place
– customer didn’t read terms and conditions and is now furious
– customer is angry about being on hold waiting to speak to someone for 20 minutes when you can see they’ve only been waiting for 2 minutes
I could go on…