Sunday, April 8, 2007

My Call Center Life!

I've been to a call center industry for almost 3 years. Almost 10 months with Dell in Sitel and almost 2 years with Sykes. I'm currently working with QWEST, an ISP account.


I was monitoring long calls last week when a message popped up on my screen. It was my former co-worker from Sitel, Raffy. It was a conversation full of "how are you and your friends..." and hellos. I noticed that there are agents already on long call. So I did approach those agents and assisted them with their issues. One agent just asked help since his customer is already asking for a supervisor. I took the call and returned to my station. I said sorry to raffy since it took a while before I answer most of his messages. I said I took an escalation from one of our agent. He then answered, "astig! e dati nung mock call umiyak ka pa remember?” At fist, I can't believe what he just said then after a while I remembered that happened in our course skills training in Ateneo Professional School in Makati. Since it was my first job and call center, I was not confident at all. I don't know how to respond properly to a customer's concern. All I remember was after my mock call my trainer gave feedback in front of our class that I almost felt humiliated. I then asked permission if I could go the cr. Then suddenly tears flowed through my eyes. Funny! I was so shy that time.


And now, with Sykes no more mock calls can make me cry... Live calls and even escalation from irate customers... Experience is the best teacher I should say... I learned how to deal with all types of customers from dell. I learned how to stand on my own. Everything was unsupported but I need to give the best customer service. I managed to deescalate all calls since most of our L2 will not take our escalated calls but instead will tell you to deescalate the call. It was hard but I learned a lot from my experiences. Now, I'm not the cry baby on a mock call... I'm now taking escalation calls... hehehe... I loved it! Ü