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You're kidding me right? I was never defenseless in food and retail jobs. My managers gave me authority to tell out of control customers to leave or advise them taht I would not be helping them until they calmed down. Sometimes, if I couldn't get the customer to do either, the manager would step in. they never felt that an ahole customer was worth more than their employee. It just paid a lot less.
At my call center job, if I tell a customer that I will not be helping them unless they calmed down I can get fired. Same for hanging up on an out of control customer. So you start playing so dumb that you hope they hang up on you. sometimes it works. but it pays more than my other jobs I've had the last few years..but I've had way better jobs that paid more too (in a better economy). Either way, I only have 7 more weeks left since I got an internship in another city so I'm going to start hanging up on my outrageous customers and telling them that I won't be helping them *click*. I live in America and I don't have to put up with you..be nice to me and I'll go above and beyond to help you. and I've learned to tune out the whiny customers with no purpose beyond whining.
You're kidding me right? I was never defenseless in food and retail jobs. My managers gave me authority to tell out of control customers to leave or advise them taht I would not be helping them until they calmed down. Sometimes, if I couldn't get the customer to do either, the manager would step in. they never felt that an ahole customer was worth more than their employee. It just paid a lot less.
At my call center job, if I tell a customer that I will not be helping them unless they calmed down I can get fired. Same for hanging up on an out of control customer. So you start playing so dumb that you hope they hang up on you. sometimes it works. but it pays more than my other jobs I've had the last few years..but I've had way better jobs that paid more too (in a better economy). Either way, I only have 7 more weeks left since I got an internship in another city so I'm going to start hanging up on my outrageous customers and telling them that I won't be helping them *click*. I live in America and I don't have to put up with you..be nice to me and I'll go above and beyond to help you. and I've learned to tune out the whiny customers with no purpose beyond whining.
You are paid to calm the customer down with your suberb customer service skills
Depends on the call center. You know how when you call customer service and they tell you to hit a specific button for a specific department? Yeah, we were EVERY department. Emergency, dispatch, billing, payments, new customers, cancelling service, retention, complaints, repairs scheduling, and so on.
I would prefer a retail job to the call center, esp the one I just finished. Pay is about the same for me. If the retail job is hanging clothes at Macy's or stocking shelves at Michael's, or ringing up the occasional customer at Nordstrom's, I can do that no problem. I could work well enough at Macy's or Nordstrom to work my way up to an office job (like I did at Wal-Mart years ago) and since I have a degree I would set my sites on HR or something. At my call center job, I was a temp so I wasn't able to move up as it was gov't, they didn't allow a temp to come on permanent no matter how much they loved you.
The "skills" one learns in a call center often do not transfer well to other industries. Oftentimes calls are incoming one after another, all day, every day, that the agent has no time to develop any skills. I can't think of any other private sector industry that has such rigid guidelines and restrictions on basic functions (having to raise a hand to go to the restroom, having to meet "metrics" every month which can be outside of agent control, little if any freedom to deviate from a script). I worked at Wal-Mart for awhile in college and would much rather do that than work at any of the pure call centers in this area.
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