The Customer Service Paradox

There’s a reason why there have been no posts for over a week–I’m thinking about whether or not I want to stick with this blog, and I’m leaning towards no.

I wanted to share something I figured out recently, though.

I’ve been reading a few things about working in tech support and other customer service-oriented jobs this past week. As you probably already know, customer service generally sucks. And I’m talking about when it’s being provided to you. As someone who has worked in support positions and currently works in tech support, I know that providing service sucks for the employee, as well. Well…usually.

See, there are two types of people who are best-suited for public service jobs and endure in those positions for a long, long time. One is the type of person who is seemingly always cheerful and nothing bothers him/her because he/she always has “the right attitude” or “the right response.” There are some people who are like this by nature. I don’t understand them, but they exist.

The other type of person?

The asshole.

Yes, you read that correctly. Assholes and bitches are well-suited for service positions.

Why is this?

Well, some of you are probably the reason why. See, assholes who work in customer service know how to deal with assholes who need service. In short, assholes speak asshole. And, boy, do a lot of assholes need service every day (and don’t be a perv here, haha). If this weren’t the case, assholes wouldn’t cut it in service positions. But as you probably know, there are plenty of assholes out there providing service and not getting fired. Some of them even get raises and promotions.

Also, assholes don’t care what you have to say or how ass-ish you get. So, they’re not going to take anything personally. They’re going to find humor in you, the customer, being an asshole. They’re not going to respond to threats. They’re not going to be pushed around. In short, they won’t be broken by asshole customers. They know how to handle asshole customers, which keeps them able to do their jobs. And if you’re a fairly easy customer, the asshole is not necessarily an asshole with you–he/she is just not particularly friendly, welcoming or inviting. But the asshole gets the job done, so the asshole is safe in his/her position.

My problem is, yes, I’m a bitch–but not when it comes to doing my job. When it comes to my job, I’m about perfection. The fact that a customer is unhappy signals a lack of perfection, even if I’m not the problem. I have a low tolerance for imperfection when it affects me. So, I care too much when one of my employer’s clients is upset. The asshole doesn’t care.

And when I say “asshole,” I say that with admiration. It’s not an insult. I have always wanted to be more like the asshole. But the fact that I’m not–at least not at work–means I’m not cut out to serve people, unless, perhaps, I work for a certain type of company. And my current employer comes close. They do care about the service they provide, but that’s because of its small size and it not being the only game in town. In other words, they have to care. They want employees like me, but they put employees like me in a position to support crap-ass products…which means I have to deal with assholes. And I get being upset about shit not working all the time, but you don’t have to be an ass.

Now, take some crap company like AT&T, for example. AT&T is huge. I mean, it’s just about everywhere. And, for a lot of people, it’s one of very few options for phone or internet. They’re a monopoly. This allows AT&T to not give a shit. This is why they can employ and retain a lot of assholes who also don’t give a shit and who let it show. They know that they will still have a lot of business. But my small employer turns flips over clients. The more the client pays, the more they turn flips and expect us to turn flips. I had a negative experience with that earlier this week. My co-worker, Chatty Cathy, i.e. Miss Piggy–I swear she looks just like her–i.e. the queen of bullshitting her way through the work day, went from standing in the middle of the tech support room running her mouth about absolutely nothing to, in my bitch co-worker’s words, “getting pissy” because I wasn’t moving fast enough for this company with which she’s affiliated. Some damn company that started calling us at 6:30am with shit.

6:30am? Why is anyone working or worried about anything related to work at 6:30am?

Well, service people seem to love to call people “stupid” all the time. Everything and everyone’s stupid to people who provide service. I rarely do this regarding my employer’s clients, which is probably another sign I don’t belong in any service position (instead, everyone’s an ass or a bitch to me). But I’ll tell you about the stupid service person and the stupid customer.

