I've been working at Vivint since January, and Friday is my last day there. I sometimes during the last couple weeks wondered whether I should be staying, whether or not I've gotten used to the more distasteful parts of the job. Mostly though I'm sure it's not a great place for me to be. I won't spend much time saying why, because I could spend a lot of time why I dislike the job. I'll just state one reason I should probably go.
Working in customer service has reawakened a bad attitude in me, because I am regularly exposed to people who are deliberately being unpleasant. More than that, they are directing their unpleasantness straight at me, to bully me into getting their way. On my mission I encountered much of the same thing. I developed an over-wariness, an extreme suspicion of people's bad intentions, and I was always ready to react defensively to someone either trying to verbally/physically abuse me or take advantage of me. I just expected it of people and was always surprised by pleasantness, rationality, and decency. I remember shocking my sisters in Greece by (rudely) chasing off some random dude who approached us when we were getting ice cream. Rather than being thankful for me chasing off the dude who I took as a weirdo who was going to start begging or harassing us any second, my sisters were disappointed in my coldness. I took that to heart, later, and tried to have a more open and warm view about people.
At Vivint I've begun to slip back into cynicism. Often the anger, frustration, unreasonableness, anxiety, and cuss words that I deal with arise from the smallest of annoyances. Sometimes they have a fairly legitimate reason to be angry. I find myself trapped between guilty scorn of people's pettiness, and bitterness for having to take the blame for legitimate mistreatment and neglect of some of our customers. In general, my view of human nature and people in general began to descend to seeing the majority of people as spoiled, unreasonable, having a overblown sense of entitlement, cranky, ignorant, and lazy. This isn't only on the customer side. There's always a crushing feeling when you realize that a customer's problem has been caused by incompetence, deceit, or neglect on the part of an employee.
Today there was a kind of a climax of sorts. My last phone call drove me crazy. The customer had a problem that could be fixed by sending out a technician, but she didn't really want that-- she just wanted to cancel the system and be done with it. She couldn't, of course. She is legally bound by contract to keep paying the company for a total of three and a half years. We had only sent out a one technician to take care of it, and that wasn't even the main focus of the service appointment, and she had had a couple of phone calls about it on record. Still, she had been put through so much! How stupid could I be? What an awful company you are! You won't let me out of my contract for a system that's never worked?? If he can't fix it today, will you let me out of my contract?? And another string of threats and personal insults to me; she would smear us on Facebook, contact the Better Business Bureau, and so on and so forth. Never mind that I was offering to send out a technician today for free to fix the problem so that her actual problem would be resolved.
After she had demanded for a supervisor a few times and I'd clumsily tried to sidestep that option, and almost losing my needed "on the phone" composure put her on hold and took a deep breath to prepare for one of the most challenging parts of my job-- actually getting a supervisor to take an escalated call for me. I talked with one supervisor who told me he would take the call if I went back to the call and kept trying to resolve the issue. I successfully managed to schedule the service call, but ran into a road block when she tried to get me to promise that if the tech couldn't fix it she could get out of her contract. The next fifteen or twenty minutes after I put her on hold looking for a supervisor to take my call is what actually put me over the edge. I bounced between two supervisors and two "advocates" who couldn't be bothered to take the call, while the guy who had promised to take the call had slipped discretely into a meeting. I finally dropped my tough front and plaintively asked the one supervisor I hadn't if he could simply take an escalated call. He took pity on me and spent another ten minutes on the phone hearing her same complaints but not actually coming up with anything different-- she would still have the tech come out. I sat numbly through the whole thing, trying to pull myself together and stop being so angry with the and with the supervisors who had refused to do their job and take an escalated call.
I kind of hit a low point when the supervisor who took my call finished up and, trying to make me feel better, said: "Is this your first week on the phones?" I know that he was trying to be empathetic, because I was mad and a little frazzled, but I couldn't help being a little offended and embarrassed. "Actually no, it's my last week on the phones. I'm quitting on Friday," I mumbled. He laughed nervously and then said, "She wasn't that bad of a person. Her house is old, the outlet probably needs to be replaced and she wants us to pay for it, although that's not our responsibility. Actually her sales rep might have even misled her about a couple of things. And really she's just older and doesn't feel secure, living in a bad neighborhood."
All of this I had heard from her own mouth so it just kind of bounced off of me. I stewed over the injustice of having to convince supervisors to do their jobs and making the customer wait on hold for 15 minutes while I walked back and forth like an idiot. I also stewed over the fact that my agitation showed enough to make it look like I was a jittery new hire. At any rate, I slumped out out of the building hating my job and with as bad an attitude as ever.
It was on the way home that I realized something. I had thrown this lady immediately into the category of "unreasonable, impatient, and impossible to work with." But the more I examined her reasons for being upset, and my reasons for being upset, the more I saw things a little differently. How petty were my own reasons for being upset? What, because I didn't get to go home right at the end of my shift and had to stay an hour later? What, because I got paid to listen to a woman complain and yell at me for an hour? Because my supervisors were in a meeting and I couldn't get one of the other ones to take a call right that instant? Because my "stats" (time the customer is on on hold, total time on the call) suffered? True, there is a ton that that woman could have done to fix her problem earlier, but she still has to live with it until December 2014. I at least got to go home an hour later.
I guess I realized that looking down on people for their unpleasantness and setting myself above that is wrong, it's prideful, and it's changing my perception of God's sons and daughters for the worse. Human nature has its deficiencies, but I shouldn't exclude myself from those. If working in customer service is making other people's faults blind me to my own faults, maybe it's time to go.
