Drowning in the world of mobile phones

This is somewhat off topic but I found myself reading, quite enthusiastically, a blog on here about call centres and it made me think about my own recent experiences. It was my first job and I recently resigned from it. Whilst I was working in that job I very quickly learned the way certain things worked and reading about it it all felt drastically similar. It’s really odd looking back (from a whole week and a half ago) because reading about that insider’s life of working in a call centre, from people who have worked in them for far longer than I did, months and years, it all seems to be the same shit that I experienced in my more modest stint.

My job was ‘tech support’ rather than customer services as most other blogs and things are based around, and yet, I knew nothing about the company I was supposed to be representing. Whenever a call came through the screen on the phone would change and that would dictate who I was representing; a phone company or a catalogue, maybe a supermarket or a network for those working there a little longer. One time I had a call that was very frustrating for us both; I put the IMEI number (a phone's serial code) into the system about 4 times and each time it was invalid. The code is very long; it's 15 digits, she was getting very angry and frustrated. I couldn't work out what was wrong; eventually I realized she'd bought it from a catalogue. Thank God, I thought, and explained she'd have to call up another number as it won't go on this system. Fine and dandy, she leaves, I breathe a sigh of relief. And then the phone rings. I look over, it's the catalogue. Oh no, I think, no it can't be. I answer it, pitch my greeting and oh yes, it's the same woman. She recognizes my voice and I recognize hers because, yes, we spoke about 20 seconds ago. She goes, insane. And you know what? The IMEI still wouldn't register on the new system.

My face was constantly changing and the major problem with lying about who we were working for was, other than the lying, the fact that we had no communication with company X who the customer thought they were phoning. They’d ask me about cancelling a contract, looking at their bills for them, about deliveries, repairs, what kind of scheme they should be on and all of this stuff that I hadn't the faintest idea about. We’re unable to communicate with this other company entirely; we don't know anybody from there, we don't know their policies, we don't know where they're locally based or, well, anything! We’ve also got literally zero information about the customer as we took everything at the start of the call and yet they, quite naturally so, expect us to know all the stuff already so get very frustrated when I ask for what network they're on, what kind of phone is it, where they bought it, when they bought it and so on and so forth.

Across the room from us sat customer service, well I say across the room, really we just sat where there were free spaces so sometimes I’d be sat between two customer service people or, more often than not, other technical support people. Customer services dealt, from what I could gather, with basically everything. I was always referring customers to customer services, head office, the repair centre; all these things are the same people. At the beginning of the job I got to pick which one I would work in and, perhaps regrettably, picked tech support as I thought they’d be less conflict as, whenever I’m in that kind of situation, I get extremely anxious. More fool me.

What was worse though was the fact I knew nothing about mobile phones. I would have people ring me about every model of phone out there and sometimes ask the most ridiculously complicated or pointless questions and, frankly, I had no idea. I didn’t really know how to help them, ever. The best I had was what they call ‘RA’ or Returns Avoidance which is like… you click which make and model ofphone you’re talking about, navigate to say ‘software’ or ‘power’ and then click like ‘my phone doesn’t switch on’ and then it goes through a step by step on how to, hopefully, fix it. Sounds great, on the surface, but it was really very simple; have you reset it, hard reset it, put it in safe mode, factory data reset it, book it in for repair or get it replaced. Shrug. What’s the problem with this? Well, a lot.

That's ok just take the battery out. You can do that with Iphones right? ...Oh.

Number 1: It never fixed the problem. Following that thing fixed about 5% of the problems so I found myself giving out exchange code or advising about repair more often than not. That’s not good; exchanges cost the company money and we’re not supposed to do it a lot. Also, a factory data reset removes EVERYTHING on your phone and naturally, this panicked people. We had to do the backup your phone dance which could take up to half an hour if I was unlucky given someone who didn’t know how to do it; because I sure as hell didn’t.

Number 2: It didn’t have information on more obscure problems which tended to make up a good 40% of problems like… how do I set up a SkyDrive account, whenever I take a picture it replaces the last photo so I can only have one photo on my phone, my charging light is flashing and it’s not on charge, my phone is pressing buttons by itself. None of these are on the system and I can’t Google anything because the entire internet is blocked. Problems that I’d be able to find the answer to in a snap at home I’m left struggling about pathetically trying to draw on my own, diluted and hazy, knowledge about technology. As somebody who had never heard of iCloud before working there; I was doomed from the beginning.

Number 3: The system was very very slow, there’s a lot of menus due to the many problems it tries to cover and with everybody using it all the time it means that it takes a long time to load up. So it goes like, ‘so how do I put it in safe mode?’ ‘yes… to do that... you need to... one second, it’s a little awkward without the phone in front of me... it’s different for each model… just a second… yes so, switch it off and then hold these buttons when it powers up again...’ –face palm-… it’s embarrassing, awkward and it makes people angry because naturally, they’re in a hurry and I’m supposed to be a technological genius.

A lack of training and a lack of product knowledge seem to be a familiar tune sung by call centre workers and I find it personally disturbing that we’re thrown into the deep end and left to bluff our way through calls all day long. There were people who worked in that call centre who knew everything, and I mean everything, about phones. Granted they’d worked there about 4 years or so and built their own computers for Gods sake, I love laptops and computers but I don’t build them myself, jeez. Anyway, if they can do that it’s natural to assume they’re very into their phones and the fact they’re actually able to help people probably meant they got through the day much more smoothly than I did. I think the worse thing is I care so little about phones I didn’t even want to learn because, in my mind, it was so low in ranking of importance it was just exhausting summoning the enthusiasm.