If you whine about customers or your service position all the time and then you say you’ve worked that job for years…you’re a stupid service person. You can say you’re so much smarter than your customers and most of them are stupid, but if you put up with it for 10 or 15 years, what does that make you? At the very least, you’re someone who needs “stupid” people to make you feel better about yourself as opposed to being able to feel good because you advanced out of a low-rung sort of position.

And if you’re that customer–that one who is essentially a regular complainer or the one who threatens to take your business elsewhere, but you keep coming back or you stick with the service–you’re a stupid customer. A stupid, power hungry but powerless, game-playing customer. If you don’t like a service, drop it. If you can’t drop it because there’s nothing better out there, don’t call a low-rung employee who can’t do shit about shit and throw around empty threats. It won’t improve your service.

Even though I can tell my employer wants employees like me, it’s telling who most of my employer’s employees actually are and how long they’ve been there. I work with one star employee, a bitch and two asses. One of the asses is a field technician, so he goes to clients to work on equipment. The star employee takes the least amount of tech support calls because he’s trusted with other stuff at work. And even at a business as small as where I work where quality service matters more, my employer knows the bitch is a bitch and the ass is an ass but nothing is done about it. The bitch has been there, like, 8 or 9 years, and the ass has been there almost 2 years when he definitely should have been fired by now. I suspect they both get raises for reaching certain marks of time for having been with my employer, just as I did when I hit three months there, but neither will advance with my employer–which means clients will keep having to deal with the bitch and the ass.

As for me? Even after the shit with Miss Piggy’s affiliated company, I was called into my supervisor’s office in part to be told that I’m doing a good job at work and that she hears good stuff about me from others. That’s not true, at least not by my standards. I have the attitude to advance at this place, but I don’t want to stick it out long enough for that (I also have seen what advancing there is like–I’d always be on call, and…um, no). I can’t handle sucking by my standards, and I can’t handle assholes (especially when it’s both clients and co-workers, even though only one co-worker bothers me). I have a feeling my supervisor is worried that I’m going to leave, and I think that’s one of the reasons she told me I’m doing a good job.

I am going to leave. Not just because of assholes and my standards, but because tech support is a beginning–not a destination. The least important people in any company deal with the highest number of assholes, and no one has to be the least important person at his/her job for years and years. If that’s the case, that employee’s not doing something right.

Tired of DS-Hell and Comcrap

Internet hell.

Seems like every two years, I have to either switch from AT&T’s DSL to Comcast’s cable internet or from Comcast’s cable internet to AT&T’s DSL. Kind of sick of this dance. They both suck, but they’re freakin’ monopolies.

DSL is slow as fuck, depending on who you are and what you need. Can barely stream YouTube half the time without videos starting and stopping. And that’s with videos that are 10 minutes long, at the most. Imagine what happens when trying to watch a longer video. Uploading is far worse, though. If you get something cool like Slingbox or Hava Titanium in order to stream your TV remotely, the quality of the video is horrendous. Forget about watching sports remotely. You can’t see anybody or any ball, and the better you try to make the quality the more the video stutters.

Uploading was great with Comcast…um, when the cable modem actually freakin’ worked. Actually, with both services, you get to about a year and a half or two years and, bam, the service starts dropping and dropping until you really can’t even connect anymore. That’s the only reason I went from cable back to DSL, knowing DSL wasn’t going to be as fast. And now I’m having to come home from work almost daily and constantly get up out of my nice, relaxing bed after a workday of dealing with technical problems for clients to unplug/re-plug in a damn DSL modem that keeps dropping.

I work in IT, but this is coming not from my professional side but my personal opinion–AT&T is the worst service in the world. Pretty much all tech companies suck in their service in their own way to their own extent, whether it’s customer service, the actual technology or both, including my employer. And my employer sucks, in my opinion, because 1) with technology, nothing is ever going to work all the time, which is the desire and expectation of the customer who is paying a ridiculous amount for the service, and 2) um, they provide their internet to our clients through garbage companies like–no way around it, since they are, as I said, a monopoly–AT&T. AT&T, Comcast, DirecTV, Dish…they’re all crooks who need to drop dead. But none more so than AT&T.