Working in customer service has reawakened a bad attitude in me, because I am regularly exposed to people who are deliberately being unpleasant. More than that, they are directing their unpleasantness straight at me, to bully me into getting their way. On my mission I encountered much of the same thing. I developed an over-wariness, an extreme suspicion of people's bad intentions, and I was always ready to react defensively to someone either trying to verbally/physically abuse me or take advantage of me. I just expected it of people and was always surprised by pleasantness, rationality, and decency. I remember shocking my sisters in Greece by (rudely) chasing off some random dude who approached us when we were getting ice cream. Rather than being thankful for me chasing off the dude who I took as a weirdo who was going to start begging or harassing us any second, my sisters were disappointed in my coldness. I took that to heart, later, and tried to have a more open and warm view about people.
At Vivint I've begun to slip back into cynicism. Often the anger, frustration, unreasonableness, anxiety, and cuss words that I deal with arise from the smallest of annoyances. Sometimes they have a fairly legitimate reason to be angry. I find myself trapped between guilty scorn of people's pettiness, and bitterness for having to take the blame for legitimate mistreatment and neglect of some of our customers. In general, my view of human nature and people in general began to descend to seeing the majority of people as spoiled, unreasonable, having a overblown sense of entitlement, cranky, ignorant, and lazy. This isn't only on the customer side. There's always a crushing feeling when you realize that a customer's problem has been caused by incompetence, deceit, or neglect on the part of an employee.
Today there was a kind of a climax of sorts. My last phone call drove me crazy. The customer had a problem that could be fixed by sending out a technician, but she didn't really want that-- she just wanted to cancel the system and be done with it. She couldn't, of course. She is legally bound by contract to keep paying the company for a total of three and a half years. We had only sent out a one technician to take care of it, and that wasn't even the main focus of the service appointment, and she had had a couple of phone calls about it on record. Still, she had been put through so much! How stupid could I be? What an awful company you are! You won't let me out of my contract for a system that's never worked?? If he can't fix it today, will you let me out of my contract?? And another string of threats and personal insults to me; she would smear us on Facebook, contact the Better Business Bureau, and so on and so forth. Never mind that I was offering to send out a technician today for free to fix the problem so that her actual problem would be resolved.
After she had demanded for a supervisor a few times and I'd clumsily tried to sidestep that option, and almost losing my needed "on the phone" composure put her on hold and took a deep breath to prepare for one of the most challenging parts of my job-- actually getting a supervisor to take an escalated call for me. I talked with one supervisor who told me he would take the call if I went back to the call and kept trying to resolve the issue. I successfully managed to schedule the service call, but ran into a road block when she tried to get me to promise that if the tech couldn't fix it she could get out of her contract. The next fifteen or twenty minutes after I put her on hold looking for a supervisor to take my call is what actually put me over the edge. I bounced between two supervisors and two "advocates" who couldn't be bothered to take the call, while the guy who had promised to take the call had slipped discretely into a meeting. I finally dropped my tough front and plaintively asked the one supervisor I hadn't if he could simply take an escalated call. He took pity on me and spent another ten minutes on the phone hearing her same complaints but not actually coming up with anything different-- she would still have the tech come out. I sat numbly through the whole thing, trying to pull myself together and stop being so angry with the and with the supervisors who had refused to do their job and take an escalated call.
I kind of hit a low point when the supervisor who took my call finished up and, trying to make me feel better, said: "Is this your first week on the phones?" I know that he was trying to be empathetic, because I was mad and a little frazzled, but I couldn't help being a little offended and embarrassed. "Actually no, it's my last week on the phones. I'm quitting on Friday," I mumbled. He laughed nervously and then said, "She wasn't that bad of a person. Her house is old, the outlet probably needs to be replaced and she wants us to pay for it, although that's not our responsibility. Actually her sales rep might have even misled her about a couple of things. And really she's just older and doesn't feel secure, living in a bad neighborhood."
All of this I had heard from her own mouth so it just kind of bounced off of me. I stewed over the injustice of having to convince supervisors to do their jobs and making the customer wait on hold for 15 minutes while I walked back and forth like an idiot. I also stewed over the fact that my agitation showed enough to make it look like I was a jittery new hire. At any rate, I slumped out out of the building hating my job and with as bad an attitude as ever.
It was on the way home that I realized something. I had thrown this lady immediately into the category of "unreasonable, impatient, and impossible to work with." But the more I examined her reasons for being upset, and my reasons for being upset, the more I saw things a little differently. How petty were my own reasons for being upset? What, because I didn't get to go home right at the end of my shift and had to stay an hour later? What, because I got paid to listen to a woman complain and yell at me for an hour? Because my supervisors were in a meeting and I couldn't get one of the other ones to take a call right that instant? Because my "stats" (time the customer is on on hold, total time on the call) suffered? True, there is a ton that that woman could have done to fix her problem earlier, but she still has to live with it until December 2014. I at least got to go home an hour later.
I guess I realized that looking down on people for their unpleasantness and setting myself above that is wrong, it's prideful, and it's changing my perception of God's sons and daughters for the worse. Human nature has its deficiencies, but I shouldn't exclude myself from those. If working in customer service is making other people's faults blind me to my own faults, maybe it's time to go.
Customer service is rough, and you are not a bad person. You're a great person. Not many people would be as reflective and honest with themselves as you. And at least you've discovered what line of work you don't want to go into long term. :) That's helpful!
ReplyDeleteSounds smart to me.
ReplyDeleteI finally remembered I needed to read this. I like that you tried to see things her way at the end, it proves you're a good person :). Which is something I already knew. It occurs to me...did you ever find an email buddy while you worked there? Someone you could email throughout the day just to blow off some steam? It was surprisingly helpful knowing my brother was there and I could emailrant at him whenever I needed to.
ReplyDelete