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summer_jackelBackground. Over the last couple of days, I've talked to AT&T wireless people about four-five times, in the course of getting my cell number off of Lucy's plan and onto one of my own. Lucy is in Covelo now, we are no longer together, it makes sense. This thing I'm ranting about bothered me then, but tonight, calling them AGAIN after I apparently lost my *&^%$#@!!!!! cell phone, it just...really bothered me.
Subject of rant: So, you call AT&T. After going through enough sufficient menu options to make certain you are good and grumpy, you finally talk to a warm body, who gives you enough canned-AT&T catchphrases and sales pitches that you wonder if you might still be talking to a machine. Creepy. And then she helps you; so far so good, my salespeople did everything they were trying to do smoothly and efficiently. Also yay! I get a new phone tomorrow, gratis. Problem? At the end, they ask you how their service was, on a 1 to 5 scale.
...say what, again?
When you are in college rating your profs at the end of the semester, or any other 'rate your service' kind of situation I've ever, I think, encountered, your rating is anonymous. Why seems blatantly obvious. As a customer, I'm not going to give someone a bad rating to their face. Beyond that, though, it feels exploitative and just horribly rude somehow for an employer to ask this of its phonestaff.
I've been blessed never to have been subjected to any kind of customer service job; I loathe interacting with many strangers, especially when I have no avenue of escape from them. On top of that, I have a pretty deeply conditioned aversion to the telephone. I know not everyone would hate these jobs as much as I would, but still, I've friends who are tech support folk and such, and there are horror stories. How could you submit your employees to the humiliating experience of asking a particularly nasty, irate and/or abusive customer to "rate" them, and then presumably enter the rating into the database for the boss to see?
That's what rankles me; it's such forced-subservient behavior, and if it were me being asked to do this by my boss I would feel poorly used and rebellious. I mean, these people already act like trained spaniels.
I will welcome overt displays of submission only when they are offered of the person's own will and desire, not on pain of losing their job. A power imbalance like that is humiliating to both of us. I don't appreciate being made complicit in this.
Maybe that's at the core of why I've not done terribly well in the professional world, right there.
Subject of rant: So, you call AT&T. After going through enough sufficient menu options to make certain you are good and grumpy, you finally talk to a warm body, who gives you enough canned-AT&T catchphrases and sales pitches that you wonder if you might still be talking to a machine. Creepy. And then she helps you; so far so good, my salespeople did everything they were trying to do smoothly and efficiently. Also yay! I get a new phone tomorrow, gratis. Problem? At the end, they ask you how their service was, on a 1 to 5 scale.
...say what, again?
When you are in college rating your profs at the end of the semester, or any other 'rate your service' kind of situation I've ever, I think, encountered, your rating is anonymous. Why seems blatantly obvious. As a customer, I'm not going to give someone a bad rating to their face. Beyond that, though, it feels exploitative and just horribly rude somehow for an employer to ask this of its phonestaff.
I've been blessed never to have been subjected to any kind of customer service job; I loathe interacting with many strangers, especially when I have no avenue of escape from them. On top of that, I have a pretty deeply conditioned aversion to the telephone. I know not everyone would hate these jobs as much as I would, but still, I've friends who are tech support folk and such, and there are horror stories. How could you submit your employees to the humiliating experience of asking a particularly nasty, irate and/or abusive customer to "rate" them, and then presumably enter the rating into the database for the boss to see?
That's what rankles me; it's such forced-subservient behavior, and if it were me being asked to do this by my boss I would feel poorly used and rebellious. I mean, these people already act like trained spaniels.
I will welcome overt displays of submission only when they are offered of the person's own will and desire, not on pain of losing their job. A power imbalance like that is humiliating to both of us. I don't appreciate being made complicit in this.
Maybe that's at the core of why I've not done terribly well in the professional world, right there.
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-11 04:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-11 09:20 am (UTC)