Comment Re:Almost all tech support requires upselling (Score 1) 251
I never worked for a cable provider, but I knew plenty of people who did. Terrible job indeed...
I never worked for a cable provider, but I knew plenty of people who did. Terrible job indeed...
A: Do not be reasonable or polite, they count on that. Remember you're in the midst of a con.
No, no, no, a hundred times no. Always, always, always be polite first. Even FLAs (front line agents) have small, non-inconsequential, amounts of power that can cause you headaches. If you are rude and/or a dick right off the bat, they can do things like screw with your account, or "forget" to document some important part of the call that can cause you a lot of pain down the road to fix. There are times to get belligerent, the beginning of the call is *not* one of them.
B: Do not get upset or use poor language, that's a free ticket to hang up on you.
This is true, almost all companies instruct their phone monkeys that they do not have to take verbal abuse from a customer. Most institute a "three strikes" rule, where if you warn a customer twice and they continue then you are free to disconnect.
C: Waste as much of their time as possible.
Again, no. This is a high stress job. Wasting time for the sake of wasting time will just piss them off more and give them less incentive to help you, and possibly an incentive to fuck with you.
D: Never let them put you on hold.
There are times when FLAs *have* to put you on hold. The two main reasons are to transfer the call, or to speak to a (mentor | senior | team lead | supervisor | group coordinator | authorizer | ). Transfers are pretty self explanatory, however as someone who doesn't understand how call centers work, speaking to a supervisor may not be. There are various reasons why an FLA may need to speak to one without prompting from a customer, usually it's to obtain authorization of some kind. FLAs fuck up a lot, it's just part of human nature. When you have so many of them, it happens, because of this there are usually a smaller group of second level agents (I've seen ratios as low as 25:1 and as high as 50:1), that can go by various different designations, that FLAs can contact for help, or FLAs are *required* to contact to get an authorization to do something. Everything is monitored in a call center, maybe the FLAs have been sending out too many replacement cable modems lately, or maybe there is a company edict that credits of a certain amount must be authorized by second level agents. They need to put you on hold to do this, they can't do it while the line is active, period, because technically customers aren't supposed to even know these second level agents exist, and if you ask for one, you will never get one.
The best advice I can give, is to just state what you want, if it's not being delivered, ask for a supervisor. If the agent offers any kind of upsell, just decline it politely.
I've worked in the telephone tech support business for 10 years. I have performed tech support for fortune 500 companies you would instantly recognize.
towards the half-way point of my stint, upselling became a *required* part of the job, a metric on which your performance was measured.
First incentives were put in place to weed out those who didn't upsell: shift bids started being held every 90 days instead of "as the business needs dictated" with top sellers given first picks. This caused those who didn't sell to get terrible shifts, requiring many to quit due to life obligations.
Then those who failed to sell were given bad reviews, causing them to lose out on annual salary increases.
When I left poor sellers were being written up, put on notice, and eventually terminated.
Note, that positions these people were initially hired for were inbound technical support jobs with no mention of selling anything. These people would be manning the technical support lines for major corporations that you have heard of, and no one calling any of them would expect to be given any kind of sales pitch.
One ISP in my area that provides anything beyond DSL speeds.
DSL isn't dial-up. I don't see why people act like 5Mbps internet access is unacceptable, substandard and inhuman.
Besides, they know people want better, and keep their prices low to compensate... That should help you negotiate a better deal with your cable company, who doesn't know you really want the higher speeds.
most of us don't have a choice. It's Comcast or no TV.
TV antennas have worked since the 1940s. With the digital switchover is the 2000s, people even further out can get a digitally-perfect picture in higher quality with less artifacts than any cable or satellite provider offers. And you probably have several times more TV channels available to you than you would expect, possibly several good ones that are not even carried on cable.
Since the 90s, direct broadcast satellite has been an option for the overwhelming majority of people. If you've got any way to put a tiny dish where it'll have a view towards the equator, you can get subscription TV while avoiding your local cable monopoly.
And today, with high speed DSL and FIOS, you may be able to get more content than you can watch, for under $10/month. Even if you choose not to go this route, the threat of it is likely to keep your cable co in-line and behaving themselves.
call your supervisor over, I'd like to speak to them immediately. Inform them that if THEY can't disconnect my service, I'll be asking for their manager as well
There's no legal obligation for them to transfer you to their supervisor. You can ask a dozen times, and the "supervisor" or "manager" you get, will keep being the guy in the next cubicle over.
If that's true, plankton might be found all over the solar system.
"My God! It's full of plankton!"
They may be the "dark matter" we've been searching for.
"[W]hite western women" are not "the most privileged creatures on this planet", as things like wage disparity
What wage disparity exists, comes as a result of what career paths women choose to take. So says a number of studies. Giving women the same wages as men, despite them being in less demanding jobs, is pure man-hating, women-are-perfect, political correctness gone completely awry.
sexual abuse
Huge populations of men are doing long jail terms and then being made unemployable and homeless for the rest of their lives, due to ever more strict laws that conflate rape with any and every other legal infraction that happens to have any minor sexual component.
access to healthcare
Men pay considerably more for health insurance, specifically to subsidize the higher cost of providing health care for women. Whatever the problems with the US health care system system, women aren't being disproportionally affected by it.
Why is it that sexism is only banned in one direction?
Who said it was? Rape jokes directed at men are banned now, too.
How it'll actually pan-out remains to be seen, and I can only hope it doesn't turn into the man-hating women's club everyone is expecting.
It wasn't that long ago that Fark stopped posting nudie pics every day, and spun that off to a separate Foobies site that next to nobody visits.
No, that's completely different than the scenario I described, and completely useless and unnecessary.
Linux, plain and simple, is not user friendly
It's not incredibly HOME-user or POWER-user friendly...
But locked-down CORPORATE-user friendly? HELL YEAH.
Your IT department sets-up a computer with just 5 big bright icons on the desktop. These are the only applications you use for your job. You can't do anything else but launch these applications. It just keeps working like that 99.999% of the time. When something doesn't work, you call IT about it, move yourself to another computer and resume your work there. There is no way for any computer to possibly be more user-friendly than that.
Linux does it, Windows doesn't.
If you spend more than 2 days total over the course of an employees time at a company to convert them from MS Windows and Office to Linux you've lost money, even on the lowest paid employee you have.
Unless you're at EOL on your Windows and Office version... Then you're going to have-to upgrade them to a new version that works completely differently, anyhow. ANY time spent training them on the new version of Windows and Office is money lost, in addition to the license fees, with NO benefit.
At least the time/money lost on training to use Linux has a payoff period.
That's a good move for KDE, and it helps users a bit, but does nothing to help you find and install the applications you want in the first place.
Photoshop is the big exception, and it probably only worked because of "photo" right in the same.
I've never heard of someone "iTunesing" or "Winamping". Nobody has ever "Firefoxed" the web, or "Outlooked" their e-mail.
The moon is made of green cheese. -- John Heywood
