The patience of a god…

 

have I.

Well at least according to my last caller. Today was my first day on the phones without anyone listening directly in, so I was super nervous. By the end of the day I was doing ok, or at least less nervous. Throughout the day I was constantly 5-10 minutes late in starting my breaks as I would get calls just before they started, except the last call was about 8 minutes before the end of the day, which is normally enough time for a quick call.

This one wasn’t.

Her first question to me was, ‘How much time do you have?’, to which I replied, ‘As much as you need’. Silly me, and damn you Murphy! Thirty-eight minutes later I am finally off the phone with her. She had moved from one city to Wpg and was looking for a cell phone provider, she was looking at our website and was asking questions on the plans, as well she was going off track and talking about other things. In the end she was happy and wanted to talk to someone to say a nice word about me to them, so I gave her to one of my supervisors and she proceeded to praise me to the skies, said I ‘had the patience of a god’ and that other providers when she had called them were fairly rude and that I was extremely nice and she was going to go down and use our service because of me. So not too bad for a first day at work, and work does have a system in place to acknowledge ‘commendations’ made by callers about the reps they talk to.

Now I just hope everything I told her was correct.

So things were ok today overall, I learned some new stuff and wasn’t too bad on the phones. All I really have to work on is my after-call paperwork. Some of which is going to get quicker as I learn to listen and fill in stuff at the same time.

I feel like a Sprite

and I don’t know why.

Since Cliff ranted about a commercial today I figured I should at least copy him and add a commercial to my blog. Somehow I don’t think Cliff will be complaining about my ad though.

German(??) Sprite commercial (NSFW)

So next week I start on the phones all by myself. Kinda scared, kinda looking forward to it. The crappy thing is we JUST started a new batch of promotions, so that means all the promos we learned are almost all out the window and we have a bunch more to learn, basically by tomorrow, with no chance to take the material home. The majority of the docs are ‘confidential’ and so cannot be taken home nor emailed to ourselves. So its a bit annoying. Plus just as we get comfortable with that set, we’ll have another set rolling out. Fun stuff.

So far I haven’t been too nervous while on the phone talking with people, but I have had someone sitting next to me where I can bounce things off of, so when I get back to the customer I can actually sound like I know what I am talking about. Next week I won’t have that, although our trainers will be there to help us out.

We are getting a couple of cool phones, but all in all the promotions and phones are pretty weak for Christmas. We are putting in the 4g network around Feb/2011 (supposed to be released already) and thy are probably waiting for that to happen before they do anything big. But what do I know? I’m just a new hire they are throwing to the wolves on monday. *sigh*