… and ended up teaching the trainee how to use the system.
While at uni I had a part time job working at a credit card provider to make some beer money. It was not a fun job and consisted of about 50% being shouted at by customers for something they’d done wrong themselves, 25% being shouted at by customers for some system error on our end and 15% trying to fix stuff incompetent management had caused. I quit as soon as I finished unit and found something better.
About 3 months after quitting I had to call the company up. I’d received a statement with a bill for about £500. I had a few problems with this. 1, I hadn’t made any charges on the card. 2, I’d never been to Thailand where the charges had been placed and 3, I’d cancelled the card the moment I left the place.* So I phoned up the company, waited on hold for about 15 minutes then got through to Tim, the customer service agent.
The call started going downhill straight away. One of the call centre policies was to never appear unsure or indecisive on a live line with a customer so if you had to check the manual or ask advice they preferred you to put a customer on hold. Well I spent about two and a half minutes of the first four minutes of that conversation on hold and most of the rest of the time you could almost hear Tim slowly searching for something on the screen. It was obvious this was a new recruit and another shining example of the companies training program.
This is when I decided to be helpful. I started giving Tim the Trainee hints. I started off trying to be subtle, saying things like “You should probably send a note to and investigation team” when I noticed Tim missed doing it. This didn’t last long and I was soon talking him through the process step by step.
I don’t think poor Tim even realized what was happening until the very end when I asked him to say hello to my old boss.
*The company liked its employees to have one of its own cards and encouraged us to apply for one.
submitted by /u/inq101
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