Dude, little things make me so happy. I just stumbled onto the fact that, duh, you can request 'scent-free' copies of magazines. No more sneezing and ripping before I can enjoy my stories!
All I can say about VSC is that they didn't pay me enough to get called a "F***ing C***" on a daily basis because some twit's panties got shipped in blue instead of red. I worked in their Customer Service department for 375 days, and that was 374 days too long.
See, the Sales department was full of happy people--they were the ones adding things to orders to boost their sales commission (didn't know they worked on that, didja?) and then when the irate customer called in, wondering why she got billed for four pairs of jeans instead of one...well, that would be my call to take. The animosity was so bad that the Service department people didn't even sit near the Sales department people in the lunch room.
I know people who work there now, and supposedly not much has changed--they've gotten more high tech than they were, but man, their policies sucked. If you clocked in more than 30 seconds late (and I'm not kidding on the 30 seconds) you would get written up. I used a stopwatch for lunch breaks because I couldn't rely on the wall clocks to match the time clocks. If you were sick, you may as well take the whole week off as one day was the same as five--it all equaled one occurrence. I'll bet I cried three times a week out of frustration.
Running this place on my own is 1000 times less stressful than working in a call center--I'll eat my own arm and starve to death before I do that sort of job again.
Haha, I worked for a few months for a diabetic supply company (not the one with Wilford Brimley, alas), that was mostly a call center (although I didn't do customer service stuff, I'm sure you can guess why). Anyways, they had a similar policy where more than 6 minutes late/early clocking in or out got you an 'occurence.' Same thing with the sick stuff. All with different fractional values based on how much you fucked up. 5 minutes before a shift ended, you could walk around and see everyone staring at their little clocks waiting for time to roll over. There's productivity for you. And, strangely, the same animosity between sales and the other departments. Maybe that is typical in large retail companies?
Needless to say, I can understand why it drove you to cry. I saw many people reduced to that state. Thank god I left after 90 days - never again could I work someplace with an employee manual 4 inches thick.
You know, I worked for the MetLife center (I know, I know, I just don't LEARN) right after VSC--and it was the same sort of thing. At that job, I would get "counseled" for doing "too much for the customer"--WTF? Which meant that my actually spending time researching the problem was taking too much time away from my "on-call stats"...which makes no sense to me at all. We hated the sales people there, too...and the field agents, for the most part.
I will say, though, the best two calls EVER from Met were the ones where I had to explain to a hard-of-hearing woman that a .357 was NOT eligible for the Home Security System discount, and getting to tell a dad that the reason his auto policy jumped up $1500 was because his away-at-college son got a DUI. Yikes!
Fun stuff. I worked there for less than a year before I landed back in this job.
I worked at a call center for a while that wasn't too bad, but we did different campaigns so some were good and some were bad.
On one campaign it was just me and another girl doing outbound calls of some sort and the woman in charge of that campaign sent us a memo that was titled 'the following is a list of things that you are not allowed to say to clients on the phone'. There were like 3 things on the list but number one was what I always said at the close of a call 'have a great day'. I was not allowed to tell people to have a great day. I didn't make it much longer after that.
All I can say is, "Wow!" I am a big fan of Victoria's Secret (their clothes in the catalogues, like jeans and blouses), and never imagined anything like this. I've had their credit card for years and years, and always had great service from them.
The only time I was slightly annoyed was recently when they discontinued the ONLY beauty product I ever bought/loved from them. If I had known that, I would have done an Elaine-with-the-sponge and bought every one off the shelf. I even called them up about it, and they said if a product doesn't sell well, sometimes they give it new packaging and like 6 months later come out with it again. Geeez.
And I can't even IMAGINE doing call center work. I hate doing ANYTHING where you're trying to get people to give you money. Retail is the farthest I'll go. I can't even do charity walk-a-thons and stuff because I just can't go asking for money from people. Ugh.
