This Call May Be Recorded For Training Purposes - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/90/telephone

I work at a call center.

Luckily for the past few years I haven't had to worry about my calls being recorded for training purposes. However, for the first bit of my time at the company I worked with a group that was always recorded and we had hours upon hours of us on the phone with people yelling at us in a variety of different languages.

Those recordings are easily the most interesting insight that I have ever gotten to listen to into the crazy world of people. When you're calling customer service, or a company, or whatever it is, and you're angry, you're only thinking about you. You only want to get the service that you want, and you are irked that you're not getting it. At no point in time do you ever think that there is going to be a third party listening to you rant about your product not being delivered on time, two months later, in a conference room trying to see if there is anything better that their customer service could be doing with working with your crazy shenanigans.

Everyone involved with this has never enjoyed it. It's like listening to your voice in a recording (which no one likes and everyone thinks that they sound different than what they expect) but doing it in the most stressful time where one person is super angry about whatever it is that they didn't get, and the other is doing nothing more than trying to diffuse the bomb of customer service, while still trying to follow the company rules, and make the customer happy.

The very best phone recordings that I have ever listened to is when one of the people in the conversation breaks their expectations of what they should be doing in part of the job. Either when the customer gets exceptionally angry, or flips the script and gets exceptionally nice and kind. The only other one that is hilarious to listen to is when the customer service person stops being sunshine and rainbows trying to make the customer happy, and they just lay it all out on the line and rip into a customer. This doesn't happen often, but with people taking a ton of calls daily, and having to deal with some real crazies, there is always the chance the customer service representitives are going to snap, and when they snap, they snap like the best of them.

You need to understand the most basic idea - people that work in customer service, especially customer service over the phone, deal with some of the rudest people out there. People over the phone are not nice. That means that for 40 hours a week, we get exposed to some really crazy ways to insult people. That means that when our limit breaks, when we finally hit that point where you're the straw breaking our back, we snap with the expertise of a person who gets yelled at about stupid things for 40 hours a week. You might think you know how to be angry, but you've never heard a real pro go for it until you've ticked off a customer service agent, and the best part is that if you're lucky, the company caught the entire thing on recording.