five thousand shades of blue
Wednesday, December 05, 2001
The initial terror of taking live calls has worn off -- now the terror is only of getting someone on the line who doesn't have a shred of common decency, spewing verbal abuse and insults to the anonymous operator on the other end of the line (as if somehow being anonymous makes it all right) because something didn't arrive as they expected or who-knows-why. (This didn't happen to me, but did happen to someone else I trained with, on her second day of work.) My only 'horror' story (and I put it in quotes because it wasn't really that bad, just an incidence of "whatever can go wrong, will") involves spending a pleasant hour and twenty minutes taking a very large order for an individual who is in the public eye (and that's all I'll say about that) and being accidentally disconnected upon an attempt at conference call to get payment information. I tried calling back many times, and in the end had to transfer the entire order to paper (not a print out, mind you, but by hand with pen) to four order sheets and then leave a message that someone would try to contact them for payment information. Of course, not before almost losing the entire thing to a computer flip-out.
I have gained a new respect for people taking orders for catalogs. If I had any advice for people calling to place an order with any catalog, I would say, let the operator direct the call. There is a certain procedure that we have to follow to get the order information, and with a room full of what seems like an ocean of other voices, adding more information to process before it is needed causes confusion... and could be a source of possible errors. Just my two cents.
Now, to indulge in the rest of my pb and banana sammich. Not much else has been going on besides working. I did see
Harry Potter a couple of weekends ago and loved it hugely, so am now reading the books. I'm just into #2. Bloody brilliant! *grin*
is
this just not enough…?
