I worked as a CSR for Sprint for approximately half a year at an outsourced call centre. It was an interesting period, I had a bad experience there because of rude customers, but at the same time I enjoyed it, I was there to help people continue to have decent service with the company, I didn’t care about making sales, I only wanted for the users’ phones to work and get any valid problem (ie billing/plan) to be fixed asap.
It helped me realize how tough CSR work is, if I never worked as CSR agent, I would probably be rude still to CSR agents myself today.
As a CSR agent, there was alot of things that were out of our control, while other problems were caused by our own reps. I remember times when there were faulty plan changes that were our fault that would cause hundreds of dollars in overages, many times all we could do is “Sorry, I can’t help you, all I can do is fix your plan, and pay your bill”, that angers them even more.
Lots of times customers just NEED to pay their bill in full and calm the f down, lots of the customers I had were poor-ass people who would pay half/quarter of their bill each month, and they have a monthly spending limit of $125 or so, and yet only make payments small enough to turn service back on, if a customer REALLY wants their line to be turned back on, they should just f’ing pay the WHOLE bill if it’s overdue.
The reason why I quit was because of the rudeness, but also because of the company itself, the company only cared about agents making sales and at the same time having a call handle time under 7 min while trying to fix their problem, it’s impossible to set up 4 lines in under 7 minutes. But also, I had a woman from Florida call in, her phone broke down, so she sent it in to get replaced, she was eligible for an upgrade so she told us to cancel the repair and she would just upgrade her phone, sometime later on she decided she no longer wanted the upgrade, so fine, but the problem was that since she cancelled the repair status, she could not get her phone back, there was absolutely nothing I could do about it, I couldn’t find the phone anywhere that she owned, nor would my team leader help, and the first time she requested a supervisor, the sup denied the request. That was bad.
The other problem I had with CSR was the training, there were some areas that we had very minimal training in, or none at all, such as in areas of porting in/out phone numbers, diagnosing tech problems, some billing related issues. We learned two different software applications, where one was more superior than another for certain tasks, and if one application crashed, you were sometimes screwed, because both applications were needed for plan changes, checking the credit status of a user, etc.. ugh
I’m happy I’m gone but it gave me a bigger interest in cellphones now more than ever
