3rd Party....
"You know secret shoppers? The people that report about the store and the workers? They are real, it's not just a too-good-to-be-true scam."
"That said, I had a job similar, but over the phone. Companies would contact my company and ask for third party reviews all the time. ADT, dish, or even home Depot, would have us call in and act like interested customers."
I" did my fair share of call making, sure, but I would also transcript calls to send back to the hiring company."
"My favorite thing was all the bad accents our employees would put on. We were given a fake person with a fake name, address, and phone number, every day. And, sometimes, those people we had to pretend to be lived in states we have never visited. A majority of our personas were from the south, and listening to a kid with a thick Boston accent trying his best southern drawl.. absolutely wonderful."Might_Be_A_Cabbage
Get to Work.
Giphy"LOL I do this quite a bit. I'm usually laughing a lot while listening. More often than not, it's the customer that makes me laugh, and then the rep's reaction to what they say. It's made funnier when you know the rep and their real personality, and you have to listen to them trying to keep it together."
"I can't really say the craziest, because there's just too many to pick one. But the funniest was when there was a global issue for nearly all of our customers, and some lady was FLIPPING. HER. CRAP. about it. She said, "Well, my husband isn't just anyone, and he needs this to work."
"Get me a supervisor who will fix this!" Lady, that's not how any of this works. There are engineers across the country working on the issue and there isn't a magic button to just make it work because you think your husband is more important than anyone else. The rep was at a loss for words for a few seconds, but he was able to politely explain how that stuff works and she huffed and puffed and finally accepted it. I gave him the highest score possible for that call. She was a pill."AlliCakes
Samoan Voices.
"An elderly Samoan lady and her son were talking to one of our CSRs via an interpretation service we use."
"While the agent was processing something on the lady's file, she ends up talking the interpreter and her son into singing hymns in Samoan with her to pass the time. They all had great voices not gonna lie."ThatHataitaiGuy
Oh the Moaning....
"When I was starting to work in a call center I was listening along to someone else's call and he was explaining to this trashy lady why we couldn't do what she was asking"
"At a certain point she gets really frustrated and she asked for the supervisor, something I would later find out is really REALLY common in the US I take of my headset as he explains what I gotta do in those situations but before he finished his sentence his face turned into absolute horror as he urged me to put it back on and so I do"
"I hear moaning."
"We both start loosing our minds laughing before getting back to her and once he re-gains composure this happens Him: Thank you so much for your pa- Her: Hold on Buzzing buzzing stops We both look at each other in disbelief Her: Sorry, go ahead Him: ... Her: Hold on, hold on Her (To someone else): Yes mAy i gET A BiG mac nO TOmaTo aND a LarGE coffffe? This lady was making a money transfer on the phone, flicking her bean and ordering food in the drive thru. The queen of multitasking, everyone."
"And yes, after that she was in a much better mood Sorry for bad english."Vulva_rider
Never talked to that guy again.
"Back when I worked in a call center we would review calls with our supervisors every month. I talked to a guy who was clearly having sex while we were on the call, and not at all trying to hide it. I aced the call, but I worked with business customers and he was with a partner help desk (working from home I think). We got to report to his management what happened and we listened to the call again with them and him. It was about the most awkward thing I've ever done. Once the call ended there was about 30 seconds of silence where you could taste the tension. Never talked to that guy again."warboy3
"did you just call me a moron?"
"Years ago I worked tech support for a software company that no longer exists. Our calls were monitored, etc., and it was done by one of the supervisors connecting a cassette recorder to a port on their phone and then dialing a code that would let them listen in."
"I took a call from some guy who was unbelievably dumb. He was trying to use our scripting language to do something, and just had absolutely no idea. Like, he didn't know anything about programming, or scripts, or even the most basic functions of our software. I had led him by the hand for like 30 minutes and he just wasn't getting it. I finally told him that maybe he needed to get someone more experienced to help him with his project."
