The Unskilled Housewife

Learning to run a household, one mistake at a time!

Friday, June 20, 2008

Work at home nightmare

Because I am the kind of girl who likes to try new things, I got a seasonal job taking orders for one of the nation's biggest florist networks. I would tell you the name of the company, but since I am about to talk bad about them, it probably wouldn't be polite.
There were some good things about the job. I got to work from home and in the middle of the night, so I was still able to take care of the kids.
The job started with a week of training. This training was supposed to cover how to take orders, monitor your progress as a sales rep, and how to use the computer system. My training class ended up having so many technical problems, the instructor just gave us the answers to the training quiz and set us loose to take orders.
From call number one, I knew I was in trouble. The supervisors who were supposed to help me via chatroom were strangely absent for hours at a time while I sat making small talk with irate customers and apologizing for the lack of resolution to their problems. One customer was mad, but ended up chatting with me for 45 minutes about 1970's rock bands while we waited for a supervisor to answer my call for help.
When the supervisors answered, more often than not their version of "help" was, "you should have learned that in training class." As if I could travel back in time and force my trainer to share the answer to my future question.
I dreaded each shift, sometimes even praying for lightening to strike my phone line dead.
The worst part of the whole experience was fielding the hundreds of calls from angry customers whose flowers weren't delivered at all. When people send flowers, it is important, and the huge volume of orders that weren't filled was appalling.
The happy ending is that I have now eliminated call center operator from my dream job list.

3 Comments:

At June 21, 2008 6:55 AM , Anonymous Sasrah said...

Wow, that must have been horrible.

I can't imagine not recieving the flowers at all - now I'll be scared to order flowers from one of those services forever.

I always knew that I wouldn't like call center jobs - this just reaffirms that.

 
At June 21, 2008 6:56 AM , Anonymous Sasrah said...

Wow, that must have been horrible.

I can't imagine not recieving the flowers at all - now I'll be scared to order flowers from one of those services forever.

I always knew that I wouldn't like call center jobs - this just reaffirms that.

 
At June 23, 2008 12:17 PM , Blogger I CAN Do It said...

Thanks for sharing. I actually considered being a call center person. Glad I stalled. I won't be buying flowers from a place like that either!

 

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