The other end of calling customer service...
 

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I can imagine it's frustrating as ****. I've had to deal with coworkers who represented the company really badly as well, and it drove me up the wall.

But with regards to customer service and call centers, I've had some pretty bad service and some fantastic service, so I've accepted that the calls aren't always a reflection of the company. I think sometimes it's difficult for people to remember that the people answering our calls are actual people, with lives and good days and bad days, and sometimes it affects the quality of the service.

Thanks for the clarification though. It's nice to see people who take pride in their work :)

It's funny you should say that, I worked at a T-Mobile call center for technical support up until about a year ago. When I started working there, the company was all about a well-rounded employee, and they topped JD Powers for their customer service. I would go above and beyond what was needed to make sure the customer had everything they needed to know. Calls about international travel? 16 minutes. Calls about Blackberrys? 20 minutes. I wasn't very good at making my calls shorter, but my customers always got off the call with everything they asked for, and I was always confident, friendly and nice. So my managers were willing to look aside my longer call times in favor of the overall customer experience.

Then about 3-4 years ago, they made the switch to a more business-like model, and they lost that charm that made them one of the top customer service agencies. They introduced things like OCR (one-call resolution....it would track if I had a customer that talked to me call back within 48 hours. Didn't matter if it was for a completely different reason, just if they called back), 800 second call time (I was never able to meet this), transfers and the need to approve every single one ("Yes, take that billing call that you have no idea how to handle, our team can't afford the transfer right now"), device exchange percentage and again, needs approval for every single one (it's technical support...and they wanted us to have an exchange rate of 4% or less. So on an average day when I'd take 100 calls, I can only have 4 exchanges? in tech support?!).

They'd want me to embellish when a customer called in about poor service, and offer things like the Mobile Booster to try and lock that customer in for another two years of service. I wasn't going to do it! I wasn't going to lie to a customer and say "yea a mobile booster should help your indoor signal coverage" when I knew very well that the mobile booster only echoes the signal from outside, inside your home. If you get one bar of service outside, you're going to get one bar or less inside.

When they closed my call center last June (along with 6 other call centers in the US), I had been completely frustrated with how things had turned out. How could a company that had prided themselves on such great customer service do a complete 180? My supervisors were equally frustrated because they knew what the company was asking for was unrealistic, and my last manager absolutely hated giving me "the talk" every week about my call time. I was frequently in the 900s, and I know that put a lot of work on my managers to try and keep me, because the rest of my stats were meeting or exceeding the goals.

Sorry for the tangent....I do agree that if you get a bad customer service call, there is usually someone there who's heard what the rep said and wishes they can correct it. If you feel you are getting bad service, I'd definitely ask to speak to someone else! After all, you're calling in to have something answered, you should be able to get that information and have it be correct!