7 comments:
When I worked for Victoria's Secret Catalogue (aka Hell in Pink Panties), we had that option on the subscription requests.
Of course, it took three months for the person to actually get one like that, since they are all printed about three months in advance...
Oooh you worked for Hell in Pink Panties? I'd love to hear more about that, girl!
All I can say about VSC is that they didn't pay me enough to get called a "F***ing C***" on a daily basis because some twit's panties got shipped in blue instead of red. I worked in their Customer Service department for 375 days, and that was 374 days too long.
See, the Sales department was full of happy people--they were the ones adding things to orders to boost their sales commission (didn't know they worked on that, didja?) and then when the irate customer called in, wondering why she got billed for four pairs of jeans instead of one...well, that would be my call to take. The animosity was so bad that the Service department people didn't even sit near the Sales department people in the lunch room.
I know people who work there now, and supposedly not much has changed--they've gotten more high tech than they were, but man, their policies sucked. If you clocked in more than 30 seconds late (and I'm not kidding on the 30 seconds) you would get written up. I used a stopwatch for lunch breaks because I couldn't rely on the wall clocks to match the time clocks. If you were sick, you may as well take the whole week off as one day was the same as five--it all equaled one occurrence. I'll bet I cried three times a week out of frustration.
Running this place on my own is 1000 times less stressful than working in a call center--I'll eat my own arm and starve to death before I do that sort of job again.
Haha, I worked for a few months for a diabetic supply company (not the one with Wilford Brimley, alas), that was mostly a call center (although I didn't do customer service stuff, I'm sure you can guess why). Anyways, they had a similar policy where more than 6 minutes late/early clocking in or out got you an 'occurence.' Same thing with the sick stuff. All with different fractional values based on how much you fucked up. 5 minutes before a shift ended, you could walk around and see everyone staring at their little clocks waiting for time to roll over. There's productivity for you. And, strangely, the same animosity between sales and the other departments. Maybe that is typical in large retail companies?
Needless to say, I can understand why it drove you to cry. I saw many people reduced to that state. Thank god I left after 90 days - never again could I work someplace with an employee manual 4 inches thick.
You know, I worked for the MetLife center (I know, I know, I just don't LEARN) right after VSC--and it was the same sort of thing. At that job, I would get "counseled" for doing "too much for the customer"--WTF? Which meant that my actually spending time researching the problem was taking too much time away from my "on-call stats"...which makes no sense to me at all. We hated the sales people there, too...and the field agents, for the most part.
I will say, though, the best two calls EVER from Met were the ones where I had to explain to a hard-of-hearing woman that a .357 was NOT eligible for the Home Security System discount, and getting to tell a dad that the reason his auto policy jumped up $1500 was because his away-at-college son got a DUI. Yikes!
Fun stuff. I worked there for less than a year before I landed back in this job.
I worked at a call center for a while that wasn't too bad, but we did different campaigns so some were good and some were bad.
On one campaign it was just me and another girl doing outbound calls of some sort and the woman in charge of that campaign sent us a memo that was titled 'the following is a list of things that you are not allowed to say to clients on the phone'. There were like 3 things on the list but number one was what I always said at the close of a call 'have a great day'. I was not allowed to tell people to have a great day. I didn't make it much longer after that.
All I can say is, "Wow!" I am a big fan of Victoria's Secret (their clothes in the catalogues, like jeans and blouses), and never imagined anything like this. I've had their credit card for years and years, and always had great service from them.
The only time I was slightly annoyed was recently when they discontinued the ONLY beauty product I ever bought/loved from them. If I had known that, I would have done an Elaine-with-the-sponge and bought every one off the shelf. I even called them up about it, and they said if a product doesn't sell well, sometimes they give it new packaging and like 6 months later come out with it again. Geeez.
And I can't even IMAGINE doing call center work. I hate doing ANYTHING where you're trying to get people to give you money. Retail is the farthest I'll go. I can't even do charity walk-a-thons and stuff because I just can't go asking for money from people. Ugh.
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