See, these people have gotten to the point where they put you through an automated runaround, and then when you finally get to the point where you think you’re about to speak to somebody…you’re on hold, listening to smooth jazz, for, like, 20 minutes. Because my employer is forced to provide DSL to our clients through AT&T since no one does it here except AT&T (note: just because you find a different company name with DSL service doesn’t mean it’s not truly AT&T providing it), guess who gets the distinct pleasure of sitting through this complete nonsense? People like me. And because Comcast completely crapped out on me almost two years ago, forcing me to return to AT&T’s DSL in my home, do you know that one day last week I had that distinct pleasure of sitting with a phone glued to my ear for over 10 mins twice in one day–once at work, and once again when I got home and thought I finally was going to be able to relax?

Now, with other companies, you get automated bullshit. And with other companies, you do have to sit on hold for a customer service representative. But I have not run across a company that makes you sit and wait as long as AT&T does.

But what choice do I have? What’s better out there? 3G is no better than dialup, and 4G isn’t available everywhere. Fiber optic is too expensive (hell, DSL and Comcast are too expensive) and you can’t get that everywhere. I live in the South of the US, which means the weather is too bad to try to get internet through satellite. Hell, during most summers, we’re lucky our TV doesn’t go out every week because of the hard rain, thunderstorms, tornadoes and various hurricanes. I can live some days without TV during the summer, but I can’t do that with the internet.

What’s interesting to me is how, without fail, DSL works great when I first get it and Comcast works great when I first get it…and then they both hit a point where they just turn to shit. It’s not always the modem, either, and when it’s not the modem the people you reach at these companies don’t know what the hell it is. Working in IT, I’m more sympathetic to not always having the answers than I used to be. But still, I don’t want to call every week with the same problem. I don’t want to have people in my messy house that I have to clean up or rework my schedule because someone from Comcrap has to come into my house again. I don’t want to have an issue that, despite all the calling and all the guys coming out, is never resolved. But that’s exactly what happens with AT&T and Comcast. I only know so much myself. If the issue is with wiring, the phone line or stuff outside/in the ground, there’s nothing I can do about that.

Apparently, Apple needs to quit coming out with all these different iPhones and iPads that really don’t seem that different from each other, get into the networking industry and further revolutionize itself by becoming the first internet service provider that’s not completely full of shit. If anybody can do it, hey, I trust Apple with it. But I need and want more viable options than AT&T and Comcast in my area.

My Worst Fear Came True

That’s right–I finally was left alone at work with the other female tech.

I had been dreading that day, and it finally happened. The male tech geek who is always there during the mornings called in sick. Since he’s the one who is always helping me, this means I not only was left alone with the FTG but I also was as good as on my own working with clients.

Of course, it also had to be one of the busiest–if not the busiest–days I’ve ever had there. As soon as I got to work, the phone rang, and I knew. The phone usually doesn’t ring that early, but the phone rang right when I sat down and essentially didn’t stop all day.

I guess as far as being able to handle technical issues, it was okay. The problem was the fact that, as I’ve mentioned before here, it seems like almost everyone else who works at my place of employment can take off work whenever they get ready to. We got all these calls, and the best tech geek was not there, one of the owners was not there and one of the field techs was not there.

Also–and this is very important for people who call companies for support to understand/realize–if you’re calling early in the morning (or late at night/overnight), there’s probably no one where you’re calling who can really help you with a major issue. The people who answer the phone at 6 and 7am–if you even can get anyone to answer a phone–are there to babysit the phone and maybe deal with simple crap that you shouldn’t even be calling about at 6 or 7am, such as resetting your email password. They’re not there to problem-solve. I’ve mentioned here before that the way my job is, a lot of calls that come in are things I’m expected to hand off to someone else. I guess people don’t understand this, but there are tiers of support with any company like AT&T, Comcast, DirecTV…and, as I’ve mentioned here, the person you reach is probably the least important and least powerful person there–hence why you can reach that person. The more important and powerful people? They’re in bed at 6 and 7am.