"No, he wasn't having it, and he just plowed forward, and the clock kept ticking, my average time kept climbing, and I finally needed to vent so I hit the MUTE button on my phone and said GET OFF MY PHONE YOU MORON. As I went to unmute the phone, the guy said, "did you just call me a moron?"
"And there it was, still unpressed for some reason, the MUTE button. About 5 seconds of silence went by. I hung up and took another call."
"My supervisor sat in the cube across from me. He wasn't recording me at that time, and didn't say anything to me about it. That night on the way out of the building, he walked up behind me and said to never trust the mute button. I shit myself the whole night but it was never mentioned again."alaninsitges
Call Back.
Giphy"Used to supervise a call center. There was the time a rep asked for the customer's order confirmation number & last 4."
"Customer mentioned something about driving & not being able to reach her purse or something like that. Our rep asked "do you want to pull over or call us back later?" The customer hadn't even been on hold that long (<5 min). So, it wasn't like she'd been waiting forever & didn't want to miss her one chance."
"Anyway, as the customer was, we assume, reaching for her purse, you can hear a car horn honking, followed by the unmistakable sound of tires squealing & the crush of metal & glass. Then silence for a few seconds."
"The customer finally speaks again. "Um, I think I'm gonna have to call you back." simononandon
Room 301....
"This happened when i was working the switch board for a hotel and was doing call evaluation (yes hotels have that too). A guest from room 301 requested few items and the agent called room service 321 who ended up telling her that they did not have the mentioned things. So, as per protocol she called back the guest to let em know, they ended up placing another item for order. So she called back room service except this time she dialed 301 (THE GUEST). He said in a very annoyed voice 'there is no blah blah?' and she without skipping a beat went on a rant of "what type of in-room dining are you running here."
"Its peak hour and you do not have what the guest wants, so you tell what i should do. Cause i sure as hell am not calling him. Also give him something free for the lack of customer service!".... 30 seconds of silence and she realized its the guest she just yelled at and starts a string of 'i'm sssssoooo sorry...'. He had a good laugh and asked for her name and wrote a review at front desk during check out 'your staff really puts effort to make sure we are fed ;)'... Never a dull day in the hospitality industry." r_sanz_ch
Dear Nurse...
Giphy"We review our EMS calls into the ED from time to time and heard one where the nurse said "yeah that's not gonna work out, just go somewhere else". Well luckily the medic knew better and brought them sparring us a huge fine. That nurse got a good talking to and her recording is played at every training session of what not to say." Noname_left
word for word.....
"Supervisor for tech support for a cable call center about 6 years ago...."
"We had an outage due to a fiber cut in an area and i told our team chat about it and was being silly because... you have to to stave off madness.... I found out the fiber cut was due to a road crew digging and they left the scene before we could hold them accountable. Well i passed this along to my agents and said "Yeah, a damn road crew dug up our fiber then zip zop skadeedle bopped the hell outta there". I got a few laughs from my agents and didn't think much of it and went about my day."
"Fast forward 3 weeks and i am doing QA's for one of my agents and no kidding i pull 5 calls from that day and he read... word for word... what i put in our team chat to our customers..... i had to pull him into a meeting with HR and give him a written warning and coach him on proper phone etiquette. Then i was promptly given a warning by HR on proper team chat etiquette."
"Not my proudest moment but i laughed my ass off listening to the customers responses to him telling them that."hghlnder72
Listen In....
Giphy"I didn't have the call listened to but rather was still on the call when a man said he wants to cut my head off with a sword and mess my neck. The company didn't like people to hang up on potential customers, so I stayed in it, and actually sold him. It was really uncomfortable."Cityofthevikingdead
ya'll ready for this?
"I worked in a call center and my boss would review a call with me in each of my monthly 1:1s. He started the call and it was one where I assessed the issue and realized it should go to a coworker. The recording captured me putting the customer on hold, then initiating the transfer to my coworker who I had already messaged with and knew the call was coming. So when my coworker picked up I said "ya'll ready for this... ba da da" and sung probably 25 seconds of the space jam theme. My boss and I sat in silence in a small conference room listening to this together with him just staring at me the whole time."agaggleofsharts
Oh Teenage Males....
