Off On One Again

Trawling through old documents, as you do, I stumbled across this little thing I wrote a while back probably one evening being well p***ed off with engineers (as usual) telling me that I had an easy life sitting about drinking coffee all day. Well I don’t, I don’t like the coffee in the office too much so the whole argument’s false, ipso facto, they’re being muppets again.

Anyway I was pondering posting this on the public side and can’t quite make my mind up, but I’d wager that many a person manning the phones would want me to do so and will be able to relate.

Enjoy and let me know if I should publish it.

K.

A Lifetime Or Two Later…

How can you live the live of three engineers worth of hassles, grief, fault diagnosis and general ill temperament from customers? In fact, you can get it worse that the poor old engineers most days without even trying, without the person giving you the hassle even having met you.

Dead easy, answer the incoming phone calls!

Whilst engineers do get grief from customers, of that there is no doubt and they have to deal with, shall we say, certain unusual working conditions at times (some of which mere mortals should not have to ever encounter) they do not get as much ear-bashing as call staff. It’s of course very easy to see why as, to the customer on the other end of the phone, you’re just a voice on the other end of the line, a sort of electronic buzz that happens to respond like a person but you’re often times not considered to be one. The treatment that call handling staff get from customers can range from very good (unusual) to just ignorant (normal) to downright stupidity (most days there’s at least one).

The telephone provides so many clichés it actually beggers belief and, in twenty years of answering the phone there’s only one thing for sure, people are getting worse. They demand more and more, want specifics on call times and other similar impossibilities, like exactly what time and day a part will be delivered. Often I shuffle off to consult my crystal ball to answer a query and suddenly remember that I haven’t got one, of course I would never want the customer to know that and I’m often forced to refer the poor soul back to some call centre that couldn’t give a fig about the problem to try and extract some fortune telling skills from an operator.

Of course this leads to yet another problem as we’re often asked to call said call centre, only to be greeted by a Casio Concerto and a ten minute wait on an 0870 number to sort out that companies customer for them. They argue that we get paid to do that, I argue that they don’t pay enough to listen to the incredibly annoying royalty free version of Greensleeves (or some other elevator music) let alone the annoyance of waiting for others to do their job. And send a report by fax or email, don’t make me laugh, nobody reads them! If I had a pound for every time had to re-send either to a few people I’d not be whining so much about not getting paid properly.

One insurer actually told me that all their faxes were received in the fax room (which they made sound as scary as hell) but nobody ever went there (see previous comment) and even when they did the fax machine had often run out of paper, ink or both. Of course this massive technological wonder that could cope with thousands of faxes a day didn’t think to tell anyone that it wasn’t working, including those people just like me that were trying to send them something. Bright eh?

Blue chip company, rubbish service. So not only do they look bad, we do too.

Then there are the customers that are actually paying us directly for service. They think we’re too expensive; especially the doctors, lawyers, accountants and other assorted “professional” people including the “ex-professional” ones that are retired and living in a wealthy area of town and need someone to call before they jet off their villa in Spain for a month or so. They think we’re inflexible, but that’s only because we’re not doing exactly as we’re told, when we’re told to do it. They think we don’t care, which we do, you just can’t afford to show that chink in the armour. And then there are those that ring up for a free remote diagnosis of the problem, hoping to avoid the callout charge and the fact that they may have to wait in for an engineer to actually repair the problem. We often get those ones back after they realise that they can’t actually do our job, it just takes a bit longer.

It really is a minefield in a repairer’s office with bombs ready to go off all over the place.

But the best ones are always under some sort of warranty as, along with the warranty which is often purchased from a major retailer, the customer also thinks that they bought the repairer’s soul along with it.

Apparently it’s our problem that the customer works and can only have a call on a Sunday or some other such rubbish, but it always comes back to it being our problem and, when the customer doesn’t get their way they simply get on the phone to the retailer and kick up a stink. Quite whether this is done just to let off steam or to actually accomplish anything I’ve yet to figure out after all these years, but often I just think that the customer has read too many issues of Which and watched too much Watchdog to still be considered remotely sane. Of course we’re going to call into the city centre at exactly 5pm, uh huh… and in this reality…

I often ponder what arrangement that these types of customer have with Royal Mail to deliver parcels and, obviously, other such services to achieve all that they demand of the poor appliance repairer. I only want to know so I can get the world to revolve around me as well as it must be very nice.

So then we have the store managers, lovely people to deal with on the phone. Not!

Well that’s not entirely fair, many of them actually are just fine, as good as gold and they do understand that quite often the customer complaining is just totally off their rocker but a lot of the big chain store managers seem to have been brainwashed or something. Attitudes are often not at all pleasant and I’ve often been pushed to remind these people that they don’t actually pay my wages and I don’t take orders, requests yes and constructive collaboration to solve issues there’s no problems with, but barking orders at the person booking the calls is not a winning strategy in people skills.

Worse still is when you get all of the above combined into the dreaded warranty call, especially when the appliance is only a mere few weeks old. Apparently the customer, the store and the manufacturer are entitled to better service than you receive on a Mercedes Benz for the paltry fee that they pay. I mean, I know that reality can sometimes be hard to accept, but you get what you pay for in life.

So you send out the poor engineer thinking he’s going to get dog’s abuse from the customer and lo and behold, he gets tea and chocolate biscuits! There really is no justice in life at times.

Ah but wait, it was a blocked filter and not covered by warranty so you then send the bill as the manufacturer has rejected it, followed by the inevitable nasty phone call, followed by more nasty phone calls. Then the penultimate call from the manufacturer asking you to cancel the bill and invoice them as they’ve agreed to cover the cost in this instance, but just this once (again). You look an instant idiot and you’ve got still more admin work to do just to set it all right, it really is enough to have grown adults run screaming for mercy from the room at times.

Of course not all customers are bad, some of them don’t call us.

And some are genuine nice people as well as horrors and funnily enough you can find each in equal measure in just the pensioners group who, it seems, lead busier lives than the chairman of ICI what with all the bowling, hairdressing, golf, holidays, trips and goodness knows what else.

After a few years of this you get numbed to the pain, you can start to care less and less if it were not for the very nature of independent repairers and the pride that they take in their businesses, something that no call centre can or ever will replicate. And that’s the rub of it all, we get upset because we care, we want to sort the customer out and not to leave people with problems.

It’s just a pity that all too often obstacles are placed in that way of that goal.

But just remember the next time you talk to somebody on the phone that they are human too, they have a job to do just like you and they do take pride in what they do. This includes engineers, even if none of them can write so that anyone else can read it.