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It’s sad that this is my 2nd, maybe 3rd, time here with another anecdote about a racist customer.
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Background because I don’t technically work at a call center, but 90% of my job these days is over the phone:
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I work for a state affiliated health insurance company, from time to time we’ll get cases assigned to us from people who either called our 800# after hours, or went online to request assistance, so there’s a ton of cold calls made day to day, reaching out to people who want to enroll in our plans.
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Today was no different, other than a shit ton of tech issues on the State side of things, preventing me from logging and actually being able to do my main duty. Still, I gotta take and make calls and do my other job functions, so I do. This morning I left a message for a woman who signed up online for a call back. Left a message and as usually, didn’t expect much because these people go online and request a call back but then never actually listen to their messages to call ME back to actually get the help.
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Not even an hour ago, this one woman calls me back and says she’s only calling me back because I left her a message, and claims that she already spoke to “someone else” yesterday, which I thought was odd because we don’t work Sundays. She also couldn’t have spoken to someone on the State’s hotline because they don’t open Sundays either. Still, I hear her out and see how I can help, she mentions that she doesn’t even know if she started an application, because she couldn’t log in etc etc etc.
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I try to ease her worries and explain that yes, the state system has been having issues all weekend, that even I’m being affected by it etc, but I’d still like to help her. I explain that despite my current log-in issues, at the very least we can try to call the state hotline together now that they’re actually open, find out if she has an active account, close out any inactive accounts (she insinuated she may have had multiple accounts online), etc etc. She claims she can’t right now because she know’s it will take to long and said “I can’t be bothered dealing with those people right now” which came off kinda rude, but I get it. They can be tough to deal with which is why my job is sort of the middle man between the two, make things easier.
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I start to ask when would be a good time for her, we’ll schedule it like a regular appointment, hopefully my log-in issues will be resolved by then and we’ll get everything done in one shot…
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But before I can even finish offering the help, completely out of the blue, this woman decides to start some racist shit.
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“you know, if I was an ILLEGAL, I woulda had this fucking health insurance by now, but because I’m WHITE…”
I couldn’t let her go on. I’ve dealt with too much casual racism in the decade+ I’ve been in the industry, I was already having a stressful day not being able to do my job because of issues out of my control, and especially after dealing with the news of what happened just upstate here in NY over the weekend.. I just couldn’t let her go on.
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“ma’am, I’m hanging up now” is all I said, and as I lowered my phone to end call I could hear her telling me to go fuck myself but whatever. I couldn’t let her put me in a position where I went off on her and I tried to be as professional as possible, but any more of such ridiculous nonsense from someone who clearly doesn’t know that “illegals” don’t just qualify for insurance instantly and I would have likely said something that would have cost me my job.
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