I had a terrible day at work

[Miles]

And [MENTION=12402]Miles[/MENTION], I feel for you. I used to have a similar type of call center job, where you don't help people as much as you just try to calm them down.

Thanks. But I really shouldn't complain though - most of my job is pretty easy and repetitive, and I'm able to assist most people who call with what they need just fine. I'm happy I have a relatively simple job in a decent mostly drama-free environment that pays pretty well for an entry-level position. The few calls that are not so great just come with the territory and I'm sure it'll get easier to deal with them with more experience. I just hope I can find a happy medium between not letting emotion get in the way of me doing my job and not becoming numb to the plight of the people on the other line.

[Miles]

Hello, I'm Asia. Nice to meet you !

Greetings, entire continent of Asia! How are all 4.4 billion of you?

[ShiftyNJ]

I do not envy you.

I'm in a call center for a health insurance company but in the pre-auth department so I mostly deal with doctor's offices/hospitals/other providers who usually at least have a general idea of what they want and how the whole system works. So I only rarely have to deal with irritable members, in which case my biggest problem is usually my own inability to help them rather than their (often well-founded) irritability, since I don't really know what the fuck I'm doing and even when I do there ends up being some minor technicality that prevent me from doing anything to fix the problem, meaning I have to just send them back into the infinite loop of bullshit and no answers and holy run-on sentence batman. It can be kind of a mess.

That has to be frustrating since it sounds like you have a genuine interest in helping. I try to go easy on people in call centers because I know the options you'all provide are generally scripted and you don't have the option of doing whatever you want to solve the problem, even if you do understand it.

I'm curious about the don't know what I'm doing part, though... they didn't provide adequate training? Are they just satisfied with a low rate of return? Seems unfortunate.

[Miles]

That has to be frustrating since it sounds like you have a genuine interest in helping. I try to go easy on people in call centers because I know the options you'all provide are generally scripted and you don't have the option of doing whatever you want to solve the problem, even if you do understand it.

I'm curious about the don't know what I'm doing part, though... they didn't provide adequate training? Are they just satisfied with a low rate of return? Seems unfortunate.

You know, when I think about it the last part isn't quite true, now - I know how to do most of what I get, but there are still some things that totally throw me and I'm still getting the hang of how to deal with those on my own. I'm pretty slow to catch on to a lot of things. But now that I've taken about 7,000 calls so far, every day I get a bit better at it.

[Albie]

Training in call centers, no matter how good, will not cover everything. Most of what I ever learned, I learned from experience.