I first started realizing this when I worked in a hotel and used to have to call the people who provided their internet service with problems. And there were always problems with their internet, and I say this as someone who worked overnight. There were problems overnight, and guests would complain overnight–you know, as opposed to sleeping (the one thing I could never figure out about working in a hotel is why on earth hotel guests don’t sleep at night). You know what I’d be told when I called overnight? “There won’t be anyone here who can do [XYZ] until [ABC time] in the morning.” Personally, I understand it. I used to say “ok” and call back at the designated time if I was still at work or would leave a message for the next worker to call back. I don’t expect people to be at my beck and call 24/7 just because my shit doesn’t work, regardless of when my shit doesn’t work. I guess other people don’t understand that.

So, given that people were calling as soon as I hit the door, I was dealing with these people who don’t understand that. But still, you know whom they complained about, right? Of course my supervisor got wind of it, and I heard about it and the afternoon tech heard about it (because I guess he had to deal with these people the previous night).

Another issue–related to what I wrote above about how everyone can take off work except the tech geeks: the most important people are the ones who are never there when you need them. They’ve either got other stuff to handle or they’re off work. They can take off every week if they want to. My supervisor seriously misses at least one day a week, and she calls in late at least one day a week. This is not the only job I’ve experienced this in, but this is probably the worst example of this fact that I’ve ever seen. Naturally, it’s these days when I get calls from clients wanting these people and expecting me to do something when these people aren’t around.

But I can’t take off. Hell, I can’t even find time in the day to just coordinate a phone call with a potential IT employer, and I have to spend entire lunch breaks on the phone with guys in the sports industry trying to hustle up one of those positions. I kind of came to the conclusion today during lunch when I could not, for the life of me, get in touch with the IT employer who called me last week in regards to my resume that I’m going to lose out on that position because I can’t take a phone call from her whenever she actually does have time to speak with me.

I might not be learning much in the way of technical skills working this job, unfortunately, but I have certainly learned other things. For one, I mentioned a while back that this job has taught me about myself that I do not like to work. But this job has also taught me that most people are spoiled brats. It’s interesting, because I actually did grow up spoiled. I got almost everything I wanted, and most stuff I wanted that I didn’t get–or maybe all of those things–I would say I just didn’t try hard enough. I still get the royal treatment from my parents, and that’s a big reason why I have extremely few issues with living at home with them as an adult that actually directly relate to them or our relationship. It’s more just having your space as an adult, being able to bring someone home (um, ahem, you know)–which is a huge reason why I just don’t even go hang out or try to meet people in the first place–and just the stigma of living at home with your parents in your 30s.

But the way that so many people act with other people every single day…these are just things I would never do or say. I don’t understand the “well, I pay you, so if I say to jump you need to ask how high” attitude, which…first of all–and I really wanted to respond this to someone–uh, no, ya don’t really pay me. You pay the company for which I work, to whom I have very little loyalty and which pays me relatively crappily. I am not the company. See, my co-workers complain about these things, but they also complain about clients not being tech-savvy. I’m completely fine with you not being tech-savvy, as long as you’re decent and respectful. Nobody respects anybody anymore.

Speaking of co-workers…really don’t know what to say about the FTG I work with. I just don’t know what her deal is. I guess she thought that because I was on my own today it would be a good idea for her to check up on if I’m doing my job correctly by looking through the tickets I was handling and then point out stuff (stuff that I was on top of)…? Wha..??? What about, “Hey, if you need any help, let me know” instead????

Maaaaan, I just want my own island somewhere with nobody else on it.

But yeah, this is about how my worst job-related nightmare went in my head, and it basically came to fruition. On the plus side, all of that and I still somehow managed to squeeze a blog post in on my college football blog. Damn I’m good.