Not What I Signed up For

By this stage I think we all know that training only ever goes so far in this type of work. It’s pretty hard to be prepared for every scenario and this is one of those stories.

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Call comes in, answered with standard greeting and dive right into working through an issue. It was turning into a bit of a longer call than normal hitting the 40 minute mark when things take a bit of a turn.

C – Customer, M – Me

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C: Hey man I really want to keep working on this with you as you’ve been awesome help so far, would you mind if I just threw you on hold for a second, this is the third time my brother’s tried calling in the last 10 mins.

M: Yeah no worries man, family comes first, I can wait for a bit.

— On hold for approximately 5 mins —

– Phone clicks back but there’s some added background noise now-

C: H..Hey man are you still there?

M: Yeah man I’m still here, is everything okay?

C: N.. Not really man. I really don’t know what to do, just getting in my car now

M: What’s happened man? We can always revisit things a bit later if you need, I’ve got your email here so can follow up there a bit later.

C: My brother just found my mom, she’s killed herself.

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The call ended up going on for a further hour or so, I don’t actually remember how long we were talking for. i’m not going to go into too much detail here but I was on speaker in the car as he drove to his moms place. We were just talking about anything we could, movies, TV, music, memories all of it.

I’ve had a bit of trouble sharing this one previously as you can imagine, and I did need some pretty solid decompression afterwards. But I think it’s an important story to share here, whether you work in a call center or you’re just here for a read, this is the kind of thing that reminds you of your humanity. I’m very very lucky to work for a company that holds those values close.

With this kind of job you can quickly lose sight of the fact that the other person on the end of that call or chat is actually a person and it goes both ways. Customers forget we are people and we also have feelings, struggles and traumatic events in our lives. I’ve been doing this now for a number of years, and yeah, you have soul crushing days, but it’s important to take time to remember the moments where you actually get a chance to make a difference in someone else’s life. Whether that be for a day or a month, doesn’t matter, you made a difference, then you picked up the next call to do it again..