"Game support where you have a teenage males as a large base of your fans...."
"No surprise to anyone who has done the work, but these kids have no problem whatsoever on the phone telling reps the various ways they are going to kill them or f them up, mess up their family etc etc.. per 100 contacts, there are a few of these."
"We did both mail and phone, I know some of the mail support companies have actually turned people into the police as players are dumb enough to write in from their accounts several times with specific death / bomb threats to the company, if they don`t change something about the game...."fredickhayek
Oh Lawd!
"I used to work at a call center and we had regular quality checks where they would pull a random call, review it, and bring us in for a meeting to go over the results."
"One time, I had a really mean, awful lady on the phone. I had to put her on hold to look something up without screaming in my ears. I forgot to mute, so as soon as she went on hold you can hear me, clear as a bell, saying "oh my God Jesus Lord what a mess. Damn."
"Of course, thats the one they pulled."
"I almost died of embarrassment, but the quality person laughed and didn't fail me since the customer couldn't hear it."eyebrowshampoo
Forget You Comcast!
Giphy"I have tremendous admiration for our Retention professionals, who make it easy for customers to choose to stay with Comcast." bachpanjaja
So Many.....
"Used to listen to random calls when doing QA on my staff members."
"The random calls I listened to were boring, nothing interesting there. The great ones were the calls that were referred because of an incident or complaint."
- "A rep flagged a call due to the customer being inappropriate. Listened to the call and found the customer had told the rep he was masturbating, and he wanted to orgasm whilst the female rep talked. Customer was fired."
- "On that theme, we had a male rep get flirty with a customer and at the end of the call asked her out. She accepted, they ended up getting engaged. Whilst we were happy for them, we had to point out hitting on customers wasn't really a thing we tolerated."
- "A customer got angry at one of our reps and called her a "stupid colored woman". She called him a "white horror". There was silence on the line as the customer processed this, and then he resumed the conversation like nothing had happened."
- "One time a rep flagged a call because the customer had a bad case of the squirts and was calling from the toilet. Customer had been on hold for too long and didn't want to call back, so the rep had to listen to the customer crapping out their insides whilst on the phone for a tech support issue."goatwomble
Whose Butt?
"We recently started using new software at my job at a self storage facility that records calls. We also had some old marketing lines that we were trying to weed out, because other companies had previously used them, and we were constantly getting wrong number calls for other companies in the area. My manager took a call one day and got all flustered, couldn't stop laughing."
"She played the call for us once she hung up and a woman says, "Yeah, how much for that butt?" My manager tried to stay professional and said, "Excuse me, can you repeat that?", and the woman just kept asking for the price of "butt". After a couple minutes of this, we figured out she was trying to reach the fish market down the street to ask the price of black bass, but was speaking very quickly with a sort of colloquial accent. We've had many more since then, but this one was my favorite." lydmeister
"Out of stock"
"We had a customer call in mad that ups would not deliver their order. We reached out to ups to find out why and were told that the customer has gotten into the ups trucks and fought the drivers. This happened multiple times so ups will no longer deliver and the dude has to pick up the order."
"Another customer referred to me as a different name every time he referenced me ( cheif, sport, bro, ect.) And then ended the call with "thanks my N-word". He dropped the hard r."
"Lastly a customer received a package that was supposed to be a set of 2 chairs and they received 1 chair and a hand written note that said "out of stock."TheKyrios3
Passport Not Needed....
"It's mostly sad stuff. People clicking on fraudulent ads and losing money by buying steam gift cards to fix their computer."
"Or people being idiots and complaining that flights are expensive because they are buying trying to buy them for the same day. Or this one guy losing 1500 because he missed his first flight, and then missed the second one because he didn't realize that he needed a passport."Autunite
You're Fired.
Giphy"One time we had an outside trainer come in and show us an example of an excellent call that hit on all the corporate required points. The guy had been fired literally the week before."mmmmmm89mmmmmm
Do you have similar experiences to share? Let us know in the comments below.